Chinese regional cuisine: Shaanxi food, with noodles galore, and the best places in Hong Kong to eat it
From rou jia mo – an open bun stuffed with chopped pork, which resembles a Chinese hamburger – to the traditional biangbiang noodles, two restaurants in the city are keeping the western province’s food culture alive and well
There’s a group of Shaanxi people living in Hong Kong who consider it their second home. They have a shared mission – to introduce the culture of the western Chinese province to the city.
Neil Han Liang is one of them, and he has chosen food as the medium to raise Shaanxi’s profile in Hong Kong. He started Chang’An Taste in Hung Hom in 2016 and has since opened two more branches.
He has strict standards for almost every dish he serves. Take rou jia mo – an open bun stuffed with chopped pork, which resembles a Chinese hamburger. Each mo (the bread part) should measure 10cm in diameter, with five per cent variation allowed, and weigh 50g. The mo comes in two types – firm-crunchy and fluffy-crispy.
To make the bun, no baking powder is used, as a piece of the old dough is reserved from each batch, and mixed in with the new dough, acting as a natural leavener. Lard is added to give a fluffy-crispy texture.
The meat in the mo is stewed for a day with 17 spices including aniseed, cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds and tangerine peel, before being chopped up. Chefs in Shaanxi would use half lean and half fat pork, but Han reduces the percentage of fat for health-conscious Hongkongers.
“Actually rou jia mo is not ubiquitous all over Shaanxi,” Han explains. “Neither people from the north (of the province) nor the south eat it as much as we Guanzhong [central Shaanxi] folks do. Because of the geographical proximity, the northerners’ palate is close to Inner Mongolia and the southerners to Sichuan food.”
