Tak Fat Beef Ball

This small noodle stall is hidden in the bowels of the Haiphong Road Temporary Market – which is temporary in name only as it's been open for more than 30 years. Walk past the butchers, flower stalls and fruit and vegetable vendors, and head deep into the centre of the market, looking for customers eating noodles served in bright orange bowls with yellow spoons. The star of the show is the beef balls, served in a rich, light broth with your choice of noodles, and optional beef tripe or brisket. Delicately flavoured with ginger and dried tangerine peel, the balls have the perfect "bouncy" texture beloved by the Chinese – often mistakenly regarded as "rubbery" by the uninitiated.
• Haiphong Road Temporary Market, 390 Haiphong Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, +852 2376 1179. A bowl will set you back around £2. Open 8.30am-8.30pm

Tsui Wah

This cha chaan teng (tea cafe) started off as a single restaurant in 1967, but there are now more than a dozen branches all over the territory. It's beloved by locals, who come here for uniquely Hong Kong comfort food, which has influences from the Brits, Indians, Americans and other immigrants, served up with a Chinese twist. The extensive menu includes toast with condensed milk, sweetened milk tea (hot or with ice), Swiss chicken wings, curried beef brisket with rice, Hainan chicken rice, beef with tomatoes, macaroni noodles in soup with preserved vegetables, and instant noodles with a variety of toppings. The branch on Wellington Street in Central – steps away from the bar and clubbing area of Lan Kwai Fong – is probably the most raucous, at least late at night, filled with tourists and expatriates huddled next to local customers.
• Branches including GF-2F, 15-19 Wellington Street, Central, +852 2525 6338, tsuiwahrestaurant.com. Average meal around £5 per head. Open 24 hours

Tung Po

A raucous seafood restaurant on the second floor of the Java Road wet market run by owner and maître d' Robby Cheung, who is famed for his wacky hairstyles and white rubber wellies, and, as evenings progress, for cranking up the music and getting all his customers to sing along to We Will Rock You (he also attempts – not very successfully – to moonwalk to Michael Jackson). Fine dining it isn't – but if you choose wisely, you can have a good meal. Regulars know to pre-order a few dishes – the deep-fried pig's trotters, razor clams (especially delicious with black bean sauce), squid ink pasta with cuttlefish balls, and fried chicken with garlic. Beer is served in bowls, the "napkins" are rolls of toilet paper in plastic dispensers, and the atmosphere is friendly and convivial.
• 2F Java Road Municipal Services Building, 99 Java Road, North Point, +852 2880 5224. Meal around HK$150 (around £13) per head. Open 5.30pm-12.30am

Under Bridge Spicy Crab

The dish typhoon shelter crab was born and bred in Hong Kong, named after the small coves used by fisherman who took shelter there during stormy weather. Facilities on the boats were limited, and the fishermen usually cooked whatever they caught, giving birth to this messy, pungent dish of crab fried with masses of garlic, chillies, black beans and spring onions – a small amount is delicious with white rice or congee (rice porridge), accompanied with a beer. There are several Under Bridge Spicy Crab branches within a block of each other, and the original is as basic as they come – the tables are covered with plastic sheets which, at the end of the meal, are gathered up with the crab shells and thrown away.
• Several branches, but the original is at 429 Lockhart Road, Causeway Bay, +852 2573 7698, underspicycrab.com. Meal around £15 per head. Open 5pm-5am

ABC Kitchen

Like the other food markets in Hong Kong, the perimeter of Queen Street Cooked Food Market is lined with stalls where customers eat under fluorescent lights on hard stools at fold-out tables. ABC is different though – it's the only one with tablecloths (red and white check), there will almost certainly be bottles of wine on the tables, and it's probably the only one to have some non-Chinese diners. The restaurant was opened several years ago by staff from the Hong Kong institution M at the Fringe when it closed, and serves up some of its most famous dishes, including roast suckling pig, beef Wellington, braised lamb shank and dessert souffles. It's not quite as good as M, but then it is a lot cheaper.
• 1F Queen Street Cooked Food Market, 38 Des Voeux Road West, Sheung Wan, +852 9278 8227. Average lunch around £5 per head, three-course dinner around £20. Open Mon-Sat noon-2.30pm, 6.30pm-10pm, Sun 6.30pm-10pm

Tim Ho Wan

Since it opened in 2009, people have been queuing to get a seat in this tiny restaurant where diners cram shoulder-to-shoulder at Formica tables covered with paper placemats. The lines grew even longer when Michelin gave it a star in 2010, making it, at the time, the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world – a filling dim sum meal will only set you back around £5. The restaurant doesn't take bookings and two-hour waits are not uncommon, but brave them for the cha siu baau baked buns whose savoury roast pork filling contrasts with the sweet, crumbly topping, the rice flour rolls with pig's liver, steamed chicken feet with black bean sauce, and steamed spare ribs. Tim Ho Wan now has two other branches – in Sham Shui Po (which also has one star) and Central.
• Shop 8, 2-20 Kwong Wa Street, Mong Kok, +852 2332 2896. Meal with tea around £5. Open 10am-10pm

Australia Dairy Company

Another cha chaan teng, the Australia Dairy Company is not a place to linger: you queue up, you sit, you order, waiters bring the food, you eat, pay and leave. In other words, it's very Hong Kong in its efficiency. It's not very difficult to decide what to order anyway: people come here for scrambled eggs (served with toast, or sandwiched between thick slices of white bread), macaroni soup noodles and steamed egg desserts, as well as drinks such as lai cha (milk tea), iced lemon tea and yin yang (half coffee, half tea). It's not fine dining, but it is a Hong Kong institution, and so popular and famous that it occasionally gets crowded with people who roll up on a tour bus.
• 47-49 Parkes Street, Jordan, +852 2730 1356. A main course and drink around £3.50. Open Fri-Wed 7.30am-11pm

Lin Heung Tea House

This place has been around since the 1920s, and many of the waiters – and some of the customers – look as if they've been around for an awfully long time, too. Some of the regulars have their own tables reserved for them every morning, where they sit, read the paper, nibble on some dim sum, and occasionally speak to each other. One of the few places left in Hong Kong where the dim sum is pushed around on a trolley, although if you're sitting far away from the kitchen it's best not to wait until the cart makes its way to you – it might never reach you. Instead, do what everyone else does and get the food yourself. Dinner is a lot more subdued, probably because they take reservations. While the dim sum isn't the best, the cooked-to-order food at night is better, with old-fashioned dishes such as eight treasures duck (braised and stuffed with rice, chestnuts, mushrooms, lotus nuts – order in advance), pan-fried minced pork patties and sweet and sour pork ribs.
• 160-164 Wellington Street, Central, +852 2544 4556. Dim sum around £5, dinner around £10. Open daily 6am-11pm

Piggy Grill

The logo of a piglet holding a milk bottle should give you a good idea of what to order here – suckling pig. The piglets are roasted to order over an open flame, perfectly cooked so the meat is tender, the fat – just a thin layer of it because it's a baby pig – is succulent, and the skin is deep brown and crackling. Yes, they serve other foods, too – roast duck, crispy-skinned chicken, simmered pig's trotters, and grilled skewers of meats, fish and seafood. There's no attempt at decor (think disposable plastic tablecloths), beer is served in bowls, and customers sit on wooden stools, but it's packed at lunch and dinner times.
• Shop 1, 17 Shun Ning Road, Sham Shui Po, +852 2194 8188. A lunch plate of roast meat over rice costs around £2.50, a meal including whole roast pig will cost around £10. Open noon-midnight

Kau Kee

The staff here are famously grumpy, but that doesn't stop the crowds from lining up at lunch and dinner. There's not much choice: beef brisket (which can be ordered in different degrees of leanness) and beef tendon, served either in a clear broth or with curry, and a choice of noodles. There's no ambience to speak of – diners perch on unpadded stools under fluorescent lights, grab their chopsticks from a stand in the middle of the glass-covered tables and will almost certainly have to share a table with strangers. The staff can be quite abrupt, but don't take it personally – they're rude to everyone. And they often close during peak time (around 7.15pm-8.30pm) so that the staff can eat their own meals.
• 21 Gough Street, Central, no phone. From around £2. Open Mon-Sat 12.30pm-10.30pm

• Susan Jung is the food editor of the South China Morning Post