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Top Hong Kong food blogger gives us a peek into his pantry

K.C. Koo, of gourmetkc.com, loves to explore new tastes on his travels – especially to Japan – but at home he prefers humble Chinese food

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K.C. Koo in the kitchen. Pictures: Nora Tam
Tiffany Chan

Known to his followers as a gourmet extraordinaire, K.C. Koo is an inexhaustible well of energy. He published his first restaurant review on openrice.com in 2000 and has since become one of Hong Kong’s most prolific food critics.

In 2010, at the age of 40, he left the world of finance, where he had worked for 18 years, and dedicated his life to food, or, specifically, to preserving and promoting Hong Kong’s fading culinary traditions, contributing to publications such as Weekend Weekly, Sing Pao and Time Out Hong Kong.

Koo also makes and sells his own laap cheong (Chinese sausage), XO sauce and shrimp roe noodles, hosts cook­ing work­shops at his studio and serves as a food importer (if you need Miyazaki radish and don’t want to pay the mark-up at a Japanese supermarket, Koo’s your guy), and all while managing a Facebook page and a blog. He orga­nises dinner gatherings at local restaurants every week too, hosting nearly 1,000 people each month. And he recently started organi­sing food tours abroad, mostly in Fukuoka and Miyazaki, in Japan.
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Koo with a batch of his Chinese sausages.
Koo with a batch of his Chinese sausages.
While he’s adamant he’s not a big shopper, he likes to explore supermarkets on his frequent trips to Japan.

“The only shopping I do is at the super­market. I don’t have a habit of buying souvenirs, but I will buy such things as kombu, Japanese soy sauce and local rice to try,” he says. “I also enjoy trying strange fruits. I was in Sanya a while ago and came across an eggfruit [canistel, an ovoid lemon-yellow fruit with a curved apex that’s native to Central America] – the flesh resembles a [hard-boiled] egg yolk. It’s very rich and creamy in texture and very sweet.”

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