Kejia (Hakka) Cuisine @ Zhongxin Kejiawang 中信客家王

Kejia (Hakka) food is very easy to find in Shenzhen and wherever you find one of these restaurants, you will find reasonably priced food that is value for money and a big crowd, as Hakka food is very popular. Zhongxin Kejiawang Hakka restaurant is not easy to find as the front of the restaurant is hidden from view of the main road by trees. However, at any given meal time, there is a decent crowd at the restaurant. Naturally, following the herd instinct, I followed the crowd in.

The menu is pretty much standard Hakka fare and in any Hakka restaurant, my acid test items are the chicken stew (清炖鸡), pork soup (猪肉汤), braised bean curd (让豆腐) and the vegetables cooked in lard (猪油炒菜). I ordered everything except the chicken.

The soup was tasty and on a scale of one to ten, I would give it a seven. Not the best I have had but good enough to be above average. This is not to say that the soup was poor. It is quite good.






Braised bean curd (让豆腐) is a classic Hakka dish. The bean curd is hand made and freshly made daily. As a result, the taste is unforgettable. The smoothness and the flavour of beans rather than flour in the supermarket variety combined with the bits of minced meat topping and the preserved beans used to flavour the dish. Excellent. And polished cleanly within minutes.



The pig trotters (糖醋猪手) cooked in sugar and vinegar tasted excellent. However, I found the pig trotters to be a bit chewy. It seems that the chef could have cooked the trotters a longer so that the skin and the meat would fall off the moment you bite into it.



The choy sum vegetables cooked in lard was excellent. Cholesterol aside, I maintain that lard just makes the vegetables taste so much better. And even the lard is delicious.



The rice is not cooked in a rice cooker like most other restaurants. Instead, it is individually cooked in earthen bowls and steamed in a large cooker. It seems that the earthen bowls impart a unique fragrance to the steamed rice and somehow enhances the flavour of the rice, making it taste even more fragrant than Thai fragrant rice.



This restaurant serves authentic and delicious Hakka food. It is a bit hard to get to, but the trip will be well worth it.

The address:
Zhongxin Kejiawang Jinhai Road next to the Houhai Wholesale Market, Nanshan, Shenzhen 中信客家王 深圳南山近海路后海批发市场旁
Directions via my Shenzhen Food Map