Wok Hei at a Hong Kong Dai Pai Dong

Two chefs cooking with wok hei at dai pai dong Oi Man Sang

In Chinese cooking, particularly Cantonese, people talk about how good a dish is by the "wok hei", literally "the breath of the wok".

It involves intense heat or fire, that heats up the wok so much that ingredients are cooked and caramelised in less than a minute, resulting in a slight char or hint of smokiness that adds another layer to the flavour of the dish.

Baked casserole, stir fried beef ribs, razor clams

Most Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong have wok stations to create wok hei, but may not be able to get that intense heat that can be found in dai pai dongs, or open-air food stall. One of them is Oi Man Sang in the Sham Shui Po area, more specifically around Prince Edward district.

Dai pai dong literally means "big license stall", and they began proliferating after World War II. But decades later in a bid to clean up the streets for hygienic reasons, the government restricted the number of dai pai dongs, relocating many of them in government-run cooked food markets. 

The numbers of dai pai dongs dwindled further when the authorities only allowed owners to pass on the license to family members. 

Which brings us to Oi Man Sang, which has been around since 1956, making it one of the oldest in Hong Kong. 

Typhoon shelter crab with garlic and spices

Typically there is a massive line of people waiting for tables -- no reservations are taken -- and diners are literally eating on the sidewalk while the mobile kitchen is on the street, with two big gas burners fuelled by kerosene. As chef Lucas Sin likes to say, they use jet fuel to cook.

This was my first time to Oi Man Sang and was excited to try the food that I had read and heard so much about. We got a table set up on the sidewalk, metres away from the open-air kitchen and watched two chefs deftly manipulate the woks as they were heated up by the roaring fire underneath.

Another good thing about eating here is that there is no corkage, so we brought a bottle of sake to try with the food. 

The first dish to arrive at the table was baked fish intestines with liver in egg casserole, and here it was topped with thin slices of you tiao or savoury Chinese doughnut for a contrasting texture. This was done well, fluffy from the eggs combined with the offal.

Stir-fried cabbage with minced pork and shrimp

Next was stir-fried small razor clams, which you don't see often. The narrow strips of sweet clam meat were about two to three inches long, cooked with a tiny bit of spice, and roughly chopped onion and peppers.

We also ordered stir-fried beef ribs, very tender and attached to the bone, together with onion and peppers again, and typhoon shelter crab, which is cooked with a lot of minced garlic and spices. The meat itself was sweet, though quite messy to eat.

A favourite was stir-fried cabbage with minced pork and dried shrimps in a clay pot. The cabbage soaked up the salty flavours, and in the sizzling pot stayed warm for quite a while. 

Stir-fried prawns is considered a popular dish, though again a bit messy to eat, though the prawns were very large, meaty and sweet.

While most of these dishes demonstrated wok hei, perhaps the only dish that was disappointing with the yeung chow fried rice; the individual rice while plump, were not cooked well enough in the wok to have the wok hei flavour.

Large meaty prawns served at Oi Man Sang

Nevertheless, we were quite satisfied with our dinner. I ventured over to the kitchen to take a look and indeed the two chefs there cooked dishes in seconds thanks to the intense fire on the stove. 

At one point there was a lot of banging -- the fire was so hot that it had warped the wok and the chef had to hammer it back into shape!

The evening we went there weren't many people waiting in line, which some attribute to not many tourists coming. We hope Oi Man Sang and other dai pai dongs continue their tradition for years to come, though who in the next generation is willing to work with such heat day in, day out?

Oi Man Sang

Shop B-C, G/F, 1 Shek Kip Mei Street, Sham Shui Po

+852 2393 9315