Tag: dining

Megabites: Food News, 31 March, 2015

Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor
Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor

America’s Culinary Bounty
In the basement of Pacific Place, through April 7, Great is showcasing America’s Bounty as it introduces and features many new American products. From seafood: East Coast Clams and Pacific Northwest Oysters, to fresh produce: meats to superfoods and grains – there’s lots to explore an savour. In Great’s wonderful cheese room there a selection of artisan cheeses from California. A wonderful firm and tasty Fiscalini Bandage Wrapped Cheddar is a delight, while the Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor is truly a gorgeous soft-ripened goat’s cheese. Among the other new products is Tolerant Foods range of bean based pastas which are wheat and gluten free, non-GMO, vegan and organic. For those who love grains and ‘superfoods’ there’s organic grains including quinoa from Arrowhead Mills and chia from Bob’s Red Mill. Many of the products will remain on-sale after the promotion period.

During the promotion Great’s hot food counter is introducing a range of take-away Tex-Mex dishes including nachos, quesadillas, fajitas and tacos

Free Milk @ Circle K
circlekwebAs the price of milk continues to increase, up almost 25% from last year as the regular price of a 946ml carton of milk surges past the $25 mark. It’s not often that you’ll find convenience store prices are lower than supermarkets but currently Circle K is running a long term fresh milk promotion buy 5 cartons of Nestle milk and get the 6th free. Simply pick up the chop card at any shop and chop away.

Buffet ala Hung Hom
Newly opened in Hung Hom is Sav, one of these new modern hotels looking to be your trendy home from home and full of bubbly friendly staff. Located on the first floor adjacent to reception is Palatte the hotels industrial looking dining space. With raw concrete floors, clear perspex chairs, the look is very modern and bright – but for all the staff buzzing around it’s strangely cold and functional with everyone trying that bit too hard to be nice.

palette-@-savThe dinner buffet is prettily displayed, with a table of enticing desserts looking to draw you into the main dining area where cold and hot dishes stretch the length of one wall. Two cooking stations offer fresh pasta and noodles. There’s lots of seafood – lobster, oysters, yabbies, muscles – some sushi and sashimi, various western, Indian and Chinese hot dishes and the obligatory range of salads. Organic greens grown in the New Territories and a cheese board round out the offerings. It’s a reasonable sized dinner buffet, but… at $588 it’s not cheap. The extensive seafood offerings may be a factor in the price – as this was a special media tasting it’s impossible to know if on a regular night when the place is full, it seats 100, these will be constantly replenished.

It’s a very pretty looking spread, sadly though the food is very bland – the hot dishes lacked flavour, the salads identity and the quality of meat wasn’t all that you’d expect. There are a lot of very good buffets available in Hong Kong these days and Palatte’s at the moment isn’t good enough to make it worth the trek to Hung Hom. If you’re in the area though, the high tea sets look good at $288/two people and the lunch offerings of a hot dish, salad buffet and tea/coffee range from $68-$138 are very good value.

In-n-Out Burger
in-n-out-burgerFamily owned burger chain In-n-Out returned to Hong Kong for their third pop-up burger event, this time in Causeway Bay. 250 lucky customers got to sample In-n-Out’s burgers – at American prices: a double double ($25) hamburger ($15) and cheeseburger ($20). Cooked either ‘animal’ or ‘protein’ style, the tasty fresh ingredients were a big hit and well worth queuing for. Sadly Brian Nakao the organiser of In-n-Out’s foreign events confirmed that the burger chain has no immediate plans to open a store or three in Hong Kong.

HKJC Community Festival @ Shatin Racecourse – 3-5 April, 2015

HKJC Community Festival @ Shatin Racecourse - 3-5 April, 2015

One of many events the Hong Kong Jockey Club is hosting as part of it’s 130th Anniversary celebrations is a Community Festival. The free entry event will be held at Sha Tin Racecourse and Penfold Park during Easter from 3 to 5 April, 2015. The festival will feature a wide array of performances, edutaining activities, family games, two Guinness World Record attempts, fitness and football clinics and a wide range of dining choices.

Tickets are free via registration, with a daily quota of 10,000.

HKJC Community Festival @ Shatin Racecourse - 3-5 April, 2015

Mongkok Street Eats @ Chinese New Year

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Portland Street was a heaving mass of revellers, as long queues waited patiently for some late night street food snacks.

Sterile soul destroying malls provide the perfect shopping locale for over-priced branded consumerism. Street eats and markets offer a vibrancy and energy that malls can never replicate or replace. There’s a place for both, as the government – who are supposed to be representing our interests – should remember.

Licence them and ensure they’re hygienic and clean up after themselves is fine. But don’t drive them out of existence – the long lines show there’s a demand and a desire for what they’re selling.

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Megabites: 8 November, 2014

Thanksgiving
A national holiday in the USA, Thanksgiving originated as a day of celebration of the previous years harvest. Local American stalwart Dan Ryan’s is offering a traditional 4 course menu for $398 + 10% featuring pumpkin soup, roast turkey with giblet gravy, candied yams, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. turkey-thanksgiving
Dan Ryan’s Chicago Grill is located at Shop 28, LG2, Festival Walk, 80 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong (t: 2265 8811) and 112 Pacific Place, 88 Queensway, Admiralty (t: 2845 4600).

Isola Reopens
A newly renovated and slightly remodeled Isola re-opened in IFC recently. At first glance you might not notice many of the new features, but take a look at the most important part of the restaurant… There’s a brand new kitchen, designed with the input of two-star Michelin Chef Marco Sacco and built in Italy. Yes, Isola is the latest eatery to partner up with an overseas Michelin star chef to add ‘prestige’ to it’s name… While Marco Satto will ‘oversee’ the gradual revamping of Isola’s menu – so don’t expect to see any of famous dishes on the menu quite yet – the new chef on the ground is Omar Agostini. At the media introduction of Marco Satto’s appointment there was little to taste, so we’ll have to wait and see what impact Marco and Omar bring to Isola, and it’s prime location with wonderful views across the harbour.

Great Idea
As part of their Christmas promotion Great in the basement of Pacific Place will be holding a series of food tastings and demonstrations loosely entitled “Comfort Foods for the Holidays”. The series of tastings and hands on activities starts on the 21 November from 3pm with the goal of inspiring and entertaining while learning more about food and how to prepare, cook and enjoy it.

A full list of the classes and tasting is posted in the store where you can sign-up in advance for those that interest you most. The list includes: Dressing a Whole Turkey (Demo), Pumpkin soup (Demo/Food Tasting), Making A Ginger Bread House from Scratch (Hands on instructional Class), Old Fashioned Christmas Cookies (Hands on instructional Class), Roasting Poultry (Hands on instructional Class), Christmas Pudding (Demo/Food Tasting), Composing a Cheese platter (Hands on instructional Class), Cooking with Cheese (Demo/Food Tasting), How to Carve a Turkey (Demo/Food Tasting), Understanding Craft Beer Instruction (Tasting).

Cooking videos
The Sheraton in Macau is posting cooking videos on it’s facebook page showing viewers how to enjoy the specialty dishes from the Sheraton Macao Hotel’s restaurants at home. Tied in with this are a series of weekly competitions and give-aways – check out their facebook page for more details www.facebook.com/SheratonMacau

If you have any food news please send it to [email protected]

Tasty Vietnamese Cuisine at the Embankment

Embankment - lobster

The healthy simplicity of Vietnamese cuisine with its minimal use of oil and a reliance on herbs and vegetables is evident at the Embankment in Causeway Bay where the dishes on the newly revamped menu look to appeal to our five senses – the aromatic ingredients stimulate the nose, the enticing plates treat the eyes, sounds comes from crisp ingredients, while the texture is felt by our fingers before the five spices are detected on the tongue. While appealing to our senses each Vietnamese dish has a distinctive flavour which reflects one or more of the fundamental taste elements: spicy, sour, bitter, salty and sweet.

The 7000 square foot restaurant on the 2/F of Cigna Tower at 480 Jaffe Road in Causeway Bay has been working hard to eliminate MSG (a common complaint from diners under the previous owners) and enhance the freshness of the ingredients – but as Nelson Tam one of the new owners comments “We’ve done everything we can to eliminate it”. “With the recent change of management, as well as a new team of highly experienced Vietnamese chefs from Vietnam who have joined our team we hope to introduce some of most authentic cuisine from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City available in Hong Kong. We are proud to introduce our new menu and renovation to our customers to create a value for money dinning experience”.

What makes Vietnamese food special – the fish sauce! At Embankment the home made fish sauce features complex but delicate layers of sweetness, lime, garlic, chilli, saltiness of dark fish sauce and vinegar. These fragrant elements and fresh herbs feature in most of Embankments signature dishes which include: Embankment1
Roasted minced prawn w/ sugarcane – the sweet sugarcane juice soaks into minced prawn for a unique flavour when roasted.

Stir fried garlic diced beef & tomato served w/ tomato rice – marble diced beef marinated with sweet basil, garlic, and slightly dark fish sauce, to enhance the original flavour from the beef. Stir fried with fresh basil, tomato, onions, topped with dried garlic, serve with tomato rice.

Deep fried chicken wings w/ butter & garlic seasoning – a unique cooking process merges 3 delicate procedures in order to bring out the prefect butter chicken wings. 1. marinate with lemongrass, garlic, fish sauce. 2. deep fried with precision timing between high and low temperature. 3. low heat stir fried with butter and garlic, in order to absorb the essence of the taste and scent of butter and garlic.

Marbled beef in Vietnamese vinegar hot pot – marbled beef cooked in a vinegar beef soup, merging the original sweetness of the beef, with a soft scent of vinegar and herbs

Nelson is also a foodie and for those new to the delights of Vietnamese dining he offer this piece of advice “When ordering remember a good meal will have balance, where the texture and flavours contrast the temperature and spiciness of the food.”
Embankment2

Embankment
2/F, 470-484 Jaffe Road,
Causeway Bay,
Hong Kong.

Embankment paid for the meals written about in this review.

Megabites: 1 February 2014

Alfresco Terrines and Pâtés  Divino.Patio-pate
Almost two years on from an extensive renovation and rebranding the Causeway Bay Centre – the former Sanlitun – has still to imprint itself on many people’s dining radar. But if you enjoy sitting outside and especially if you have kids it’s worth a look as there’s extensive seating on the spacious walkways – all discretely labelled for general public use so you don’t have to actually buy anything to sit down, but expect some dirty looks if you don’t. A couple of reasons to sit-down at Divino Patio’s comfortable chairs are it’s Italian Aperitivo Buffet and this month’s Terrines and Pâtés promotion. The free (upon purchase of a drink) Aperitivo Buffet is typical of the type you’d find in bars across Italy and is full of nibbles including cheese bites, pizza squares, salmon bites, vegetables in tempura, grissini wrapped with salumi’s, polpette (meat balls), fried fish, pork belly and is available nightly from 5:30-8:30.

February’s Terrines and Pâtés promotion includes a country style pâté flavoured with guerande “fleur d sel” at HK$118 per 100 grams; Foie gras terrine and yellow wild mushrooms at HK$138/100grams; a traditional duck pâté at HK$168/100g; and a free range chicken breast and fresh tarragon terrine at HK$128/100g. The pates are served with toasted farm bread, gherkins and garden salad and are paired with a selection of wines and beer from the Italian artisan microbrewery 32 Via dei Birrai.
Divino Patio: Shop !1, 1/F Brim 28 Causeway Bay Centre, 28 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Tel: 2877 3552
Divino.Patio-buffet-web

Fondue
Locally fondue has in recent years come to mean dipping marshmallows and other confectionary in chocolate and while that’s nice and incredibly sweet the more traditional dipping medium is cheese (An aside, marshmallows and jelly beans dipped in cheese… intriguingly tasty idea….). fondueNightly through February 28 Divino in Central is offering three delicious cheese fondues to share with friends, Fonduta Svizzera ($300/person) comprising 1⁄2 Gruyere and 1⁄2 Vacherine Fribourgeois with a hint of Kirch wine; Fonduta Alla Valdostana ($280/person) using fontina cheese and Fonduta al Gorgonzola ($250/person) which as the name implies, uses gorgonzola. All are served with a selection of toasted bread cubes and fresh vegetables – including lightly poached Brussel sprouts and pumpkin both of which are delicious when dipped and coated in cheese, especially the gorgonzola. Remember to scrape the bowl, the slightly burnt cheese that sticks to the bowl is a crispy oft forgotten delight. All three fonduta are offered paired with wine or Italian artisan beers.
DiVino: G/F, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Tel: 2167 8883

A Chinese New Year Option
It’s Chinese New Year, the weather’s sunny and you’re stuck for something to do… Why not check out Ocean Park or Disneyland both have a variety of restaurants offering CNY specials and a wealth of other activities to make for an enjoyable day-out. And with the mainland hordes staying north of the border visiting their relatives crowds should be light and meal prices are not too extravagant.
disney cny