The Noodles Specialist

Noodles are essentially the main source of carbohydrate for the Chinese in the northern part of China in the ancient time. It is now a very popular type of food for the overseas Chinese. Where there's Chinese, there are noodles. Even Marco Polo couldn't live without noodles and brought back the noodle making skills back to Italy to make spaghetti, though the Italians may not agree and insist that they invented noodles. Well, noodles have been in China for thousand of years, that's the fact.

Hong Kong is no exception that noodles are aplenty. I may the exaggerating, but you'll find a noodle shop within a hundred steps. So, there must be some famous noodle shop around, and we found one at Wellington Street, Central. You can get there from Central MTR station, Exit D1 and D2. This shop is called Tsim Chai Kee (沾仔记).

This is a real nooldes specialist shop. You don't get anything else on the menu, just noodles. There are only three variants, the signature wontan noodles (招牌云吞麵), fresh fish ball (鲜鲮鱼球麵) noodles and fresh beef noodles (鲜牛肉麵). The price is also standard at HKD15 per bowl. The rest are just mixture of the three main ingredients or just plain noodles and side order of vegetables. If you dare to ask for a roasted meat noodles, the aunty taking your order may just ask you to leave and let the other queueing customers take over your seats.

As we are the famed food bloggers, we got to taste everything in the shop.

My favourite of all the three has to be the wontan noodles. There's no doubt about putting it as the signature noodle item in the menu. Each wontan was filled with two or three whole shrimps that are really fresh. I could really tell the freshness from the crunchiness.

In fact the soup and noodles in all variants tasted the same. The difference was only in the topping. I could tell that the soup is boiled for hours with the thigh bones. It has that unique sweetness taste. The fish balls tasted like fish paste to me, as they were softer than the usual fish balls, but thet were very fresh.

The thinly sliced beef was soft and tender with the juice well kept in the meat. Well, what I can say about this shop is that you can't go wrong with any type of noodles you order. Just choose your favourite topping. If you are indecisive, just throw a coin on the menu and see where it lands. If you have darts, that's even easier.