Atlas Obscura Itineraries

Gastro Obscura’s 10 Essential Places to Eat, Drink, and Shop in Hong Kong

Think Hong Kong and the mind flits to dim sum, sweet roasted meats, and noodles. While you’ll still find all of those in abundance here, Hong Kong’s status as a port city and a former British colony have led to dishes that exist outside of the Cantonese genre—indeed, also to entirely new cross-cultural genres. With this in mind, we wanted to put together a list that touches on the classics: a stuck-in-time dim sum hall, a streetside dai pai dong where nearly every dish is cooked in a wok, and an artisanal soy sauce maker. You’ll also find a few lesser-known places that are nonetheless important to Hong Kong’s food scene: the local equivalent of the diner, restaurants that serve Western dishes as perceived through a Chinese lens, Hong Kong’s unique bakeries, as well as things tangential to the territory’s food culture such as kitchen supplies and the neon signs that used to decorate nearly every restaurant in the city.