米俐的部落格

When the dumplings arrived in Hong Kong a century ago, the former fishing village replaced the river shrimp filling with sea shrimp.

“In the old days, wonton noodles were not a main dish. They were served in small bowls as a rich person’s snack between meals,” says Jeremy Li, business development director of Mak’s Noodle.

Mak’s father, Mak Woon-chi, was known in Guangzhou in the 1920s as the “king of wonton noodles”, says Li. When Mak immigrated to Hong Kong in 1949, he brought with him everything he learned from his father.

He worked as a wonton noodle chef at a teahouse in Sheung Wan before opening his own dai pai dong.

After running the stall for a decade, Mak opened a bricks-and-mortar restaurant in 1989, which has since expanded to 12 locations in Hong Kong and three in mainland China and Thailand.

To this day, Mak’s Noodle’s wonton skins and noodles are made in its own factory, Li says.

“The most important thing about wonton skins is that they have to be thin and smooth, which requires more eggs. As for the filling, we use bigger shrimps, ground flounder and our own seasoning. Instead of making giant wontons, our idea of wontons is delicate and bite-sized,” Li says.

He adds that Mak’s Noodle was “the first to create a wonton recipe with shrimp and no minced pork”, a rarity because of seafood’s higher price point compared to meat.

The wonton maker was not the first to popularise shrimp wontons for the working class in Hong Kong – as it turns out, Mak had a cousin who also sold wonton noodles out of a street stall, but on the other side of Victoria Harbour, in Kowloon.

“[Mak] was my father’s cousin,” says Lesley Mak, daughter of Mak Man-king and the current owner of Mak Man Kee Noodle Shop.

She tells the Post that, when her parents began selling wonton noodles from a nameless stall in the mid-1940s, her mother was already making all-shrimp wontons: “It differentiated us from the others. But of course, there is no right or wrong.”

Mak Man Kee only gained its name in 1958, she adds, when it moved to its current bricks-and-mortar location in Jordan.

“Over the years, we’ve improved the quality of the shrimp that we use. Back in the street stall days, [my parents] used peeled fresh shrimp from the wet market, which is, of course, the best option, but not the easiest to obtain in this day and age.”

From the 1970s onwards, Mak Man Kee used frozen “broken” shrimp from Vietnam. When Mak took over from her mother in 2007, it switched to using whole tiger prawns, which she says gives the wontons a firmer, fresher texture.

Unlike Mak’s Noodle, the family-run business has just one location. “We used to have a small workshop in the flat above the restaurant, but we have since outsourced our wonton skins to a factory in Fo Tan [in the New Territories], which we’ve been working with for over a decade.

“For our wonton skins, we have used the same traditional recipe as for our noodles with standardised thickness and size throughout the decades, as we insist on using our old recipe.”

Then, there is the even smaller-scale Shek Kee Wonton Noodles, founded in 1994 by Wong Kit-ling. Shek Kee stands out because its wontons are made in-store every week by Wong.

“We fill them with fresh ingredients and wrap them with heart,” Wong says. “The main ingredient is shrimp, with a bit of minced pork to complement. Our wonton skins and noodles are also made in our own workshop.”

Its wontons, the size of ping pong balls, are unlike the Mak cousins’ petite creations, probably because Wong learned her craft from another known maker of them.

“I was poor and had to earn money for my children’s tutoring lessons, so I worked at Tsim Chai Kee for three years. Then I decided to open up my own restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui,” she says.

Tsim Chai Kee, which was set up across the street from Mak’s Noodle in Central in the 1990s, started as a dai pai dong around the 1950s. At the time, founder Yeung Chin-wah named it “Tsim Kee”.

When he took over in the late 1980s, Yeung’s son moved the street stall to a restaurant in Tai Kok Tsui, West Kowloon, and renamed it Tsim Chai Kee, before later opening up shop in Tsim Sha Tsui and at two locations in Central.

Now under third-generation owners, Tsim Chai Kee’s menu is extremely precise: shrimp wontons, beef, minced dace fish, egg noodles – and nothing more. The giant, daringly meaty wontons are twice the size of Mak’s Noodle’s and still attract long queues today.

Christina, who chooses not to publish her surname, says her parents first encountered the delicacy in the 1960s in Repulse Bay, at a clubhouse restaurant. Today, she is unsure if the dish, nicknamed “Repulse Bay wontons”, is still made elsewhere.

Christina adds: “In 2014, my mother, who really loved these wontons, passed away. A couple of years later, I made them again for a food critic. Now, I mostly make them for friends and family, because it’s quite a complicated procedure.”

The wafer wontons are an off-menu item, as they require immaculate control of time and frying temperature, and multiple people need to focus on the dish at once. The wontons must be consumed quickly, before the paper softens and becomes soggy.

Those who are interested can call ahead of time to see if they can reserve the dish, or try to visit “either very early or very late”, when the kitchen may be more amenable to work on the dish, says Christina.