Dinner and a show

It was late afternoon in the small neighbourhood of Cheung Sha Wan in Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po district, and a performance was about to commence. The star: Alan Lee, owner of Kwan Kee Bamboo Noodles. A crowd gathered outside the noodle shop, watching through the window in fascination as Lee prepared to knead the dough for his jook sing noodles, also known as bamboo noodles.

In the small kitchen at the front of his shop, dough in place, Lee secured a large bamboo pole to a loop on his workbench. Then he sat on the other end of the pole, bouncing up and down, like on a seesaw.

The trick, he said, is to leverage your weight to knead the dough until it’s perfectly pressed into a thin bed. This is what gives the noodles their ‘elastic-band bounce’.