The Pekinese cuisine is best known for Peking duck, served as a suitable entrée for a meal that begins with assorted cold meats and proceeds through chicken and walnuts to the celebrated bird. The duck is basted with salad oil and roasted until brown, then the skin is dipped in soya paste with scallions and wrapped in thin pancakes to be eaten as a kind of sandwich; the meat is dipped and eaten in a similar manner and the bones of the duck are made into a soup with cabbage and mushrooms. Toffee apples and caramelized bananas (sugared and deep-fried, then immersed in cold water) top off the feast. Two of the popular Pekinese restaurants are the Peking, 1 Great George Street, Causeway Bay; and the Princess Garden, Kimberley Road, Kowloon. Hard to classify but too good to miss is the Mongolian steamboat, a cooking utensil used for Northern and Cantonese dishes. Hot coals are placed in the bottom of the vessel from which the heat rises through a chimney at the center. Water or soup stock boils in a little open-top tank that encircles the chimney. In the Cantonese style, tiny baskets of sea food, meat and vegetables are hung into the boiling water until they are done, then the contents are fished out with chopsticks. In the Northern Chinese variation, a soup stock is put in the reservoir with very thin slices of meat and sea food being dipped in until they are cooked, which takes only a few seconds. Both styles use various sauces and condiments to flavor the food after it is cooked and drawn out with chopsticks. The steamboat sits in the center of the table, puffing energetically, and every diner has a fine time dipping and fishing for his food. The Peking Restaurant at Causeway Bay and the Wong Heung Min, at 191-193 Gloucester Road along the Wanchai waterfront, are two steamboat anchorages of note. The various styles of Chinese cooking do not differ so radically that the same restaurant cannot prepare food in two or more regional ways. Many restaurants do so and quite capably. Americans sometimes choke at the thought of bird’s nest soup, which is made from the saliva that swallows use to build their nests. The saliva is separated from the straw and feathers by boiling and evaporation, and the dried saliva extract is added to a stock of chicken broth, combined with sliced ham and minced chicken. The end-product, served in most Chinese restaurants, is a prince among fine soups. If one wants to prowl around a bit, he can locate a restaurant or two that serves snake meat or civet cat. The Chinese have a theory that they can make anything taste good with the right amount of cooking and a judicious use of sauces, spices and condiments. What is more, they usually prove to be correct. But a taste for snake meat is like the appreciation of Cantonese opera; it takes years of conditioning.