Kowloon City

Nobody had told me about the Thai food before I arrived, which made Kowloon City one of the better surprises I’ve had wandering a neighbourhood with no real plan. I’d gone to see what remains of the Walled City park nearby, but Nam Kok Road pulled me sideways before I got there — a run of shopfronts selling Thai groceries, imported snacks, fresh galangal and kaffir lime leaves in quantities that suggested a serious local demand rather than a tourist gimmick. The community here traces back to Thai and Chiu Chow migrants who settled decades ago, some connected to the old Kai Tak airport’s ground staff, and the food scene that grew out of it has become genuinely one of the best outside Thailand itself.

We ate at a small restaurant with handwritten Thai and Chinese menus and no English at all, ordering by pointing at other tables’ plates, which is how Lia and I ended up with a som tam that had more raw chili in it than either of us was prepared for, a plate of grilled pork neck with a dipping sauce I’m still thinking about, and a bowl of tom yum that cleared every sinus I own. The prices were Kowloon City prices, not tourist prices — the whole meal for two came to less than a single main course would have cost in Tsim Sha Tsui, twenty minutes away by taxi.

The neighbourhood’s food culture doesn’t stop at Thai. Chiu Chow beef hotpot restaurants line the surrounding blocks, serving thin-sliced beef swirled through boiling broth at the table, a specialty of the Chiu Chow community that settled here alongside the Thai population. There are also excellent, unpretentious dim sum spots that draw a mostly local crowd rather than tour groups, and a scattering of bakeries selling Thai-style egg tarts and pandan cakes that have nothing to do with the more famous Portuguese egg tarts elsewhere in the city.

Kowloon City itself has a low-rise, unhurried feel that’s rare this close to the old airport flight path — buildings here were kept deliberately short for decades because of the Kai Tak approach, and the neighbourhood never fully caught up to the tower-block density of the rest of the city even after the airport moved. That accident of aviation history left it with a scale that feels almost village-like, food carts and grocers spilling onto streets with actual daylight reaching the pavement, which after a week of Hong Kong’s canyon streets felt like a small mercy.

When to go: Any evening for the Thai and Chiu Chow restaurants at full service. Weekday lunchtimes are quieter and a good time to browse the grocery shops without the dinner rush crowding the narrow aisles.