As a cosmopolitan city, Hong Kong is known as the "World's Food Fair." Gastronomy is Hong Kong is so rich and varied that dining out is one of the most popular things to do as a tourist. From street markets to world-class restaurants, Hong Kong offers a wide variety of choices when it comes to dining out.

East meets west in Hong Kong's dining scene, and many restaurants in the city have been influenced by both worlds. This one city offers all kinds of authentic cuisine from Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, India, Europe and America. With such a varied dining offer, Hong Kong has truly become a gourmet eating paradise.

Some of the best dishes you can find in Hong Kong are as follows:

Given that most of the residents of Hong Kong are Chinese, either Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka or Shanghainese, there is predominance of typical dishes. Many enjoy a traditional breakfast that includes congee (ride porridge) and yau cha kwai (oil friend bread sticks). However, western breakfasts that include bread, sausage, pancakes and eggs are fast becoming more popular.

For mid-day and evening meals, most people serve Chinese food with rice in their homes. Some of the most common ingredients used in Cantonese cuisines include shiitake mushrooms, Chinese cabbage, salted duck eggs, kai-lan, red beans, dried shrimp, hoisin sauce, dried scallops, jujube and lotus seeds.

Some of the famous dishes in Hong Kong include:

Sweet and Sour Pork is probably the most famous Hong Kong food, which has made its way into Chinese take away menus around the world.

Wontons, added to a clear soup or deep-fried, are also common in the region. The most famous are called Sichuan-style wontons, a celebrated snack in Chengdu. They are famous for their thin skin and rich meat filling as well as their soup, made of chicken, duck and pork simmered for a long time. The Hong Kong version varies from others in that it is cooked without peppers but with pieces of salted fish instead. It's extremely popular and much ordered in restaurants or daj paj dong (traditional licensed food stalls) together with rice.

Another traditional specialty of Cantonese cuisine is Roast Goose. The dish consists of a whole goose roasted with secret ingredients, cut into small pieces, each piece with skin, meat and soft bone, and eaten with plum sauce. This dish has become a tourist attraction in itself in the New Territories.

Another dish that is beloved by Hong Kong people is Wind Sand Chicken. It consists of a whole chicken being flavored and put into the oven for about 20 minutes until the chicken's skin turns brown. This dish stands out from the other in that garlic pieces are added and it looks like wind-blown sand. The chicken is roasted and crispy in the outside, whereas the inside is smooth and tender.

Another famous dish is Shrimp and Chicken Balls, Chinese for "dragon and phoenix balls." Dragon refers to the shrimps and phoenix refers to the chicken. But there's more to the name that meets the eye. Indeed, it is related to Chinese royalty. It refers to the emperor (dragon) and the queen (phoenix), and is usually served in Chinese wedding ceremonies. Preparation is as follows: first, shrimp and chicken meat are chopped finely and kneaded into balls, then they are deep fried with bread crumbs. The balls are like the Wind Sand Chicken in that they are crispy and tender.

The complex and mysterious art of Cantonese opera has conquered the hearts and minds of many Hong Kong's youngsters, even when they don't understand it. The future of this traditional cryptic art is secured in the younger generation.

The person behind the initiative to encourage children to listen to Cantonese is Stella Ma Man Har, director of Cha Duk Chang. Her main aim is to use Cantonese opera as a tool to teach children Chinese music and dance. This noble goal also helps keep Cantonese opera alive.

Since 2002, Cha Duk Chang teaches children in groups ranging from four to 12 years old. Instead of mimicking traditional old stories, which make little sense to the average adult with no background in Chinese history, she writes Cantonese operas that children can understand. "Of course, traditional Cantonese opera doesn't mean that it's not good," she says, "but it might not be suitable for their age." Although Ma changes the wordings, she keeps the original rhythm and songs.

Through this art, she aims at improving children's endurance, perseverance and ability to express themselves. Through Cantonese opera, children will develop holistically.

This task has not been easy. She thinks the government needs to get behind her efforts to keep Cantonese opera alive. "They've given money out, but they haven't taken another step."

In the past few years, the Cantonese Opera Development Fund has helped incorporate Cantonese opera into the new secondary education curriculum. Ma argues, however, that a suitable Cantonese opera curriculum for primary school is still missing. Many teachers only teach difficult Cantonese opera songs to children who don't understand the true significance behind the stories.

"What I fear is the counter-effect of teaching overly difficult pieces which children can't relate to or interpret," says Ma.

After some interviews, it became apparent that Ma's students took Cantonese opera out of interest after watching some of Cha Duk Chang's performances at school. The once-a-week lessons are three and a half hours long, which is quite long for four year olds.

Cantonese opera is not reserved for locals. Twelve-year-old Jessica Hunger, half British half Chinese, has been learning Cantonese opera for over six years.

Jessica recalls that it wasn't love at first sight with Cantonese opera and she didn't like it before as "everyone spoke Chinese and I wasn't very good at it." However, her passion grew and she started learning it with her current teacher Leung Mui Fong after three years she became acquainted with this form of art.

Her teacher Leung, who has been teaching Cantonese opera for over 30 years, says the difference between teaching children and adults is that children cannot understand the scripts easily, hence their movements may be more robotic and lack of emotion.

"In teaching kids, I have to bring up my childhood memories in order to better explain the meanings to them," Leung says.

Without this input, Leung believes there is a possibility the art for could be lost. "In my age, my parents were watching a lot of performances but as many well-known veteran performers are dying, less and less performances are available."

She also agrees that there isn't enough being done to promote Cantonese opera. "It's a community activity which requires a larger exposure," she says.

When you enter the hall at one of Modern Education's Hong Kong centers, you have the feeling you are at a movie theatre lobby. The difference, however, is that the idols on the portraits lining the walls aren't movie stars but exam tutors.

It might sound strange, but exam tutors are depicted as celebrities in Hong Kong. This is because the exam-preparation business has become as fiercely competitive in Hong Kong as school itself. Cramming centers are turning their employees into celebrities, plastering their names and faces on the city's buses, metro stations and billboards.

"Some tutoring has existed since the existence of schooling," said Mark Bray, a professor of comparative education at the University of Hong Kong. "But what's interesting is that in Hong Kong, the star tutors have found a formula to work pretty much in an industrialized way, with mass production."

High school students in the territory used to take two major standardized tests. But in 2009 the Education Bureau cut that down to one, a move that was supposed to reduce student anxiety and promote "whole-person development and lifelong learning capabilities."

That is not how things have worked out, anyway. On the contrary as students' futures now depend on that one big test, which has sparked the demand for preparation and tutoring.

Now there are about 2,600 registered private schools offering "nonformal curriculums" - the category that includes tutoring centers - in Hong Kong, a number that amounts to more than twice the number of primary and secondary schools in the territory.

According to Minnie Wong, a Modern Education spokesman, the company has more than 50 centers on its own, and an advertising budget of more than $1 million.

The star system can be very lucrative. Antonia Cheng, a veteran tutor for Modern Education who has estimated that she had taught more than 100,000 students within the last decade, said some of the company's most popular tutors earn millions of dollars yearly.

She also said that the portraits of her that appear on city buses are so heavily retouched that she does not feel like a celebrity outside of class.

You might find Hong Kongers singing in English, but it is not common to see a Western artist singing in Chinese. Celine Dion may be one of the few Westerners that have tried. Her performance during Chinese New Year attracted 700 million people fascinated by the idea of watching the Canadian diva singing a famous Chinese folk song in Mandarin on China's state-run CCTV.

While Dion's appearance may have been a one-off event, there's a Western singer in Hong Kong named

Corinna Chamberlain

- aka Chan Ming Yan - who is fully committed to having a career in one of the city's most famous exports, Cantopop (Cantonese popular music.)

But it is not only her looks what differentiates her from other Cantopop artists. The opening line of her song "Yi Jung" is like no other Cantopop. She sings that she feels like an "Alien from Mars" who has landed on Earth.

"In a body with this skin color," she continues, "I'm not quite like them. In fact, what kind of race am I?"

"Yi Jung" translates as "Different Breed" and Chamberlain herself is a different breed of Cantopop herself.

Born to parents from Australia and New Zealand, she is white, blue-eyed, and has long, curly blonde hair. Unlike most Westerners in Hong Kong, she grew up in a remote part of the region, far from any expat enclave. She attended local schools and speaks fluent Cantonese.

Growing up immersed in local culture caused something of an identity crises for Chan. In high school, she had many friends but necessarily close friends.

"When it comes, like, especially to the girls in Hong Kong, to have your best, best friend, it's always somebody who is the same as them," Chan says. "Somebody who likes Hello Kitty, somebody who likes Snoopy as much as them."

A best friend who'll go everywhere with you — everywhere.

"It's like, you know, ‘Oh, I need to go to the toilet, come with me, let's go to the toilet together,' " she says.

Since Chan was different from all of her friends at school, she didn't have a best friend.

"I started to really feel like 'where do I belong, who am I?' And I was like, 'maybe I'm not one of these people.' So I thought 'well, maybe I better just be a Westerner like the rest of the Westerners' or something."

The problem was she didn't feel identified with Western people who are seen as in Hong Kong as direct, loud and independent. Instead, she felt Chinese - non-confrontational, humble, happy in a group.

"If you're in their circle of buddies, then you're there for life. It's really on the inside, the way of communicating that we get used to," Chan says.

Since she was born to missionaries, Chan learned to sing in church and she listened to Christian singers like Australia's Rebecca St James. She then went on to study musical theater at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Her interest in Cantopop, however, didn't spark until later in life. She realized that if she was going to have a career here, she'd have to sing local pop music that wasn't like the Western music she grew up listening to.

"I've noticed that Western pop is a lot more in-your-face attitude, really be tough, strong diva. But [in] Hong Kong, a lot of it's very sweet," she says.

In fact, her melodies are so sweet, they allow Hong Kongers escape from the region's hustle and bustle. However, the language itself poses a great challenge as it is a tonal language. "If it goes up, it's different. So it's a lot more complicated, a lot more restricted," she says.

Chan's big break came took place on a popular TV show called "Inbound Troubles." She took the show by storm with her blonde hair and flawless Cantonese. Fortunately, she had just recorded "Yi Jung" and the timing couldn't have been better. Following that success, she appeared on an American Idol-like show, where she placed third in the singing competition, boosting her visibility even more.

In her next single, "Ngoh dik gwai suk," Chan stays true to her trademark. Although she again addresses her outsider status, she keeps the storyline old school: she wants to find a husband who will take care for her. And it is Chan's deep understanding and respect of Chinese culture what have earned her the respect of locals.

"Now, when I go out on the street, everybody's my neighbor. ‘Oh, Chan Ming Yan!' You know, like ‘How's your mom?' " she says.

That familiarity has allowed everyone to see beyond her skin color which is just what she has been looking for. She doesn't have to feel like an outsider anymore.

"I know it's really not easy for a Westerner to have that kind of acceptance in Hong Kong," Chan says. "Westerners are accepted as Westerners, but as one of your own? That's something really touching for me."