小菜王

This place is one of those places you shouldn’t miss — both as a tourist or a local — for an authentic dai pai dong experience. It’s cheap and great for large groups. In fact, there were so many of us on the night we went we actually ended up occupying two tables! Needless to say, we ended up ordering almost everything popular dish on their menu. It’s BYOB. There is an old school convenient store just across the place selling most of the popular local beers — get a Tsingtao and forget about your foreign imports. Common, you are at a dai pai dong!
Food is delicious. Even though the setting is a bit shady and there is always the fear a critter may decide to pop out from it’s den to say «hello». I think I might have seen a few cockroaches when we left but at least there were no rats running around… (Yes, they exist when there is food nearby. It’s just their nature.) I didn’t end up with any food poisoning so all is good.

This dai pai dong is one of the many that actually does most of their seating indoors, and they span across 4 – 5 shops next to each other. Although they are quite famous for their lamb pot, we decided to order other dishes so we could get a variety because the lamb pot is rather large and we would pretty much only be able to eat that. Next time.
We ended up ordering a fried calamari, steamed fish belly, appetizer platter, and boiled spinach soup. The fried calamari came in a large portion and the squid was really fresh. The steamed fish belly was a little bit over cooked but still really soft and moist. You could also taste the freshness in the fish. The appetizer platter had deep fried pig intestine (really crispy), deep fried pork neck meat (great texture and flavor), and two other unidentifiable things. I think one is a green onion pancake and the other was a deep fried chicken patty. Whatever they were, they were good. I’m not a huge fan of deep fried foods so this platter definitely wasn’t my favorite dish, but it was good. My favorite dish of the night has to be hands down the boiled spinach soup with minced meat. It could be that I love spinach though: P I thought it was very flavorful and I loved the salted egg that was in it.
All in all, this place is a solid dai pai dong to visit and I can’t wait to go back to try their famed lamb pot.