Village Bakery is open... for trial runs!

Buffalo Wilbur has been taking to peering into the glass doors of Village Bakery for the past month, willing it to open. So when we saw the sign, can you guess who was in there like a flash?

I must say I didn't think it would be that big. It takes up two shops, one for the bakery cafe and the other for the kitchen.

As this was a trial, it wasn't fully stocked. But what they had was so impressive we wanted to buy up the whole shop. In the end, we settled for a date and walnut loaf, minced beef bun, sausage roll and mango pudding.

They open at 7am so leave yourself some time to pop into the place for freshly baked breakfast before hopping on the ferry.

The Village Bakery is opposite the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

More cafe fare

Every month, we resolve to not spend so much at the beginning that we have nothing left the week before payday. But we never do it.

Being down to double digits in our bank account meant cutting right back on eating out.

So I thought we'd check out the cha chan teng next to 7-Eleven to see if we could get an okay meal for less than HK$50. And we could.

The food is nothing fancy. The lunch sets for example, are around HK$30ish and contain exactly what is stated on the board, without even an extra slice of tomato or lettuce to liven up the mix.

The board is in both Chinese and English so you can just point and order.

But it was cheap and filling – and, most importantly, will fill our tummies until payday.

Cafe fare

Being Chinese illiterate, I haven't dared step into the cha chan teng opposite Wellcome. But I have seen loads of people in it so I knew the food had to be cheap and good.

Today I woke up with a craving for the local fried beef noodles so I finally screwed up my courage to walk into the place.

As expected, they didn't have an English menu but the waitress speaks English so she translated the daily specials for me.

I did get my beef noodles. And it was all I'd expected it to be: juicy slices of beef, oil-slicked noodles, sweet cabbage and an amazing smoky wok hei (wok breath).

All for HK$33, with an iced lemon tea.

It was worth going off the beaten track, food-wise, after all.

Best onion bhajis in HK

In case you think I'm a total dining curmudgeon after my last post, here are the best onion bhajis in Hong Kong.

Freshly made, totally yummy and only HK$20 for three (I think Gordon used to give four but inflation, ah well...) from Bombay Cafe.

And yes, those legs are pretty good too.

Mui Wo on TV

If you missed the BBC Working Lives documentary on Tom and his Caffe Paradiso (with lots of shots of Mui Wo looking absolutely the place everyone wants to live in), the trailer and parts of the documentary are on Youtube:

This is Part One.

This is Part Two

Home at last

The day is as lovely as only a non-polluted summer day in Hong Kong can be. The sun is out and tourists streaming out from the ferry terminal tilt their heads to enjoy the full warmth of its rays.

Tony the hairdresser waves to a regular from his salon while Tom enjoys a quick gossip with his customers outside his cafe. At the bus station, two dogs hold up an incoming bus from Tung Chung by refusing to budge. The driver just waits patiently and finally one dog lifts his head and ambles off, followed by the other. There's no rush, everyone seems to slow down the moment they emerge from the pier.

Ahhhh, this is why we have decided to move to Mui Wo, the southern gateway to Lantau island. People population: 5,000. Dog and buffalo population: Probably just as many.

I fell in love with the town the first time I saw it. We'd just done a two-hour hike from Discovery Bay to Mui Wo and, knees trembling from the long stairway down from the mountains, we stopped for a snack at a beach hotel that looked like a throwback to the 70s, complete with kitsch fountains and chipped statuary. I ordered spring rolls and orange juice. The drink was as flourescent as a safety vest and tasted like those Tang drinks I had as a child -- the one which made you feel like an astronaut. It was absolutely delightful.

With such an introduction to the town, it was no wonder that I was predisposed to it even before I saw it. I loved that it, like the orange drink, looked like a throwback to the 70s, when life was slower, quieter and unplugged. My husband was won over by the very professional looking second-hand bookshop on the corner, known as The Bookshop. Duh.

That was three years ago. And finally, after a lot of humming and hawing, we are going to move here. We've bought ourselves an absolutely tiny flat with a sea view. Many people have asked us why we bought somewhere in the town, their attitude being: "If you want country living, why are you not getting a village house instead?"

The reasons are:
1) We can't afford the minimum 30 percent downpayment on a village house.
2) With so many Cathay pilots snapping up the village houses, the prices are so high we can't even get a mortgage on one.
3) Lazy gits that we are, we like being three minutes from the ferry pier so we can see the ferry coming in and run.
4) The Wellcome supermarket is just downstairs. Told you we were lazy gits.
5) Most village houses don't have a sea view and the ones which do have are perched so high on the mountainside they take ages to get to.

More on Mui Wo living later.