On Thursday night, we took a cab over to Kowloon to Hutong, a Chinese restaurant on the 28th floor of an office tower in Tsim Sha Tsui. The restaurant is two blocks from the harbor and has a spectacular view of the Hong Kong skyline. It's a little cheesy, but most of the skyscrapers in Hong Kong put on a laser and spotlight show in the evenings, visible only to those in Kowloon. I remembered the Pink Floyd laser show I once saw at the old Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, and the spotlights made me think of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I thought we were signalling alien starcruisers, telling them just where to land.
The food was exceptional, and it just kept on coming. We started with hot Chinese wine, which was sweet with a slight vinegary taste, but not in a bad way. Then we had spring rolls, spare ribs, fried lobster with vegetables, dumplings, pea pods with shredded pork, and fried rice. I managed to get everything into my mouth with the chopsticks, though the lobster posed a challenge, as it was chopped up but had been fried in its shell. After dinner we went upstairs to Aqua Spirit, a bar with the same view but a different ambience. We had drinks and swapped stories about our firm's many offices and attorneys. It's only on trips like this that I hear all the good gossip.
We took the Star Ferry back to Hong Kong Island. The boat is smaller than the Staten Island Ferry, and shaped more like a traditional boat than a squarish ferryboat. The ride was about 10 minutes and, like the Staten Island Ferry does in New York Harbor, offered its own outstanding look at the sights of Hong Kong. Since we'd had rain all day, it was a cloudy night, but the skyline was still visibly striking despite the mist.
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