Jon Siegel / ジョン 米岡

On our last evening in Hong Kong, we decided to hit a fancy Beijing-style restaurant for some of the best Roast Duck outside of Beijing. Led to our table and surrounded by wealthy foreigners, this had to be THE place for top notch food and service. Every dish that followed our order was beautiful, crispy, succulent, perfect. Although I’m still not a big jellyfish fan but I’m working on it. About halfway through our meal, everything in the room came to a sudden and abrupt halt by a loud “WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!”. We swung around to catch what looked like a brown basketball meeting an explosive demise by a man swinging a golden mallet. The thing burst open, but we were too far to catch a glimpse of what was inside.

We turned back around and continued with our meal, still unsure of what exactly the now-deflated brown basketball thing was. We asked the waiter and I honestly don’t remember what he said, but I think it was something like a thousand year old chicken that had a hard shell of clay around it or something. Just as he finished explaining, a tall man stood up and was handed a mallet by another waiter. There it was, just feet from our table, another giant brown dinosaur egg. The man politely asked the waiter, “Uh, just how hard can I hit this thing?” His friends shouted back at him to just whack the heck out of it. He obliged and started slamming that thing to hell. It blew open but we still couldn’t see from our table just what was inside. If our meal was any indication, it’s probably delicious whatever it was.