Hirafu Village is where all the action is…accommodation, restaurants and night life. All locations are accessible via free shuttle buses and menus are in English and Japanese to cater for the influx of foreigners to the Niseko Resort Area.

The streets of Hirafu becomes a whole different place at night. After a long day of skiing and snowboarding, the town is filled with people rewarding themselves with a good hot meal or a drink at the bar.

Evening is spent recounting the days thrills and spills, and how amazing the powder is.

If you’d rather stay in, you can buy food back from the restaurants, get delivery or get cook your own meal. You can buy your food ingredients from the two convenience stores in the village. One of which is open 24 hours a day.

I find great joy in discovering new hole-in-the-wall restaurants with tasty local food. Maybe it’s because of its rustic décor and local flavours, it so satisfying finding a rare gem of an eatery amongst old shop houses hidden in small alleyways.

Our recent quest led us to a small little place in Wanchai called “Crowd Restaurant (群 众小厨)”.

Most Hong Kong eating-places like this are small and floor space is maximized by cramping as many tables and chairs as possible. More often than not, you’ll have to share your table with complete strangers.

What I love about Chinese food is that your meal is cooked when you order it, so it’s served hot and fresh out of the kitchen. Huge demerit points to restaurants that opt for the easy way out of reheating/microwaving your food. On a side note, most of the time this theory holds true: the grumpier the 老板, the tastier the food! Discuss!

Back to the restaurant. The menu was all in Chinese, so it took awhile for me to figure out what was what. Maybe it would have helped if I turned the menu the right way up. Thank goodness for the pictures of some specialty dishes on the wall, all I had to do was point to it and say “一碗”.

Dru made the safe choice of ordering the sweet and sour pork with rice. Ironic because the non-angmoh was ordering what I consider a very Western-Chinese dish.

I opted for the scallop vermicelli. At this point, it also occurred to me that the pictures of food on the wall were probably the most expensive dishes too. I fell for their marketing ploy. What a Dupe!

But all was redeemed when I was presented with this massive claypot bowl of noodles with a generous amount of scallops (some were hidden under the noodles, can’t see from the picture). And all for just something as little as HKD75 (approx SGD15) But don’t quote me on this, I didn’t keep the receipt so I can’t remember how much it was exactly. Portion size was double of what we were used to, so we had to 打包 it.

It tasted great, I’d definitely go back there for seconds.

群众小厨／群眾小廚
Address: Shop A, 14 Gresson Street, Wanchai
Tel: +852 2866 8088