While Hong Kong wrestles with severe acute respiratory syndrome, a chicken dish named after the island city is causing a stir in the Eastern Cape.
Hong Kong chicken is at the centre of constant brinkmanship between Chinese restaurants and takeaway outlets in East London. The sweet and salty meal — well, mostly sweet — has the appearance of a honey-glazed chicken with a sticky syrup plastered over it. And the dish is not Chinese. It is peculiar to Chinese takeaways in East London.
The restaurants — The Jade Garden, the Shanghai, the Taiwanese Ballad and the Zhong Hua — all claim to make the best version of the hottest “Chinese dish” in the city.
“We have people from as far as Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth
driving to East London just to have our chicken,” says the soft-spoken and elegant Pauline Wong, co-proprietor of The Jade Garden.
Mothers, husbands and wives have been known to buy huge quantities of the dish and freeze-pack them for pining loved ones in Australia and Canada.
“Yes, our dish has travelled all the way to Australia,” says an amazed Wong.
After several interviews, some successful and others not so successful because of my non-existent grasp of Mandarin, I established that the Hong Kong chicken actually did owe its origins and popularity to The Jade Garden.
The pretty, charming — if being zapped with the force of a double
margarita is charm — Suiji Zhou, the young proprietor of the Shanghai on Currie Road (East London brims with food: the city even has a hamburger-eating contest), spilt the beans: “When I came here [from China] four years ago, I heard about Hong Kong chicken. It is not really Chinese food.”
Scorn is written over her face. “We bought some [of the chicken] and tasted it to see what the ingredients were.”
Zhou thinks her chefs got the ingredients right and they started selling the dish too.
Hong Kong chicken seems to be a variant of the honey-glazed chicken, pork and duck cooked by the Chinese. The secret, of course, is in its sauce.
The lingering smoky, salty flavour and the dark colouring of the chicken comes from soy sauce.
Wong says her father’s family of Sing Gen, who migrated from Hong Kong to East London at least 100 years ago, concocted the Hong Kong chicken. So the dish has some link to Hong Kong.
She remembers as a little girl begging her uncle — Cecil Sing Gen — to whip up a portion for her. He sold Hong Kong chicken from a restaurant called Bamboo Inn for more than 20 years until it closed 17 years ago.
It was around that time that her husband’s family — the Wongs — decided to open their own restaurant.
Pauline Wong coaxed her uncle and his Hong Kong chicken back from retirement. He stayed for a couple of years as head chef and then went back into retirement, but not before handing the secret recipe to another family member, who mixes the ingredients at the family home.
Sealed batches of the sauce are sent to the restaurant every day, with
written instructions on the quantity to be used in relation to the weight of the uncooked chicken.
Wong admits that the competition might have ascertained the ingredients correctly, “but the trick is in the proportion. No one can make it like us.”
And she has a point. The Taiwanese Ballad’s chicken is a bit too sweet. Zhou’s chicken is a bit more syrupy, as she points out, but it seems to
have a bit more soya. As did the Zhong Hua chicken.
The competition also lacks the crispiness around the edges of the rather substantial chicken pieces found in the original offered at The Jade Garden. The competition does, on the other hand, offer fragrant sticky rice with their chicken against The Jade Garden’s boiled rice.
Despite its sweetness, the dish is addictive. Even I, who have at least two green chillies with every meal, found myself coming back for more.
Maybe it’s the sugar.