Two outlying hotels worth noting are the Carlton and the Shatin Heights, both in the New Territories but not far from Kowloon. The Luk Kwok in Wanchai, once the locale for Richard Mason’s _The World of Suzie Wong_, prospered so handsomely from the publicity that it is now a quiet, middle-class hotel.
Confirmed hotel reservations, arranged well in advance of your arrival, are advisable for all tourists who are not thoroughly familiar with Hong Kong. Certainly it would be unwise to arrive without them and be forced to rely on sheer luck or the noisy touts who besiege incoming passengers at Kai Tak. The touts are kept behind a fence nowadays, but if the unsuspecting visitor lets them steer him to a hotel, their kick-back will be added to the bill. Experienced visitors sometimes check into a modestly priced hotel for the night and spend the next day bargaining for the lowest rates at one of the better places which, when business is slow, regularly knock 30 percent off the stated charges. For newcomers, this is seldom done.
Some European and American visitors cannot be persuaded to try Chinese food. Either they think it will make them ill, which it certainly will not, or they believe they’ll look silly fumbling with chopsticks. It must be conceded that inexperienced users of chopsticks usually look rather foolish, but practically every Chinese restaurant will provide a knife and fork if asked for them.
No difficulty should arise from a determination to stick to one’s usual diet. Every first-class hotel serves an international cuisine. Prices are tailored to the room rents; high at the Peninsula, cheap at the Y.M.C.A. next door to it. In general, the meals are as good as those at American hotels and they cost considerably less. Steaks are tougher than Choice U. S. beef, and occasionally one resembles a small portion of a welcome mat. Apart from the hotels, there are about a dozen good European restaurants.
In Mandarin Chinese, there is a saying that “food is the heaven of the ordinary people,” and the Chinese in Hong Kong, like their countrymen all over the world, do their remarkable best to impart a foretaste of heaven to their cooking. Their food reaches the table in edible form, and does not have to be slashed and hacked before the guest is ready to eat it. Chopsticks are all that is needed to lift the food to the mouth. (Foreigners take weeks to get over the shock of seeing a three-year-old Chinese child manipulating chopsticks; it seems so infernally clever.)