bc magazine

Great Food Hall ReOpens to Intoxicate Your Taste Buds

The Cheese room is open again! After an extensive cosmetic makeover, Great Food Hall in the basement of Pacific Place has reopened. The new upmarket concrete with hints of bronze design fits with Pacific Place’s attempt to position itself a premium location, despite the resultant drop in foot traffic.

The renovated store features a lot more ready to eat options, there’s salads, cooked meats, sushi, Korean etc all with portion sizes and prices surprisingly competitive compared to other options. You can also preorder your salad (sadly not any of the other lunch options, maybe that’ll come in the future) on the new Great-to-Go app that hopefully will make getting lunch a quicker and less stressful experience.

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Thankfully the cheese room remains, stocked full of tasty fromage from across the globe including France’s Mons Comte and Italy’s Artigiana. There’s sustainable Italian caviar from Calvisius at the ‘Luxury’ counter. As well as a range of fresh smoked salmon from H Forman & Son, the UK oldest salmon curlers. Meat lovers will find the beef, lamb and pork from across the globe including US Brandt Beef from California, Tasmanian Cape Grim Beef and English Yellow Longhorn from The Ginger Pig. This wide selection offers you the chance to buy the same cut from different producers, cook them together and compare the flavours and textures. All are delicious – but also quite unique.

At a US Beef organised meat tasting in the old Great, an artisan butcher from California offered this advice on buying meat – and it’s worth repeating again. “Decide how you are going to cook your meat first, then ask your butcher which cuts are best suited for that cooking method.” Great also still offers a dry-aging and a cooked to order service.

Also along the back wall next to the meat counters, Cosro Italia offers freshly made pasta, pizza and ready to eat meals. For vegetarians, there’s a wide range of salads and many products on the shelves. While Tai Pan Pies offers sweet and savoury options.

Triple O’s remains and there’s a new coffee counter One Shot offering freshly made coffees. Sadly while there’s lots of tea on the shelves we didn’t find a nice cup to ‘lai cha’ to enjoy with our lunch.

The remodelled store looks a lot ‘fancier’, but also feels as though it’s more expensive to shop there. Take a look, there’s a lot to intoxicate and excite your taste buds.

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Last Minute Christmas

traditional-roast-turkey-dinner

It’s late December, where has the year gone? The seasonal music and decorations that have been up for months have inured you to Christmas, yet suddenly it’s here and you’ve got nothing prepared… bc’s here to help with it’s ‘instant’ traditional Roast Turkey Christmas meal – no cooking involved, although you will need to warm some dishes up to fully enjoy them.

Starter
Smoked salmon + Rainbow Salad
Smoked salmon: IKEA offers packs of frozen smoked salmon (Lax Kallrökt) $66 for 200g.
Rainbow Salad: black chickpeas, carrots, peas, corn, potatoes, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, parsley from Maya Takeaway, $88.

Main
Roast Turkey, roast potatoes, parsnips, red cabbage, Brussels sprouts, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce.
Roast Turkey: Great Food Hall in Pacifc Place have around 12 cooked US Roast Turkey per day $120/kg (4-6kg). Buy at the cooked food counter including Christmas Day. They also offer cooked roast beef, lamb and gammon if you prefer something other than turkey.
Roast potatoes: Great – $18/100g (cooked); M&S – $45/300g (need cooking)
Parsnips: M&S – $50/300g (need cooking)
Brussels sprouts: Great – $18/100g
Red cabbage braised with Bramley apples: $45/300g Marks & Spencer
Turkey gravy: $69/540g Marks & Spencer
Cranberry sauce: $59/300g Marks & Spencer
Stuffing: sage and onion/ cranberry & orange stuffing from M&S
Bacon wrapped sausages: sadly we couldn’t find this staple side dish in a cooked version.

For vegetarians: mediterranean vegetable stew / chickpea patty simmered in tomato sauce both $88 from Maya.

Dessert
Christmas Pudding with Brandy Butter
Christmas pudding: Great: several choices, M&S: $379/907g
Brandy Butter: $59/195g M&S or you can make it yourself it’s just butter beaten with sugar and brandy, or pick up a can of classic Bird’s custard and add a dash of brandy/ rum for a good alternative.

Cheese
Great’s cheese room is one of the unsung wonders of Hong Kong, the choice is varied, delicious and if you’re used to US and European cheese prices, expensive – but it’s Christmas so indulge.
A cheaper alternative is www.cheesebytom.com: cheddar 250g/$35, Brie 250g/$50 and other cheeses. Deliveries to Central and Lantau.

Christmas Cake + Mince Pies
Finding a good tasty Christmas cake is hard, especially one with marzipan and Royal icing
Christmas Cake: Great and M&S have several choices at different prices from $89 up – including the Hand Decorated Bauble Bar Cake (left) with marzipan and royal icing at $379. Most are more like fruit cakes than Christmas cake which is a shame as the two are subtly different in taste.
Mince Pies: Again Great and M&S have several choices, but none have a taste that leap out and say buy me!

Store Details + Contacts:
Great Basement Pacific Place, Admiralty Tel: 2918 9986 www.greatfoodhall.com
IKEA Causeway Bay, Shatin, Kowloon Bay www.ikea.com.hk
Marks & Spencer various stores www.marksandspencer.com
Maya Takeaway 173 Des Voeux Road, Central. Tel: 2111 4553 www.mayacafehk.com

Edit: 24 Dec – Added Christmas cake photo and updated text

Megabites: Food News, 31 March, 2015

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
As 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 6^th 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.

The 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
Family 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.