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A secret food street
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John Woo
DAPAIDANG, a simple neighbourhood restaurant, is an interesting variation on traditional Cantonese restaurants. The price is right and the food tastes good. Many Cantonese are used to midnight snacks, and the perfect place to get a late-night bite is at somewhere like Dapaidang, even well into the wee hours. This makes Dapaidang a lively place where friends meet to enjoy themselves while eating and drinking.
Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) has a food street composed of about 20 such restaurants. Swarming with people both in the restaurants and outdoors almost every evening, the food street, though, is still short of a name. It is located somewhat deep inside the OCT community, behind the Seaview Hotel, and not many outsiders know about it. A knowledgable local is needed to steer diners towards the best dishes. Residents of OCT simply refer to it as "the food street" .
Since those restaurants are small and diverse in the specialties they offer, OCT's small population of 30,000 is enough to guarantee a bustling business.
The food street includes such restaurants as A Shanghai Family, Beijing Fragrance, King of Jiaozi Dumpling, along with Chaozhou, Hakka, Hunan, Sichuan and other specialties.
The types of food seemingly come from all over China, so they are rich in stories. One eatery is called Northeast Tiger, serving Northeast-style food and typifies the popularity of this genre. In the past, however, Northeastern cooking was not famous at all. But a few gutsy folk from that region took a chance and began setting up restaurants outside the Northeast, and as fate would have it their style of cooking caught on.
"Yes, many of our Northeasterners aren't afraid of risks and are happy to try new things," agreed a waiter surnamed Wang in the eatery.
Another restaurant is Goubuli Baozi. Goubuli has been a nationally-known brand name of baozi, or steamed stuffed bun, for 110 years. But ridiculously, Goubuli in Chinese means "even a dog ignores it". Why the unflattering name? Infant mortality was high in the old days, and a tradition developed whereby parents gave their children awful names because they hoped it would spare them from misfortune. So the baozi simply carries the name of the man who invented it.
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