The Temple Street night market in Kowloon is one of the best known attractions in the whole of Hong Kong, and its biggest market, an illuminated beacon of haphazard stalls selling everything from mobile phones to watches.
And, of course, food. A hub for late-night dining, you can grab a plate of steaming dumplings as easily as more exotic offerings like snake or mock shark fin soup or dragon’s beard candy.
Not to mention the traditional clay pot rice, where sticky rice is cooked with various meats and vegetables in a sealed clay pot.
Like ‘tahdig’ in Iranian cuisine, the style of cooking means that as well as the gooey rice inside and the ingredients all steaming together in the same pot, you get a layer of scorched, crunchy rice at the bottom too – known as ‘faan ziu’, or ‘scorched rice’.
This is also the specialty of Temple Street Claypot Rice in Altrincham, not long opened by the same folk behind Happy Valley, another well regarded Hong Kong style ‘cha chaan teng’ in the shadow of Strangeways on Bury New Road.
Cha chaan tengs – informal cafes which have been springing up all over the city in recent years – offer up an authentic flavour of casual Hong Kong-style eating, and on a damp October afternoon last week, the windows were steamed up, tables full and lunch service was in mid flow.
Sizzling, black ceramic pots whizz past your shoulder and on the wall, a whiteboard with the menu in marker pen, all in Chinese (don’t worry, if your Cantonese isn’t up to scratch, there’s an English version too). It all adds to the sense of culinary adventure, even though you could hurl a dumpling and probably hit the Broadheath branch of Dunelm.
It’s objectively not Kowloon, but the food on the table is the next best thing, owner Don reckons, mainly thanks to his chef Joe, who is reproducing authentic dishes like wanton noodles, soup with floating fish balls and beef brisket so soft it falls to bits the moment it hits the chopstick.
Dishes come with a side of sweetcorn soup, simmered for hours, and another bowl of clear broth arrives unannounced that is so deeply savoury it’s unputdownable.
The claypot rice is the thing, though, coming in all kinds of iterations; with chicken and Chinese mushroom, Sichuan-style with numbing sauce, with minced pork and salted egg and, best of all, cured meat and duck liver sausage.
If the delicacy of chicken feet is your thing, there’s a pot with that too, scattered with chunks of spare rib, and then dig down to the bottom of the pot, and you’ll get a layer of that crispy rice.
There’s signature Hong Kong-style drinks too, like sweet iced lemon tea, iced milk tea and iced coffee.
Happy Valley has already gained a fiercely loyal following just out of the city centre, and now Temple Street is extending that reach into the south of Manchester too.
And if a visit to the actual Temple Street market is a substantial savings plan away, this will very much fit the bill in the meantime.
Temple Street Claypot Rice, 68 Manchester Rd, Altrincham WA14 4PJ
Open Weds-Mon 12pm-9pm
Claypot rice from £15, soup noodles from £12.50, ice lemon tea £4
