What should one expect from a typical Chinese meal in Hong Kong? The cuisine will most likely be Cantonese, a style of cooking that excels in steaming and stir-frying, prides itself on natural flavors brought out by quick cooking over high heat, and relies largely on vegetables, seafood, chicken and pork. Sauces are designed to enhance, never overwhelm, and flavors are likely to be subtle rather than bold and forthright.

Many Chinese restaurants are large, with some serving 500 to 600 people at lunch or dinner. Reservations are always recommended. Most restaurants add a 10 percent service charge to the bill. Tipping is at the diner's discretion, but it is common practice to add 3 to 5 percent.

No. 2: City Chiu Chow Restaurant, East Ocean Centre, 98 Granville Road, Tsim Sha Tsui East, Kowloon, tel: 723-6226.

No. 3: Chili Club, 88 Lockhart Road, Wanchai, tel: 527-2872.

With one eating establishment for every 200 residents, it's clear that Hong Kong residents not only eat to live, but live to eat. There is no limit to the number of excellent dining spots, only the limitations of time and budget. Here are three dependable, affordable restaurants.

Anyone who loves the subtle, ethereal flavors of the local Cantonese cuisine will enjoy dim sum, an assortment of bite-size steamed, pan-fried or deep-fried delicacies served from layered bamboo steamer baskets. The best dim sum I've ever had was at lunch at the Victoria City Seafood Restaurant, the flagship of a series of restaurants specializing in fish and shellfish.

This huge, bustling, modern restaurant offers dim-sum specialties at lunchtime only, when office workers from the Sun Hung Kai Centre crowd around large tables, sharing basket after basket of extraordinarily fresh delicacies. The lunch menu offers more than 20 choices, ranging from steamed squid to deep-fried shrimp rolls to cold, sweet bean curd for dessert.

Victoria City Seafood's offerings show to best advantage the qualities of Cantonese cuisine: Dishes were shimmering fresh and delicate, yet balanced with enough solid protein to satisfy. The best of many dishes sampled were the steamed lobster dumplings, each in its own miniature basket. The dumplings are as big as baseballs, filled with luscious, moist steamed fresh lobster wrapped in delicate rice paper rounds, and set off by paper-thin slices of quickly seared white radish. I could return again and again for the steamed young squid cut into thin slices, then layered and covered with a veil of spicy sauce.

Open daily, 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. and 5:30 P.M. to midnight. About 130 Hong Kong dollars ($17) for lunch, 300 dollars for dinner. Dim-sum items from 15 dollars.

Where Cantonese food is light, ethereal, subdued, Chiu Chow cuisine has more spice, more punch, greater earthiness and a carefully considered sauce to match each dish. Chiu Chow is a coastal region around the Shantou district of Guangdong Province, and its cooking is the current vogue in Hong Kong.

At the popular, cavernous, well-priced City Chiu Chow Restaurant in the East Ocean Centre in Kowloon - another flagship of a successful chain - you'll find all the classic and finest regional specialties, including the cuisine's signature braised goose; steamed flower crab; dim sum; steamed and pan-fried fish enlivened with a hit of chili pepper, and Chiu Chow congee, a rice soup.

The East Ocean Centre's branch resembles a lively, well-kept office commissary, where families and workers sit 10 or 12 to a round table, sharing dish after dish, each paraded to the table with swiftness and efficiency. If your appetite will allow for only two dishes, sample the crab and the goose. The whole coral-toned flower crab is steamed upside down (so its juices flow back into the crab and are not lost to the liquid), then cooled and served with a perky dip of vinegar and fresh, minced ginger. The goose - braised in a pungent potion of soy sauce, rice vinegar, lemon peel, ginger, star anise, cinnamon and scallions - is cooled, then served at room temperature, chopped into bite-size pieces and offered with a dipping sauce of garlic and rice vinegar, designed to counter the richness of the meat.

The Chiu Chow repertoire also includes a brilliant variation of Cantonese-style, whole steamed fish. The fish is half-steamed, then pan-fried, making for a skin that's crispy and chewy, and set off by mounds of scallions and Chinese chives, along with slender strips of spicy, fresh chili peppers.

Open daily, 11 A.M. to midnight. About 100 Hong Kong dollars for lunch, 200 for dinner.

When my palate wanted to move beyond the boundaries of China, the thought of a healthy hit of spice led me to one of Hong Kong's most popular Thai restaurants, appropriately named the Chili Club. Reserve well in advance for lunch or dinner, for this bustling restaurant turns away people in droves.

Traditional choices such as a spicy beef salad - beef, leaf coriander, fresh hot chilies and cucumbers - make for a dependable starter, and although dishes are spicy, they're not over-the-top hot. I adored the spicy-and-sour prawn soup, laden with giant, sparkling fresh prawns and white mushrooms, floating in an almost clear broth stained with rivulets of vermilion pepper.

A true sign of success, the heat neither overpowered nor obliterated the sweet flavors of the shrimp and mushrooms. But the best dish of many was the prawns with garlic, ginger and scallions, a colorful saute of pillowlike nuggets of whole cloves, soft and sweet garlic, fresh ginger cleverly cut into the same size as the garlic, accessorized with a touch of red pepper and coriander.

Open daily from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. and 6 P.M. to 10 P.M. About 70 Hong Kong dollars for lunch, 100 for dinner.

No. 1: Lai Ching Heen, The Regent, Salisbury Road, Kowloon, tel: (852) 721-1211.

No. 2: One Harbour Road, Grand Hyatt, 1 Harbour Road, Wanchai, tel: 588-1234.

No. 3: The Chinese Restaurant, Hyatt Regency, 67 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, tel: 723-6226.

What is billed as a meal or even a banquet unexpectedly becomes an otherworldly pleasure. There is a sense of a perfectly - yet seemingly effortlessly - orchestrated symphony with a progression and a rhythm of sensations that flow, that build. Flavors and textures may be at opposite ends of the taste spectrum, but there is never a sense of contradiction or competition.

Chef Cheung Kam Chuen of Lai Ching Heen restaurant in The Regent hotel has the talent to elicit such a response, and in a recent six-course banquet managed to move heaven and earth. I found his food almost intellectual, in the very best sense, as, days later, combinations and counterpoints flashed through my mind. Chef Chuen stretches his own imagination further than most, offering a world cuisine, but one that remains distinctly Chinese. The setting - with its breathlessly beautiful view of the harbor, its opulently appointed tables laden with jade and chopsticks of ivory and silver, and its flawlessly attentive service - does not compete with the cuisine, but rather complements it.

The chef's menu began with his signature tour de force, an uncommon marriage of deep-fried scallops with fresh pears. The plump local scallops are covered with a vibrant mixture of fresh shrimp, sharp Yunnan ham and fresh leaf coriander, then sandwiched between slices of crunchy, juicy, firm-fleshed Asian pears. A fairy-like dusting of corn flour binds and protects the pillowlike forms as they are quickly deep fried. At table, the crispy creations are dipped alternately in a spicy mix of star anise, fennel, cloves, cinnamon and Szechuan peppercorns, then a sauce of lemon juice and lemon zest. Piquant yet elegant, innovative yet far from contrived, this is a modern dish that respects the tradition of Chinese cuisine without overstepping the bounds.

The double-boiled whole winter melon is like a cross between a soup and a tonic, a protein-rich palate-rester, a lean broth laced with thin slices of lobster, pork and chicken. And the braised angled loofah with a fiery blend of fresh crabmeat and garlic was smooth, creamy and surprising, as we dipped chunks of moist crabmeat into one of the five spicy sauces set upon a jade-colored glass lazy Susan. The procession of tiny, carefully orchestrated courses continued, with sauteed diced pigeon teamed up with an ultra-crunchy mixture of fresh water chestnuts, celery and the rare Chinese olive kernels.

When I saw that baked stuffed sea whelk was on next, I can't say that I was overjoyed. Though an expensive delicacy in Hong Kong, the flesh of this giant, conical-shelled mollusk does not have instant, universal appeal. Well, in this chef's hands the shellfish was transformed into a steaming, exotic confetti of cubed sea whelk, abalone, onion, goose liver, pork, curry and coconut all stuffed into the giant shell, a dish that stood out as the best of the evening, another imagination-stretcher added to the repertoire of modern Chinese cuisine. A hard act to follow, but he continued to dazzle, with a sensational roast duck with kiwi and lemon sauce, the fat countered and checked by the purity of citrus, leaving the palate both fresh and refreshed. A closing course of fragrant, highly flavored fried rice wrapped in lotus leaves was like a brilliant encore, a dish that wove crabmeat and mushrooms, abalone and duck, chicken and bamboo shoots, all in infinitesimal amounts, into a final, but surely temporary, good-bye.

Chef Cheung Kam Chuen, a native of Guangzhou, is the son of a well-known Chinese chef. Since 1959 he has cooked at many top restaurants in Hong Kong. He joined The Regent in 1980 as head of the Chinese kitchens, and in 1984 oversaw the opening of Lai Ching Heen, whose three Chinese characters can loosely be translated as "an elegant dining place." The restaurant's extensive menu features special dim-sum lunches, a menu of daily seasonal specialties, as well as a wide choice of traditional and innovative Chinese fare. A side note on the restaurant's attention to detail: in only one other restaurant has the dining room staff noticed that I was left-handed, and that was at Taillevent in Paris.

At Lai Ching Heen, the chopsticks were reversed to accommodate. Open daily, from noon to 2:30 P.M. and 6:30 to 11:30 P.M. About 150 to 200 Hong Kong dollars ($19.50 to $26) for lunch and 300 to 500 dollars for dinner, not including wine.

Albert Einstein is quoted as suggesting that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." The advice came to mind at One Harbour Road, the elegant harbor-view dining room in the Grand Hyatt, where the cuisine is intentionally classic and Cantonese.

Here, the perfection is in the perfection, not in any sideline fireworks. All was made as simple as possible in the delicate, sublime roast goose served Peking Duck-style, with ethereally light pancakes dotted with a fiery sauce, masterful little temptations. And when I bit into a portion of sauteed prawns with garlic, I witnessed an explosion of freshness, as though the shrimp had jumped from sparkling ocean waters into my mouth. (A few days later, while touring the Grand Hyatt's kitchens, I understood why: the shrimp had indeed been alive only seconds before, fished from the kitchen's spotless holding tanks.)

The ingredients and methods in these deep-fried prawns paired with spring onions, chicken stock and garlic were nothing out of the ordinary, yet the ingredients and technique quite simply raised the dish to a higher level. It was almost sedative fare, a marvelous, happy drug for the palate. The mode here, as elsewhere, is to offer an assortment of five spicy dipping sauces covering the full range of fire, allowing guests to season at will. Here, the largely soy-based dipping sauces are seasoned with chilies or with pine nuts and peppers, some with shallots and garlic, others with ham, dried shrimp and dried scallops.

At a corner table with a commanding view of the harbor, chef Law Yip Lam offered a final, chive-spiked concoction of stewed e-fu noodles, fresh noodles simmered in a mixture of consomme, oyster sauce, fresh Japanese enoki mushrooms and shredded, steamed conpoy, or dried scallop. Again, nothing remarkable about the concept, yet the execution created a balanced marriage of condensed flavors. Dab on a touch of extra spicy X-O sauce, and you're in another universe.

Open daily, from noon to 3 P.M. and 6:30 to 10:30 P.M. About 310 Hong Kong dollars for lunch and 515 dollars for dinner, not including wine.

Designed to suggest a traditional Chinese teahouse of the 1920s, The Chinese Restaurant in the Hyatt Regency hotel is a subtle, understated play of black, white and wood tones, a fitting backdrop for chef Chow Chung's innovative, modern style of Chinese cooking. As chef at the Hyatt Regency since its opening in 1986, Chow is about as ambidextrous as they come, popping his head in and out of Western restaurants to see what ingredients he might incorporate into traditional Cantonese fare.

In an opposite vein, he is a staunch traditionalist, bringing back nostalgic menus from his childhood, home-style fare that includes currently less fashionable Chinese "nursery" foods, such as bean curd in many guises. His six-course banquet managed to mix nontraditional artichokes with braised, dried abalone; baby pineapple with baked stuffed sea whelk and fried rice, and for a finish he candies strawberries, like apples. While his food is innovative, it is far from wacky - traditional fare with a modest touch of whimsy.

I loved his rendition of seven stir-fried vegetables, a nostalgic dish based on his wife's Hakka fare: It's a blend of cubed vegetables and rice, stir-fried with peanuts and scallions, poured into a bowl and doused with hot oolong tea. Soupy, yet not a soup, the dish had a complex, homey, welcoming quality.

The surprise of the evening came in the form of wok-baked wild baby ducks - shipped from Hunan Province and no larger than sparrows. Marinated in ginger and scallions, then simmered in broth, the birds were lean yet glowed with the rich flavor of wholesome duck meat.

My favorite of the evening was a small trek into Thailand, a super spicy steamed garoupa (grouper) flavored with lemon grass, spicy peppers and preserved lemons. The Chinese Restaurant prides itself on its extensive wine list (we sampled a well-matched chardonnay, New Zealand's Cloudy Bay).

It is also one restaurant that pays attention to the single diner. There is a set lunch menu for one, two or four diners, and an a la carte menu that changes every six months.

Open daily, from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. (10 A.M. on Sundays) and 6:30 to 11 P.M. About 190 Hong Kong dollars for lunch and 380 dollars for dinner, not including wine.