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Kathmandu

About

I was excited to spot this place hidden in the back streets below the hulk of The Belchers. Hong Kong has so few Nepalese places that it’s always good to have another one, plus the humble front of this place made me optimistic it might be reasonably authentic.

But things quickly began to disappoint.  First, I noticed they offered Spanish Tapas alongside Nepalese food in what I could only take as an attempt to cash in on two markets. Then, the menu felt disappointingly limited. Instead of offering something distinctly Nepalese, most of the dishes resembled those served in India restaurants across town, and the more standard dishes offered by these places at that. There were korma and jal-frezi curries, a few tandori dishes, but nothing much else.

We went for a Kathmandu fish curry with mustard seeds, which looked like one of the more unusual things on the menu.  It shared a problem suffered by most of the fish curries I’ve had, the delicate taste of the soft white fish becoming completely lost in the sauce. Instead of cheap white fish, it would be nice to see curries made with something slightly meatier. The curry’s sauce wasn’t bad, tasting convincingly rich and thick, with the mustard seeds adding a nice hint. However it lacked the subtle hints of spice and feeling of balance that have made curries I’ve had before really stand out. The small metal dish of curry we were given also felt very small, especially considering that it cost around HK$80.

The mixed tandoori was also distinguished primarily by its size. It was about half as big as similar dishes offered in other restaurants and really felt insubstantial considering the HK$100 price tag. The small pieces of sausage tasted good, with mixed lamb nicely blended with herbs, but their flavour didn’t really compensate for their measly size. The ostrich meat, the one slightly more unusual part of this mix, was very tough and uninspiring. Better Tandoori can definitely be found at some of the restaurants in Chungking.

The samosas we had to try and supplement these shrunken portions were also on the small side. They tasted very dry – as though frozen or made a long time ago – and had been reheated quickly (maybe microwaved) so that the insides were still lukewarm. They were a depressingly long way from the crisp, slightly flaky-shelled, Samosas that you can get just fried on the streets of India. You can also pick up much better samosas for about a third of the price just by wandering around Chungking mansions.

We also had some Nepalese Ghurka beer (HK32), which came in small bottles and was very watery and lacking in flavour.  I switched across to something else after my first glass.

My biggest complaint about Kathmandu is the price of the dishes, which mostly sat between HK$80 and $100. This might be justified if these are for huge, or even normal sized, portions, but for the shrunken serving we seemed to get it felt too much. Equally, it might be okay if the restaurant was producing some really outstanding cooking. I will happily pay for tiny servings of really great Japanese food, for example. But the food here was largely very mediocre. I don’t think I will return.

Directions

G/F. Shop 1A, Woo Hop St, South Lane, Kennedy Town (At the back of The Belcher's)

Raku-En

About

I’m writing this quite a while after going to Raku-en and am not able to remember too much detail about the separate dishes we had. But the quality of the Okinawan food offered here made me want to write at least a short listing to be updated on a second visit.

Hidden away at the top of a tower, this place specialising in Okinawa style Japanese food felt authentic the moment we stepped in. Japanese magazines and other items crowded the front counter, sake bottles lined the walls, and all the tables were already filled by excited groups of young Japanese.  It’s one of several Causeway Bay based hideaways for Hong Kong’s Japanese community.

The menu had a massive range of small plate dishes ranging from about HK$40 to 70. I am fairly new to Okinawan food, so was fairly bewildered a choice of dishes that stretched from stuffed fried chicken wings all the way to snapper carpaccio.

The pork belly in miso had beautifully soft pieces of meat which melted in your mouth, their small layers of fat adding a richer buttery hint to the taste. Each spongy piece has soaked up the sauces stronger flavours and let these drift sumptuously out as you chewed.

Fried chicken sunk into a pile of crumbled bread and garlic and chilli also tasted great. Each crisp piece of chicken would gather up so of this pile to add to the crisp flavour of the skin. Both this, and the skewers, were ‘snack style’ dishes prepared excellently and with extra elements.

The stuffed chicken wings were another example of this. With the bones taken from the middle of the meat, little fleshy white pockets were filled with a pasty stuffing. This was sealed in a wonderfully crisp skin that was perfectly fried to fill it with taste whilst keeping it from being to charred or oily.

Almost all of the other dishes we had followed a similar trend – full of flavour and with meticulous attention to detail. The cod showcased as well as anywhere I have been in Hong Kong the Japanese ability to prepare fish in a very simple way that brings out all of its flavours.

Overall, Ruku-en is a great place to go to explore Okinawan cuisine and to try a wide range of different dishes. I felt confident that the things I was eating were genuine and that whatever I ordered it would be well prepared and offer something interesting.

Directions

12 F Circle Tower, 28 Tung Lung Street, Causeway Bay

Website

http://www.rakuen.com.hk/

Cost

About $40 to $80 per dish.

The Flying Pan (Wan Chai Branch)

About

Lunch in The Flying Pan was depressing. I had looked at the menu in Central before, but decided it was too expensive and headed elsewhere. I should have done the same this time. But needing a quick meal, I decided to stick things out.

Sunk in one of the leather chairs, I scrolled through the menu and was struck again by how expensive everything was. Even the most basic omelettes were over sixty dollars. Surely frying a couple of eggs in a pan couldn’t produce anything that amazing that it warranted this kind of price? The fried breakfasts were even more, mostly topping the hundred mark and reaching up to the same kind of prices you’d pay for finely cooked French food elsewhere.

I was loathe to spend more than about fifty dollars on lunch and I really needed a coffee as well, so I searched onwards, determined to find something cheaper. A burger for HK$37 looked promising, but then I realised I’d need to order a whole load of extra ingredients to make it even vaguely interesting. Finally I settled reluctantly for a breakfast burrito. At big wrap stuffed with beans and rice and cheese could be pretty good, I naively persuaded myself.

“The breakfast burrito is just eggs and beans,” the Filipino waitress said when I ordered. “You want to get some bacon or something to go with that?”

It’s always a bad sign when the waitress is telling you openly about the limitations of the restaurant’s food. I should probably have backed out at this point. But a little like George Bush in Afghanistan, I was strangely determined to press recklessly onwards without heeding how much damage I was doing.

Coffee has been the main reason I came here, so I hoped this would at least be decent. But the only variety on offer was a ‘bottomless’ pot of drip coffee. At $30, this cost more than the best coffee in most of Hong Kong’s other cafes. Basically I was going to pay extra for the chance to drink unlimited amounts of coffee that would probably turn out to be so watery and weak I’d only want half a cup. I ordered it and felt my heart sinking.

The burrito came quickly. I’d love to say this was testament to the chef’s dexterity for Mexican cooking, but more likely it was credit to the power of the microwave. It was barely bigger than a Mars bar. Its wrap was reasonably crisp, but inside there was just a mixed up past of canned beans, rubbery egg and plastic cheese which stretched with each bite. None of it really tasted of anything much at all. It arguably had more flavour than the coffee, though, which tasted like somebody had taken a regular cup of instant coffee and just diluted it five or six times. There was none of that bracing, bitter taste of really strong dark coffee that I had been craving all morning.

I grimaced and sat back in my chair, feeling truly miserable as I listened to the hardcore club music pounding out of the restaurants many speakers. Staffed entirely by Fillipino’s, filled with lost looking gwei-los, and blaring these tunes, The Flying Pan feels very like the different Wan Chai nightclubs that surround it. But in the middle of the day on a Saturday, this might not be what you’re really looking for while you eat lunch.

There are reasons to go to The Flying Pan. If you’re a tourist who gets lost if you stray more than a hundred yards from your hotel, or if you’re desperate for something to eat at five in the morning after stumbling out of the bars in Wan Chai, then perhaps you’d consider it. In these situations, you won’t mind paying stupidly high prices for plastic food and impotent coffee. Otherwise its probably best to stay away.

Shanghai Lane

About

I was a bit uncertain about Shanghai Lane as we walked in. The large black and white photos of Old Shanghai, the neat soy sauce pots on each table, and the smartly uniformed waiters all felt very packaged. I imagined other identical restaurants being set up by the company across the city and feared the food would taste equally indistinct. Overall though, while not that remarkable, the restaurant offered solid Shanghai food at lower prices.

The ‘braised pork belly with bean curd knots’ (HK$50) had fatty cubes of meat that were pleasingly tender, but didn’t melt sumptuously in your mouth like the best braised pork can. The meat was soaked in a sauce which felt a little thin, potent with Chinese rice wine but lacking more subtle flavours. In comparison the dark sauce of Xiao Nan Guo’s ‘red braised pork’ is thicker and loaded with hints of liquorish and cinnamon that it has absorbed through the long cooking process and make it really exciting to eat. The dish is twice the price at Xiao Nan Guo, but I’d probably rather pay the extra for these more stimulating flavours that really enhance the meat.

I was hesitant to pay HK$68 for fried noodles when some you can get them for half the price elsewhere. Shanghai Lane’s ‘fried noodles with shrimp, chicken and ham’ warranted the higher price though, reminding me more of pasta dishes in finer Italian restaurants than the oily ‘chau mihn’ of a lot of local cha chaan tengs. The noodles were just lightly brushed with oil, which enhanced rather than smothered their own fresh, slightly floury taste. The shrimp and chicken had also been handled delicately so the frying just lightly cooked them and brought out the strong seafood and tender white meats flavours. Together the noodles and shrimp offered really soft, yet enticing tones that were very enjoyable.

The siu lung bau (dumplings with pork and soup inside) followed the trend of being good whilst not really blowing me away. The dumpling wrapper was thin and tasted fairly freshly made, free from that chewy, micro-waved texture that often marks cheap dumplings. But the wrapper still didn’t have the homemade texture of the best dumplings, and the soup inside was a little bland, lacking those soothing brothy flavours which explode out of the best siu lung bao. Again, Xia Nan Guo offers better dumplings, as do many of the higher end dim sum places in Hong Kong.

If you’re hungry and looking for decent Shanghai food at a low price then Shanghai Lane is definitely worth a visit. Some of the more special braised dishes like the ‘sea cucumber’ or ‘pigs trotter’ might also offer something a bit more special, though I’m yet to try these. If you want more stimulating Shanghai food though, it’s probably worth paying a little bit more to head over to Xiao Nan Guo or somewhere else.

Directions

35-37 Gough Street, Central, Hong Kong Tel: 2850 7788

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=110278381660667080594.00045eee009a4d17a789b&ll=22.284262,114.151836&spn=0.000869,0.00114&z=19&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Notes

Open from 11:30 a.m. until 11 p.m.

Cost

Around HK$50 a dish, Dumplings HK$15-35 with some ‘chef’s recommendations’ for up to $200

Yachiyo

 

About

I’d walked past this place quite a bit. It’s tucked away in On Wo lane, just behind Wellington Street in one of my favourite semi–hidden areas of the island. There are host of Japanese restaurants around the intersection of Aberdeen, Gough, Cage and Wellington streets, and I’m yet to really weed out the good from the bad. Yachiyo is definitely good.

A Japanese friend had also given Yachiyo his seal of approval, based on the fact that the noodle company he works for supplies them. The ramen here had an amazingly soft texture, melting in your mouth as you ate them and spreading a rich buttery flavour. They are the type of noodles you could eat unadorned and really enjoy.

Here though, the ‘spicy miso’ ramen I had came wonderfully presented in a bright red broth scattered with different additions. The soup really was exceptional, with a deep and hearty miso flavour just piqued by the right amount of spice. Its texture was especially satisfying. While not at all gloopy, the loaded flavours gave it a thickness so different from the tired, watery broths in a lot of places. I'm told this is because, instead of using a soup base, the chef here spend about six hour boiling down fish and other ingrediants into his own broth. 

Scattered into this broth are a liberal amount of other seasonings. Taking your chopsticks you can pull together the bits of seaweed, pickles, ginger and even strange very soft boiled egg, mixing all these with the noodles to further add to the depth of the flavours.  Although these ramen aren’t cheap, they are definitely worth the extra cash for the attention given to their preparation.

The restaurant does a range of ramen, a couple of cold noodle dishes, a few snacks like gyoza and fried vegetables, and Japanese ice cream. The beer and sake are reasonably priced and would go well will a bowl of spicy noodles. Worth checking out.

Directions

8 On Wo Lane (Kan U Fong), Sheung Wan

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com.hk/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=110278381660667080594.00045eee009a4d17a789b&ll=22.284689,114.152986&spn=0.000869,0.00114&z=19&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

Price

$60 for a bowl of Ramen, $28 for 8 Gyoza

Notes

Open on Mon – Sat 12pm to 3pm and 6pm to 10pm.

Tel: 2815-5766

Hometown Dumpling

About

There are a few places dotted around Hong Kong Island doing good homemade noodles and dumplings, particularly Wang Fu in Soho, the two different Dumpling Yuan’s in Soho and Sheung Wan, and a place in Sai Ying Pun near the Chong Yip shopping centre.

You see them with all with trays laid out in the evening, rapidly stuffing filling into neat dumpling and lining them up row after row. All of these places are good basic fare rather than anything fancy, with prices to match.

Hometown has a better range of dumplings than most , with a lot of steamed buns and xiao lung bao on offer too.  Unlike Dumpling Yuan or Wang Fu, its menu is fairly limited to dumpling and a few different types of noodles though. If you’re not looking for either of these then you should probably go elsewhere.

Based on quality of dumplings alone, I’d say Hometown places near the top of the list. The Beijing lamb dumplings I had melted in my mouth with wrappers that were wonderfully buttery. The lamb stuffing had a really distinctive earthy flavour, and oozed succulent juice. 

The whole package tasted really freshly made, and massively better than the defrosted dumplings you get in so many places now.  

Directions

102 Caine Road, Mid Levels, Hong Kong

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=110278381660667080594.00045eee009a4d17a789b&ll=22.283185,114.149832&spn=0.001737,0.00228&z=18&output=embed&w=425&h=350]#

Price

About $30 for bowl of dumplings and noodles, $30 for 12 dumplings, $10 for a steamed bun, $10 for plain noodles.