Kids are delicious. Though some like eating them curried or stewed, you like them barbecued as they do in Matamoros, Mexico. Held up vertically by metal rods along raised beds of mesquite charcoal luridly aglow, they look like runway models for Hell’s Spring Kids Collection. Their flesh is tender, luscious, smoky, charred, a cross between milk-fed veal and lamb. It’s ideal tucked into fresh tortillas smack off the grill squeezed with lime.
As baby goat is to Mexico, baby pig is to China. Commonly it’s called suckling pig. A lawyer and an English teacher (both word mavens) begat you, and you must insist the word is “sucking” not “suckling.” The mother suckles, the baby sucks. No less a source than the Oxford Companion to Food confirms this. A sucking pig is nourished only on mother’s milk up until its earthly departure. (Ingesting one blade of grass would sully its perfection.) Thankfully, a few old-school HK barbecue nooks get this right, listing “sucking pig” on their menus.
You’ve bbq’d large pigs before, the size of Mini Coopers, and liked the meat and particularly the skin very much. But you’ve held off on a wee tyke until now when you can order him entire which involves rounding up carnivorous pals, no easy thing with so many living off chia seeds these days. So you find yourself at Go Go Goose, Repulse Bay, to eat sucking pig (it must be special-ordered, just ask) with five fellow fans of Piglet. Do you feel guilty you’re about to eat him? Not one bit. After all, he eats Heffalump. Heffalump eats Owl. It’s the food chain.
The restaurant is ship-shape, brightly lit, a television plays. They’re rightly house proud. Within is a glass wheelhouse where the chefs toil like surgeons. Notice how, unlike other bbq cockpits which are greasy, this one is scrupulously clean. Off-hour heart-valve replacements could well be done here.
Service is warm and attentive, sweet even, which frankly you didn’t expect given the impersonal service you’ve experienced at many tonier chow halls. You get to meet the chefs, distinguished men, one with 55 years sucking pig experience, the other 15. You relax knowing they have the wheel.
The size of a pug, he arrives, skin crisped brown with a sheen of molten fat. He stares at you reprovingly just as you would him tables turned.
Inoculated against PETA-think, you’re charmed. They retrieve him in order to cut him into pieces, then return him handsomely sectioned for consumption.
They bring hot, blistered pancakes in which to wrap him
along with batons of cuke, scallion, and hoisin.
You drink good IPA and Tsing Tao from the 7 Eleven next door, unsurpassably perfect.
The sucking pig is supernova scrumptious, nothing less. A few errant bones aside, the meat is boneless, moist, mild, slightly salty, piggy. The skin is as crisp as an artisanal potato chip (with audible crunch when you bite down that makes you shudder with pleasure), lightly saline, intensely porcine. The pancake is hot, the vegs cold, the hoisin sweet, each bite a grand, complex chord of all these flavors and textures at once. It’s quite similar to Peking Duck, but strapped with extra booster rockets. There is much grunting and jostling as you and your companions jockey for your share. All of you agree you adore it!
Along with this you order excellent char siu. You would have liked more char but that’s what you always say. It’s devoid of cellulite, common elsewhere.
Fried rice was good, just shy of excellent.
White rice was a bit overcooked. You wish more scallion for the pig had been provided though, frankly, if you’d asked surely they’d have brought it. Choy sum sauteed with garlic was cooked just right.
The meal, including beer and a few cokes, for six trenchermen and a six-year-old with the appetite of a Tyrannosaurus, cost about HK$1500, cheap. The sucking pig by itself was HK$888.
This is a place to come with family, pals, and foodie dates, more folks more fun. As you clash chopsticks, you’ll connect and bond, citizens of the Sucking Pig Society. At Go Go Goose.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 4.5
Ambiance: 3 (this is on a different continuum from a luxe resto, but you like it here.)
Service: 3.5 (ditto for the service)
Overall Greatness: 4.5
Go Go Goose
There are many branches.
You ate at: Shop A, G/F, 33 Beach Road, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong
+852 2871 3388