Harbour Restaurant

海港食家 (Harbor Restaurant) is a typical example of killer seafood and stir fry, right in the ‘hood.
First of all it is all the way over in Ap Lei Chau on the main street, a little island (separated by an overpass/​bridge) across from Wong Chuk Hang side. Mostly residential, with some factories and small businesses (including a Maserati and Ferrari dealership! Rents be skyrocketing, yo.) This place was virtually unheard of except for the most die hard of locals, until some media personality type decided to share the scoop.
Fortunately I have family living nearby who took me here and declared it one of the best eats in the area. Unfortunately one visit is not enough, but I am not sure when I will get back here again.
Too many visitors to Hong Kong get caught up in the generics… HK café, dim sum, or Michelin star dining. It is an utter shame, considering the blue collar delights, as well as the true hard core grassroots part of Hong Kong, also have their culinary pleasures. And it is best to understand things from the ground up, and in order to do that, one must dive in and immerse in the flavors of the ‘hood and what it has to offer. The difficulty is navigating to them, a lack of understanding of local food, and of course the language. It is easier to pick up cuss words, than it is to order proficiently at a neighborhood stir fry and seafood restaurant (or you can eat great food and hear random cussing in places like this, but not during my visit).
Too many choices… placard menu, or look at the handwritten specials plastered along the wall.
No brainer, pay the fee (not expensive) and get a heaping steaming hot bowl of daily soup. The owner wakes up very early in the morning and goes to the nearby Ap Lei Chau market to purchase fish upwards of 3 times a day, then also goes across the strait to Aberdeen side (there is a giant wholesale fish market there too). Old school man in his 70s reasons that the daily catches change depending on what the fishermen have, thus the need to go regularly, and he doesn’t want to miss out (plus he doesn’t go online and check social media, and the fishermen don’t Tweet their catches). So the soup stock is made with lower end (but fresh) wild local catch. Can you imagine how ridiculous good that is? Throw in some root vegetables, ginger, scallion and it’s magic.
The restaurant normally has lots of styrofoam tanks outside filled with live and kicking seafood, so you can pick what you want. Unfortunately during my visit it was slim pickins, but we ended up with a small wild fish of the grouper family, and had that mofo steamed with soy sauce, oil, scallions. Really hard to top local cooking, local ingredients, where fish has fish flavor (unlike the farmed commercial varieties at our California Cantonese seafood restaurants) and the sauce is heavenly when splattered over a bowl of steamed white rice.
Stir fry… so we wanted some wok stir fry plate. What to get? No brainer… 生炒骨 (sweet and sour spareribs). Very nice execution on this one. Not a single drop of excess goopy sauce (and not cornstarch enhanced). This is the OG shiznit version, and not the moo shoo poo poo doo doo that you find abroad.
Beef fried rice was rather textbook, but still hit the spot.
I don’t remember the total amount of the bill, but it was very reasonable.