Shrimp paste pizza, mochi mania: what to eat and where in Tai O, Hong Kong fishing village

We explore Tai O on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, where locally made shrimp paste features in some surprising dishes and mochi are everywhere

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Cheng Kai-keung and his mother at Cheng Cheung Hing Shrimp Paste in Tai O, one of two surviving shrimp paste producers in the former fishing village on Lantau. Photo: Kylie Knott

Published: 7:15am, 4 Jul 2024Updated: 11:11am, 4 Jul 2024

Blocks of shrimp paste – an ingredient in Cantonese pork, seafood and vegetable stir-fries – are laid out along a wooden counter next to jars of shrimp sauce and other condiments at Cheng Cheung Hing Shrimp Sauce Factory, in Tai O, a village at the far western end of Hong Kong’s Lantau Island.

“These are krill eggs, [from] a type of tiny shrimp,” says Cheng Kai-keung, the shop’s 70-year-old, fourth-generation owner, holding up a container filled with tiny particles that look like ground pepper.

His mother, the matriarch of the Cheng family, is also there. “Just call me por por [grandmother],” she says, handing over a block of the company’s famous shrimp paste. “It is good for fried rice and stir-fried water spinach,” she adds.

The Chengs, with their strong community ties and livelihoods shaped by the seafood industry, are a typical tight-knit Tai O family.

Tai O village, on the west coast of Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, is famous for its stilt houses (pang uk) and waterways. Photo: Getty Images

While shrimp paste has been a constant source of income since Cheng Kai-keung’s great-grandfather established the business in 1920, the village in which the family business is based has seen dramatic change over the years, surviving typhoons, floods and fires – which in 2013 and 2020 destroyed many of its unique stilt houses (pang uk).

Walking around Tai O today, with the smell of dried seafood hanging heavy in the air, it is clear the village is but a shadow of its past.