Fuk Kee Congee

This is a family favourite! You are not going to find any comfortable seating here. Instead, the floor is grimy, you might share a table with others, and you might want to compulsively wipe the utensils before you eat with it.
However, this is old school casual Hong Kong eating at its best. My family’s favourites include the fried glutinous rice (生炒糯米飯), beef chow fun (乾炒牛河), claypots, and the daily chinese soup. Thinking about the food makes my mouth water, and we often order more than we can eat so we can pack up the rest to go for the next day.
If you don’t speak any sort of Chinese though, it might be hard to get anything here. Tag along with a local, and just eat everything they present. Trust me.

In the last few years 富記粥品 (Fu Kee Congee) has been on the radars of many local food fanatics last few years, even though FK has been around since 1948! Set your GPS if you are not familiar with the Mong Kok area. I know I get lost when wandering around this part of town!
For some reason, Fu Kee is the favorite of many bachelors of all ages… especially those dudes with bad habits and character. Which the locals refer to as 麻甩佬 (mah lut lo). 麻甩 sounds like malaise, or malade as they say in French (apparently a word used by Belgian missionaries when treating sick patients in Guangzhou at the time). But somehow now such dudes of ill repute have a few things in common… women, sex, many other random vices (which most of us have anyway to some degree), and a love for comfort food high in calories, fat, cholesterol, and insane flavor up the yin yang, that pairs well with an ice cold beer. Then again, one doesn’t have to be of ill repute to have such tastes and tendencies. Despite most customers are elderly male locals, there have been spottings of quite a number of female customers who have found their way in here, ill repute or not :-)
It is a pretty no nonsense operation. Go in, find an empty stool (or availability on booth) and sit down. It’s Hong Kong where real estate is king, and you are not. So be prepared to share your tastes of ill repute with random strangers (just not your plate of food).
For beverages, it’s either soda (Coke in a can, good for combating MSG) or beer.
None of that frou frou iced tea with Stevia, Cosmopolitans, sparkling or still H2O, iced coffee or milk tea in this classic joint.
Oh yeah, no English on the menu. Bring a local if you can, or point.
Some loyal customers swear by the congee here, but it appears to be rather subjective. Should you get congee, perhaps the standard pork organs/​innards congee, or roast goose congee. Roast duck should be pretty good here as well.
Roast goose is rumored to be done the traditional way with with a marinade/​rub made from fermented bean paste, scallions, garlic, Chinese rose wine etc, and the goose is let to hung dry for half a day before roasting. Great with beer. Oh might as well get 花生、鳳爪炒心椗 (peanuts, marinated chicken feet, and chicken hearts) as an appetizer.
Others prefer a more down to earth boiled soup that works for them… something like mustard greens with pork slices with rice in soup (soggy rice). No nonsense and cheap. Same with 魚雲時菜湯 (fish head and vegetable soup). Or ginger scallion pork liver and kidney stir fry.
But if you have a lot of bad character in your bones with vice running through your blood… whether you are a playa, gambla, thug, thug wannabe, passive agressive, a loner, or have an amazing social circle on the internet yet feel empty inside, then perhaps one of their finest roasties offerings might fit the bill.
BBQ pork, cha siu. But not your usual cut… you have to ask specifically for the fatty part, like TORO. 肥叉. It is pretty much 80% fat. But to roast it properly and not burn the hell out of it, requires a lot of skill and patience. It looks so fatty but when you eat it, it is one of the best things ever. My friend and I pretty much cleared up this plate, and knew our quota was maxed out for the year. In retrospect, this should have been paired with an ice cold beer! Some of their small dish type appetizers are meant to be paired with beer as well.
Their 肉絲炒麵 pan fried noodle with pork strips, yellow chives, bean sprouts is a very classic approach. The look and feel is fit for photography, in addition to having a nice layer of like a crispy «noodle cake». There is no excess cornstarch goop sauce like at many dim sum restaurants in California. A little vinegar would escalate this, but ideally some good ol’ YKY chili sauce would send this to the moon.
The Japanese salaryman may have izakaya to unwind himself or to get bone ass drunk before he goes home.
The Hong Kong middle aged man with no emotional attachments (or a playa to the end)? Depends. A place like this would be an ideal choice… and for him, easier to romance himself with salty roasted fatty protein and animal parts, than it is to spend a fortune chasing after women. The perfect locale for a date with thyself. What more can you ask for?