Following last year’s post-pandemic return with a bang, the Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival is showcasing over 350 booths, offering quality wine, as well as spirits and cocktails, and all manner of delectables, including street food, from over 35 countries.
Hong Kong, on any given day, is everywhere else in the world, that is, if you are a gourmand or gastronome with a taste for global pleasures. The city is all the world in just 1,108 square kilometers of space in the region.
At Nagamoto, you are on On Lan Street in Central, but you might as well be in Tokyo eating seared scallop with maitake mushroom, caviar, and finger lime.
At Chicha, you are on Peel Street, also in Central, but you might as well be in Lima delighting on marisco jugoso, Peru’s answer to bouillabaisse with sea urchin, scallops, prawns, squid, and black cod.
At Caprice, you are at the Four Seasons on Finance Street in Central yet again, but you might feel you’re in Paris, tucked into a feast of Brittany blue lobster dressed in ruby sauce with beetroot and chocolate.
At Dara, a Kapampangan restaurant, you are in Sheung Wan, but there are kare-kareng baka, replete with bagoong, and sizzling sisig on your table, so you might as well be home.
This weekend, however, you might as well be in Helsinki or Sydney or Beijing or Bordeaux or Rio de Janeiro and in other cities across 35 countries all under the sun or the stars at the Central Harborfront on the Victoria Harbor.
Ongoing there until 11 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 27, is the Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival, a 23-year-long tradition spearheaded by the Hong Kong Tourism Board, although it took a years-long break during the pandemic, moving online when in-person events were banned across the planet. This gastronomic festival is just the activity made for an international hub like Hong Kong.
Hong Kong to me has always been a place to eat, especially since it was my training ground for solo travel and what I would consider my gateway to the world, my first ever step out of the country.
As a solo traveler, I would go with no itinerary, no specific purpose, not even eating, but then, in Hong Kong, for example, all the walking would get you hungry, so cha chaan tengs, cafés, pastry shops, bistros, or restaurants, which you would find lining every street in most districts in the city, to the rescue, providing not only food and drink, but also a place in which to rest your tired feet while still immersed in the experience of traveling, people watching or processing everything in the course of a meal, which in my case could go anywhere between 30 minutes and three hours.
The Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival is just tailor-fit for a place like Hong Kong, a global address, a business and leisure hub in the Far East—packed full of expats, who comprise 10 per cent of city’s 7.5 million population, and tourists, about 21 million in the first half of 2024—and a foodie destination. Before the opening on Wednesday, Oct. 23, the organizers said it was expecting about 150,000 guests, including the 8,000 port-of-callers invited from cruises docking on Victoria Harbor throughout the five-day event.
This year’s edition of the Hong Kong Wine and Dine festival is also extra-special because it is a nod to sustainability, complying strictly with Hong Kong’s aggressive stance against single-use plastic. Guests are encouraged to bring their own wine glasses and, to make it more convenient, provided with souvenir glass sleeves. Otherwise, wine glasses are also available for purchase within the premises. Plastic containers, cutlery, and straws are banned at the festival as well, along with anything Styrofoam.
This year, following last year’s post-pandemic return with a bang, the Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival is showcasing over 350 booths, offering quality wine, as well as spirits and cocktails, from French, Italian, Spanish to Australian, Californian, and Chinese, and cheeses galore, Spanish tapas, Argentinian beef, Korean BBQ, Japanese sushi, and all manner of delectables, including street food, from over 35 countries.
If you are in Hong Kong this weekend, this festival is sure to give you a treat. It’s like the world circus on the palate, especially now that, timed the weekend before Halloween, it’s cosplay too, with some of the booth attendants and guests are dressed as elves, fairies, zombies, or ghouls. Discoverhongkong.com
