It’s a jarring juxtaposition, lunching at the Mong Kok Cooked Food Market in Hong Kong’s bustling Kowloon district. Nestled into the otherwise nondescript second floor of an expressionless office building, it’s a sprawling white tile food court punctuated by a dozen or so stalls at the perimeter, their closet-­sized kitchens sending out streams of steam over clusters of diners.

On one side, from the pass-through window of his Tsui Yuen Cafe, Thomas Chau doles out plastic trays piled with a meal that feels conspicuously out of place—his signature beef curry bun. It’s a dish loosely inspired by a recipe from his native Macao. It was tasty, but for my purposes, it was a hair too close to a Panera-style soup-in-a-bread-bowl.

Across the hall and past a sea of diners watching television on their phones while eating at plastic picnic tables, it is hardcore Hong Kong—cart noodles. Named for the street carts from which it once was served, it’s a Build-A-Bear affair of a meal. Diners assemble bowls of brothy noodles decked out with dozens of options. Tripe, chicken feet, fish bones and doughy fish balls, and just about every last bit of the pig, from blood and liver to intestines and skin.

It’s a contrast emblematic of Hong Kong, where the cuisine is a mix of old and new, foreign and local, recognizable and not. It was early days in my visit to the so-called special administrative region of China, and truthfully neither option spoke to me.

I’d flown some 8,000 miles to find a seemingly elusive sweet spot in the cooking of Hong Kong. I was looking for elevated versions of the Chinese foods Americans know and love. Actually, let’s be honest—I was looking for good versions of the over-fried, overly sweet takeout those of us unlucky enough to not live near a legit Chinatown have learned to tolerate.

On paper at least, it made sense. The cooking of Hong Kong—though an amalgamation drawn from many places, including Britain and Europe—is heavily influenced by Cantonese traditions. Thanks to immigration from mainland China and—during the last half of the last century—Hong Kong, the same is true for Chinese American cooking.

Which is how I found myself scouring the city for delicious examples of that classic dish Americans love—and too often love to hate—sweet-and-sour pork. But as I’d quickly learn, Hong Kong and Chinese American cuisines had more in common than I expected. Turns out, this was not a good thing.

Cook Tang Kwok Keung mastered those flames with disturbing ease, even as they licked up, over and around him, trying to call a bluff that wasn’t. He was totally in control.

THE FLAMES
In the United States, sweet-and-sour pork has almost become its own punchline. Heavily battered, deeply fried and thickly drenched with Day-Glo sauces built mostly from corn syrup, it’s a sugar shock of a dish with little nuance and even less flavor. Godspeed to you if you fail to eat it before it cools and the copious cornstarch turns it to glue.

When I travel to learn better versions of recipes that are lackluster at American restaurants, I gravitate to home cooks. Unencumbered by the pretension or expectations of restaurant cooking, they just intuitively cook better, lighter and brighter. In Italy, fettuccine Alfredo was a fat bomb even at the restaurant that birthed it. From home cooks, it was transformative.

I’d hoped the same would hold true for sweet-and-sour pork in Hong Kong, but this was not the case. Like the whole hog barbecue of the American South, sweet-and-sour pork is a dish most Hongkongers leave to the pros. That’s largely due to the method of cooking—stir-frying. Across Asia, wok-style cooking is done over high-­octane burners that approximate jet engines, pumping out the sort of shockingly high BTUs no home stovetop—even in Asia—can match.

That’s how I found myself at Oi Man Sang Kitchen, the sort of languorous restaurant that spills out beyond its storefront, joyously breaking the fourth wall to scatter wobbly plastic tables and stools across the sidewalk, even creating a kitchen on the street. Because honestly, no sane person would put the sorts of burners these folks cook with inside a building.

Cook Tang Kwok Keung mastered those flames with disturbing ease, even as they licked up, over and around him, trying to call a bluff that wasn’t. He was totally in control. I stood by him for hours, leaving with far less arm hair and eyebrows than I’d arrived with. And virtually everything he made was fantastic, especially his fried eggplant, which had a shatteringly crisp exterior and a creamy-tender interior and was flecked with crunchy garlic and pops of red chili.

But the sweet-and-sour pork? I’m sorry to say it differed little from the takeout we know all too well. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t better. And that wasn’t particular to Oi Man Sang Kitchen. Many of the restaurants I visited served up the same deal—too sweet, too thickly battered, often a little overcooked. Maybe those monster flames weren’t the right choice?

THE HISTORY
But Keung did school me on some valuable history. Sweet-and-sour pork is a traditional Cantonese dish, though most of us would be hard-pressed to recognize it in its original form. It began as bite-size chunks of bone-in pork ribs cooked in a fruit-based sauce that was mildly sweet and a little tangy, a signature flavor of Cantonese cooking.

When the British took control of the territory in 1898, locals adapted the dish to—you can argue with me, but I’m just going to say it—their more pedestrian tastes. So fruit gave way to... ketchup and something called O.K. Sauce, an English condiment made from apples, dates, vinegar, sugar and tomato paste. Which sounds an awful lot like ketchup, doesn’t it?

Over time, Worcestershire sauce and tons of sugar were added. They also subbed boneless hunks of pork for the bone-in ribs, and later battered the meat before frying it. Somewhere along the line, bits of pineapple and bell pepper were added.

Brit-bashing aside, the idea of a true fruit-based sauce intrigued me. Normally, I avoid high-end restaurants when I travel. Their cooking rarely translates well to the home. But several in Hong Kong were known for innovative and fruit-forward takes on sweet-and-sour pork, so I took one for the team and dropped some cash for a few fancy meals.

It went as well as you can expect. Adding dragonfruit to sweet-and-sour pork—as much as I loved the romance and symbolism of it—did nothing to rescue yet another over-fried, syrupy dish. Ditto for the restaurant that added strawberries, which just tasted mushy and strange and only made the whole thing worse.

THE SOLUTION
The first real clue to making a better sweet-and-sour pork came from Brother Seafood Restaurant. This family-run place—where beers flow freely from morning to night—specializes in old-school Chinese-inflected Hong Kong cooking, seafood and not. And they offered to show me their tradition-­bound way of making the dish.
Eddy Au Man Kit oversees the kitchen his father and uncles opened decades ago. “It’s very simple, this kind of life. You wake up. You cook food. People enjoy it. It’s good.” It’s hard to argue with that.

His family’s approach to sweet-and-sour pork dates to the old days in a way I didn’t initially understand. His sauce still was built on plenty of ketchup (starting with a 7-pound can, in fact), vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and sugar, though far less of that than I’d seen elsewhere. But the next ingredient threw me—dried hawthorn berries.

If you didn’t need to, good for you. But I had to Google what hawthorn berries were. Turns out they are a crabapple-­like fruit with a flavor that was the traditional source of the sweet and sour in sweet-and-sour pork (as well as plenty of other similarly flavored dishes) back before British sensibilities came into play and made a mess of things.

Today, even in Hong Kong, hawthorn berries are hard to find fresh. At the markets, you can find them sliced and dried, looking a bit like a mini dried apple ring crossed with a cranberry and tasting kind of like that combination suggests. More often, you’ll find them turned into candies, which taste like tart apple jelly.

Au Man Kit makes his sweet-and-sour sauce by steeping the dried hawthorns in it, then straining them out. The result is a sauce with fruity complexity and deeper flavor than the simple yin-yang of sweet and sour. That extra flavor also meant his sauce needed less sugar to taste great. We finally were making progress, even if the key ingredient was a bit elusive.

The pork at Brother Seafood Restaurant also took a more traditional approach—bone-in pork ribs cut into chunks, then sprinkled with a light potato starch-based slurry. It then was briefly wok-fried before being scooped out and set aside while first the vegetables, then the sauce were cooked separately. Only at the end were all elements combined.

It was fascinating the way the ingredients collaborated to make a better and lighter dish, even though they actually spent little time in the wok together. Pulling the pork out after its initial fry saved it from overcooking, and that bare coating of starchy slurry cooked up with a feather-­light crispness. Nothing heavy, doughy or sodden. And while the cooking was fast, the flames were not nearly so furious as I’d seen elsewhere. Blissfully, no overcooked pork.

This cooking method also left the bell pepper and pineapple tasting fresh and crisp in the finished dish. And briefly simmering the sauce reduced and concentrated it on its own, no gluey cornstarch needed. This meant a cleaner, crisper flavor and a far better texture. “We don’t like to have too much sauce,” Au Man Kit explained. “It should just barely coat it.”

THE HUNT
Except, the problem with this solution was the solution itself—the hawthorn berries. As I continued to sample sweet-and-sour porks across Hong Kong, I found more instances of cooks using them, often at older, more traditional restaurants where diners expected—and the staff didn’t mind—the 24-hour process of steeping the sauce.

But neither the timing nor the ingredient itself suggested an easy solution for our recipe. Then I ate at Tai Wai Dining Room, where a modern vibe and massive mural of the city set the tone. As at Brother Seafood Restaurant, the sweet-and-sour sauce here was light and bright, not syrupy and thick. I assumed it was another case of hawthorn berries.

I was wrong. Chef Fung Wing Hung takes a freewheeling approach to his sauce, favoring flavor balance over authenticity. The secret to his sauce? Balsamic vinegar.

While I didn’t find its flavor as compelling as the hawthorn berries, it did get me thinking. Perhaps in trying to solve this problem, I was being too literal. So we began searching for all manner of hawthorn. I wanted to taste as much of it as I could. I did find dried berries, but I don’t recommend eating them as is. Kind of woody.

But hawthorn candies—chewy gummies, hard suckers, Necco Wafer-like disks—were plentiful. I tried them all. And no matter the form, the flavor always was the same—tart apple jelly. Which is when I realized I was trying too hard. Maybe the secret to the sauce really was as simple as apple jelly.

As the cooks at Milk Street dug into these lessons, we tried numerous variations of fruity sweeteners, even balsamic vinegar. All were better than the Chinese American versions we’d grown up with. But none was as good as apple jelly. As with Au Man Kit’s hawthorn-­based sauce, this allowed us to add fruity flavor as well as the push and pull of sour and sweet.

From there, it was a simple matter to also adapt his in-and-out approach to the wok, a process that prevented overcooking and allowed us to use starch only in the frying of the meat. No gloopy sauces, thank you.

As ever, finding the way forward often means taking a look back. Even for something as simple as a sauce.