The previous day, I called up some friends in Shenzhen, China to meet up for lunch. It has been a while since I last saw them, I thought it would be great to catch up. Besides, I was still craving for some authentic Chinese food in China itself, so I thought it would be great to cross the border for lunch. As usual we left late in the morning as we headed off to the KCR to get to Shenzhen. Our goal is the get to the Mongkok KCR station which will bring us to Shenzhen. I have taken the KCR several times and pretty much know my way around. It takes us half an hour to get from Mongkok to the Lo Wu Station which is right at the border itself.
Getting out of Hong Kong was easy enough. I proceeded to the visa on arrival section where you can get a 5 day Shenzhen only visa. I have done this several times so I was confident with what I was doing. The room was on the second floor just after crossing the bridge which connects the Hong Kong side to the China side. It is not very obvious, it is a small flight of stairs to the left, just after a security guard’s desk. The office wasn’t very crowded which was a pleasant surprise. There were a handful of foreigners applying for the visa. It was orderly enough and soon my number was called.
To my huge disappointment, the officer told me my passport no longer allowed to get visa on arrival in Shenzhen. There were no explanations given to me. I even showed them how I went there several times but to no avail. You know how you cannot argue with types of people. I was told to get a visa at their office in Wan Chai. No way am I doing that. It looks like my friends in Shenzhen would have to eat amongst themselves now. I called them up and told them the bad news.
Anyway, it just so happened that another friend of ours who we were supposed to meet up with also lives in Shenzhen is raring to go to Hong Kong with us and since he was already waiting at the other side we told him to meet us back in Hong Kong side. It took us a while to get back to Hong Kong, apparently it wasn’t just a matter to turning back and re-entering Hong Kong. An immigration officer asked for our passports and after about 15 minutes, she told us to walk back to Hong Kong side through the same way we came in, apparently they have already made a few calls since there were people waiting for us at the other side and ushered us into a room where our passports where processed. In a few minutes, the office pronounced us “back in Hong Kong”, and we quickly met up with our friend who as already waiting. Apparently, we went all the way to Lo Wu just to fetch our friend.
Now, it was already way past lunch and we were starving. My friend knew about this place but he didn’t know the name. He called it “Queen Chicken”. It was actually Chuen Cheong Kui Restaurant or Quan Zhang Ju or 泉章局. It is a Chinese restaurant specializing in Hakka Cuisine. I was never keen on Hakka food since I thought it was rather ordinary. I’d rather have a nice spicy Sichuan dish anytime. But I was already hungry and I didn’t mind this place since it seemed to be well known. It was a full fledged restaurant and it looks a bit fancy for me. However the prices were quite reasonable.
Their specialty is their Salt Baked Chicken, which looked suspiciously like Hainanese Chicken Rice I have in Singapore. True to its name, the chicken was rubbed with salt all over before being baked. Naturally it was salty but a bit oily and I liked it a lot. This reminded me of some cafeteria food I had in Hong Kong before but this was much better. The other dishes included Braised Pork with Salted Vegetables, fried rice and some Chinese herbal soup. They were okay but nothing really to write home about. At the time of our visit, it was already way past lunch time and much of the restaurant was already shut down for the afternoon. The staff was already relaxing on one side of the restaurant waiting for them to reopen in the evening. It was also a bit rude to have them present us the bill even before we asked for it. It was as if they were kicking us out. Well, they didn’t really kick us out in fact, in fact, we hung around the restaurant for quite a while, while catching up on our gossip.
[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/QuanZhangJu.kmz}]