If you’re street smart you’ll set your sights on Hawker
Agood meal is when you get exactly what you want, when you want it. When this happens outside the home, it’s particularly special and it can be greatly enhanced by good service. If you’re with someone whose company you greatly enjoy, and who shares your own enthusiasm for eating well, it’s even better.
Well, all of these stars aligned when I visited Hawker on a warm, sunny evening. This is the street food part of Hang Dai on Camden Street. Hang Dai, of course, rewrote the rules for Chinese cuisine in Dublin, purist in some respects, less so in others, but always dramatic, often with a bit of restaurant theatre thrown in. We’re talking punchy flavours and vibrant cocktails with a carefully chosen soundtrack.
Hawker is literally about Hong Kong-style street food. I mean, you actually eat it on the street, at uncovered tables, no frills but absolutely no hardship either, provided you get the weather. If you’re lucky you might get a seat at the little bar that occupies the space where Hang Dai’s front window used to be. And the prices are equally down-to-earth. It offers some of the best value eating in the capital, with a constantly changing menu, handwritten in black marker on brown paper bags.
On Instagram, some of the dishes leap out. Fried duck hearts, anyone? Truffle popcorn? Chilli and salt frog’s legs, a startling contrast to the usual crispy squid? The chef, incidentally, was formerly second-in-command at Neil Perry’s highly distinguished
Rockpool in Sydney where I ate many years ago.
Our Buddha’s delight (€7) was well named. This vegetarian dish – the ingredients vary widely throughout South-East Asia – is said to have been created by Buddhist monks who, of course, abstain from flesh. Served, like all the other dishes here, in a little cardboard box, it featured, among other delights, little neon green edamame beans, a mop of crisp shallots on top, beansprouts, white and black sesame seeds, crunchy scallions...
It was fab. Intensely savoury, brilliantly fresh, excitingly spicy but not too much so, distinctly tangy. I’ve thought about it a lot in the meantime and may eventually have a stab – doubtless unsuccessful – at recreating it at home. Stir-fried noodles with prawns and XO sauce (€8) sound good? They certainly did to us but it was so much more than the sum of its parts, not least in the freshness and juiciness of the prawns and the deep savouriness of the sauce. The XO sauce contains expensive Cognac but its secret lies in using dried seafood, notably shrimp, to create an explosion of deep, deep umami. Developed in Hong Kong as recently as the 1980s, there are lots of commercial versions of varying qualities. I bet this one was made in-house.
Noodles may sound bland, but in this company each strand was a savoury delight.
Chicken satay (€8) sounds potentially boring. You know, dried
NOODLES MAY SOUND BLAND BUT EACH STRAND WAS A SAVOURY DELIGHT
out, overcooked bits of chicken breast slathered in a beige sauce tasting vaguely of chilli and lemongrass.
Here at Hawker, any fears of that were immediately dispelled just by looking at the three nicely-loaded skewers. They were covered in a combination of dark sauce, crushed peanuts, scallion slices and powdered chilli, a riot of colour.
And the flavour! It was electrifying: tart, spicy, vibrant. And, of course, the chicken was perfectly cooked. A word to the wise. If you order this to share, there may be an unseemly struggle over the third skewer. Order two portions. You know you want to.
At this point we were thoroughly well fed but the chef kindly sent out a new dish, not yet on the menu when we ate there: deep-fried soft shell crab, that you eat whole, crunchy outside and deeply crabby and tender within. This had been cooked with whole dried chillis – not to be eaten! – and served with what I think was a zingy mayonnaise pepped up with yuzu. Superb.
The last occasions when I had this dish at this standard were at the China Sichuan in Sandyford and, interestingly, in Sydney.
Be warned. Hawker, not surprisingly, gets very busy. It’s not just the splendid food that’s the draw; there’s also a brilliant little selection of wines, many of them by the glass, and all cleverly chosen to work in this food context.
Dublin is blessed to have so many excellent restaurants these days, and at all levels. It’s truly wonderful to be able to eat so well and so cheaply as we can at Hawker. As it gets colder and the weather wetter, I can see lots of people adding a few extra layers so as to be able to enjoy the menu of largely Hong Kong style street food in the right context: on the street where you can watch the world go by as you tuck in.