In Pinay's footsteps: THE LEGEND HONGKONG SEAFOOD RESTAURANT MANILA

I was invited by friends for dinner at the Legend HongKong Seafood Restaurant near the World Trade Center in Manila.

I couldn't help but want to share my gastronomic experience with you.

It seems the blog is getting to be a food blog, too, but food is always part of the travel experience.

Again, I am no food critic since I just enjoy eating and have no culinary experience.

Here we enter the doors of the Legend HongKong Seafood Restaurant Manila, a well known Chinese restaurant in Manila.

So just enjoy the meal with me...

Appetizer with Mixed Cold Cuts with Pork Asado (Char Siu), Smoked Ham Hock, Soy Chicken, Century Eggs and Jellyfish

From Wikipedia for JELLY FISH:
In China, processed jellyfish are desalted by soaking in water overnight and eaten cooked or raw. The dish is often served shredded with a dressing of oil, soy sauce, vinegar and sugar, or as a salad with vegetables.^[25] In Japan, cured jellyfish are rinsed, cut into strips and served with vinegar as an appetizer.^[25]^[26] Desalted, ready-to-eat products are also available.^[25]

from Wikipedia for CENTURY EGGS:

Century egg or pidan (Chinese: 皮蛋; pinyin: pídàn), also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, thousand-year-old egg, andmillennium egg, is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing.

Through the process, the yolk becomes a dark green to grey colour, with a creamy consistency and an odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with little flavor.^{[citation needed]} The transforming agent in the century egg is its alkaline material, which gradually raises the pH of the egg to around 9, 12, or more during the curing process.^[1] This chemical process breaks down some of the complex, flavorless proteins and fats, which produces a variety of smaller flavorful compounds.

from Wikipedia for CHAR SIU:

Char siu (also spelled chasu, cha siu, chashao, and char siew), otherwise known as barbecued meat (usually pork) in China or Chinese-flavored barbecued meatoutside China, is a popular way to flavor and prepare pork in Cantonese cuisine.^[1] It is classified as a type of siu mei, Cantonese roasted meat. It is listed at number 28 on World's 50 most delicious foods readers' poll complied by CNN Go in 2011.^[2]

"Char siu" literally means "fork burn/roast" (Char being fork (both noun and verb) and siu being burn/roast) after the traditional cooking method for the dish: long strips of seasoned boneless pork are skewered with long forks and placed in a covered oven or over a fire.

The meat, typically a shoulder cut of domestic pork (although in ancient times wild boar and other available meats were also used), is seasoned with a mixture ofhoney, five-spice powder, fermented tofu (red), dark soy sauce, hoisin sauce, red food colouring (not a traditional ingredient but very common in today's preparations) and sherry or rice wine (optional). These seasonings turn the exterior layer of the meat dark red, similar to the "smoke ring" of American barbecues. Maltose may be used to give char siu its characteristic shiny glaze.

Fish Lip Soup

Steamed Fish with Ginger and Onions

This is one of their bestsellers.

Peking Duck
Peking Duck is always considered for special meals. This is very interesting because they show you have of the duck with very shiny, thin, crispy skin which they slice and place in thin "pancakes" but actually looking like "lumpia" wrappers.
They get the meat of the Peking Duck, sliced and diced and it comes back to you as a different dish, which we place in cabbage leaves with their special sauce.

From Wikipedia:

Peking Duck, or Peking Roast Duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing^[1] that has been prepared since the imperial era, and is now considered one of China'snational foods. It is listed at number 5 on World's 50 most delicious foods complied by CNN Go in 2011.^[2]

The dish is prized for the thin, crisp skin, with authentic versions of the dish serving mostly the skin and little meat, sliced in front of the diners by the cook. Ducks bred specially for the dish are slaughtered after 65 days and seasoned before being roasted in a closed or hung oven. The meat is eaten with pancakes, spring onions, and hoisin sauce or sweet bean sauce. The two most notable restaurants in Beijing which serve this delicacy are Quanjude and Bianyifang, two centuries-old establishments which have become household names.

From Wikipedia:

Serving

The cooked Peking Duck is traditionally carved in front of the diners and served in three stages. First, the skin is served dipped in sugar and garlic sauce. The meat is then served with steamed pancakes (simplified Chinese: 春饼; traditional Chinese: 春餅; pinyin: chūn bǐng), spring onions and sweet bean sauce. Several vegetable dishes are provided to accompany the meat, typically cucumber sticks. The diners spread sauce, and optionally sugar, over the pancake. The pancake is wrapped around the meat with the vegetables and eaten by hand. The remaining fat, meat and bones may be made into a broth, served as is, or the meat chopped up and stir fried with sweet bean sauce. Otherwise, they are packed up to be taken home by the customers.^[24]^[25]^[26]

The Peking duck is served two ways:
The meat is then served with steamed pancakes (simplified Chinese: 春饼; traditional Chinese: 春餅; pinyin: chūn bǐng), spring onions and sweet bean sauce.

The pancake is wrapped around the thin, crispy skin.

The duck meat is slices into smaller pieces and placed on top of the cabbage leaves and with sauce.

Mantis
This is called "Alupihang Dagat" in Tagalog / Pilipino and a really tasty seafood.

From Wikipedia:

Mantis shrimp or stomatopods are marine crustaceans, the members of the order Stomatopoda. They are neither shrimp nor mantids, but receive their name purely from the physical resemblance to both the terrestrial praying mantis and the shrimp. They may reach 30 centimetres (12 in) in length, although exceptional cases of up to 38 cm (15 in) have been recorded.^[2] The carapace of mantis shrimp covers only the rear part of the head and the first four segments of the thorax. Mantis shrimp appear in a variety of colours, from shades of browns to bright neon colours. Although they are common animals and among the most important predators in many shallow,tropical and sub-tropical marine habitats they are poorly understood as many species spend most of their life tucked away in burrows and holes.^[3]

From Wikipedia:

In Cantonese cuisine, the mantis shrimp is a popular dish known as "pissing shrimp" (攋尿蝦, Mandarin pinyin: lài niào xiā, modern Cantonese: laaih liu hā) because of their tendency to shoot a jet of water when picked up. After cooking, their flesh is closer to that of lobsters than that of shrimp, and like lobsters, their shells are quite hard and require some pressure to crack.

In the Philippines, the mantis shrimp is known as tatampal, hipong-dapa or alupihang-dagat and is cooked and eaten like shrimp.

This is the live mantis shrimp. These are placed in bottles.
Why?
Because these sea creatures are aggresive and can cause painful gashes when handled and they may also hurt each other.
From Wikipedia:
Called "sea locusts" by ancient Assyrians, "prawn killers" in Australia and now sometimes referred to as "thumb splitters" — because of the animal's ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously^[4] — mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning or dismemberment. Although it happens rarely, some larger species of mantis shrimp are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike from this weapon.^[5]

These aggressive and typically solitary sea creatures spend most of their time hiding in rock formations or burrowing intricate passageways in the sea bed. They either wait for prey to chance upon them or, unlike most crustaceans, actually hunt, chase and kill prey. They rarely exit their homes except to feed and relocate, and can be diurnal, nocturnal or crepuscular, depending on the species. Most species live in tropical and subtropical seas (Indian and Pacific Oceans between eastern Africa and Hawaii), although some live in temperate seas.