We recently got to partake in a BBQ party in suburban Hong Kong with my work team. It was a beautiful night to spend outdoors with friends and fun to compare and contrast the HK version of BBQ with our typical Midwestern version. Overall I would describe the HK BBQ style as a combination of a campfire roast and regular grill. You have a basic charcoal grill, but everyone gathers around it to cook their own food, like a campfire, thus all the stools shown below.
The food selection and set up consisted of a large variety of meat and seafood that our host purchased at the local store already marinated in different spices and sauces. Pick a protein, any protein! As you can see the focus is really only on the meat-- no Midwestern side dish parade. Just some foil packets of corn, mushrooms and some sweet potatoes put on the coals that no one paid much attention to.
Then load up your big fork, crack a beer and sit down to chat for the whole night while you gradually (it takes a long time to roast enough food for a family of four on two sticks!) fill up your belly. Someone brought some leftover birthday supplies for the kids to play with, which explains Paul's purple mask.
While we had some more typical things like beef and pork and sausages, we also had fish meatballs (not shown), these whole fish, which included eggs in their bellies...
...fresh scallops cooking on their shells with minced garlic, and clams, among other things.
Here is a chicken wing batch done sans sticks and Remie is slathering them all with honey. No BBQ sauce at this BBQ. But they put honey on everything, even the hot dogs and the fish meatballs, in the last minutes of cooking.
Another shot of the clams along with the s'mores introduction prepwork.
My team was familiar with roasting marshmallows, but had never heard of s'mores so we brought the fixin's, kind of. Graham crackers do exist in this city, but not in the two grocery stores nearest to us, so in the last minute we had to punt with some biscuit cookies. They were a decent substitute. Here is the reaction from the first s'mores tasters of the evening. Thumbs up!
The woman in the picture above, Cecilia, is on my team and the guy in the pink, Jay, is her husband and they were the BBQ hosts. The kids all enjoyed the old birthday party gear and running around.
Except then Esme had a long, dramatic, big-bottom-lip pouting session over not getting to have multiple s'mores since she didn't eat her dinner. But Chinese people love taking pictures of Esme, so Venus and Cecilia weren't deterred from posing with her anyway.
And one last picture of the whole group before heading home with pooped out kids. Fun times!
