One of the city’s best chefs recently described the BBQ chicken bones at Chinatown veteran Mr Hong’s as being ‘the best £2 you can spend on food in Manchester’. That’s a bold claim. Perhaps even a challenge.
“Oh, and make sure you get the blue menu,” the chef added, conspiratorially. “They might fob you off with the red one.” And indeed, the moment me and my very nearly 15-year-old lad wander up the stairs, we’re promptly handed the red menus, like a pair of novices.
“Erm, could we have the blue ones?” They’re swapped over without a batted eyelid, but already, we feel like we’re in the inner circle. The club. We mean business.
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With the Lunar New Year approaching and Chinatown about to be festooned in lanterns and the streets filled with parading dragons, it felt like absolutely the right time to rediscover the wild menu at this Faulkner Street institution.
Where else in town can you get bullfrog in various forms, from stewed to roasted, not to mention rabbit legs rubbed with spice, skewered and barbecued over coals. I can’t think of a single other spot offering such breadth of the animal kingdom on its menu.
That’s not to say it’s all nose-to-tail eating, so those feeling a bit snout-averse need not fear. For every pork tripe, cow heart or pig’s ear, there is a simply steamed piece of bass with ginger, or prawns fried with garlic and dried chillies.
The menu here is completely fascinating, but It’s the skewers we’re here for, though, and if you play your cards right, you could technically eat at Mr Hong’s for under a fiver, thanks to the blue menu’s marvellous back page, which is skewer valhalla.
We order a truckload. The roast chicken bones, the roast lamb, the roast rabbit, a few of each, the rabbit coming in as the most expensive at £3.80, the least, just £1.20. There’s also skewered aubergine, potato, trotters, chicken wings, lotus root, sausage, beef and gizzards, all impaled and caked - and I mean caked - in spices and aromatics before being scorched on the grill.
The nice lady on the table next to us spies the fact that we’re looking over at what she’s got, and probably both have our mouths hanging open. She smiles, and tells us It’s the intriguing, if a bit vague-sounding Northeast Crispy Meat (sour and sweet), adding, crucially, that it is ‘exactly how it is in China’.
It gets ordered too - how could it not? - along with the equally intriguing ‘hot and numbing braised pork’ (both £13.80). It’s worth noting at this point that while the skewers might be cheap as chips (cheaper in some cases), the main course prices at Mr Hong’s might feel a bit expensive, most of them in the teens.
Be assured that most of them will easily feed two greedily, and three normally, perhaps even four, so go in as large a group as you can muster to get the best experience. Take neighbours. Drag the postman.
The chicken bones arrive first. They are precisely what they say they are, half an entire chicken carcass, stripped of its legs, thighs, fillets, the lot, but covered in spices and then roasted on the barbecue. They’re huge and a little on the wrong side of anatomical.
Me and the lad share a suspicious look. The late great Umizushi, which nestled itself under the arches of Victoria Station, but which sadly closed pre-pandemic, used to do a vaguely similar thing, but with a huge fish.
Billed as salmon or hake ‘collar’, it looked like an offcut. A mistake on the menu maybe. But once you started digging away, you’d find smoky jewels tucked in the nooks and crannies. These chicken bones are just the same.
Once you start digging around, what’s still clinging on there is charred and crunchy and savoury and delicious, and soon enough, there’s chicken all over your face, hands, and in all likelihood, hair and clothing. The lad sensibly removes his sweatshirt once this becomes apparent.
If you’re lucky, you might find a barbecued chicken oyster, the magical piece of poultry hidden in a cavity near the thigh. The French call them ‘sot-l'y-laisse’, loosely meaning ‘only the fool leaves it’. They’re right, on this occasion.
The rabbit comes next, and it's picked up and devoured. Then the lamb, which is rubbed with insane amounts of cumin and comes with cubes of crisped fat between the chunks of meat. We’re pretty much in punch drunk, slightly delirious meat heaven, by this stage.
Or so we think. The numbing pork arrives, with so many dried chillies scattered on the top that it looks like it must be inedible. It’s the very opposite. The lad crunches into a Szechuan peppercorn - the dish is completely laced with them - and his eyes widen. “Mmmyeah, it builds up,” he says of the gathering heat.
Then the Northeast Crispy Meat comes sliding onto the table, in a slick of sweet and sour sauce - the proper stuff, orange like Irn Bru. Along with the sweet and sour crispy fish at Peace Garden, over by the University, this is the best sweet and sour dish I’ve ever tasted. It’s like the best crispy chilli beef you could possibly imagine.
After a bit more than an hour, we roll out, almost literally. I remember going to Chinatown with my parents when I was his age, and younger, and we’ve been regulars at places like Happy Seasons and Mei Dim, next door to Mr Hong’s, since the lad was far less lanky and giant-footed than he is now.
This two block square of the city seemed impossibly exotic to me then, like being able to visit another country, with the crates of huge radishes stacked up on the pavements outside the supermarkets, catching glimpses of murky basements with huge round tables and the steamed up windows with contorted ducks and sides of greasy belly pork hanging in them.
It’s tough to get enthusiasm out of teenagers sometimes. They’ve got a lot of other stuff going on in their heads. But that Saturday, we connected over a shared love of exploring a thrilling menu. It was a rare 10/10. A lunch I’ll remember for a long time. I hope he does too, and maybe brings his own teenager here one day.
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