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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Pizza Express Launches Summer Menu

Ahead of summer’s official start Pizza Express have launched a new Summer Menu featuring a wide range of new pizzas and pastas. bc sampled several of the new dishes at the Lee Tung Street branch which – with it’s chilled layout, fresh juice bar, coffee machine and free WiFi – also makes a nice change from your local coffee outlet when looking for a place to hunker down and work or chat.

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Burrata & Eggplant ($88)

Among the new items on the Summer Menu are three new starters: Burrata & Eggplant ($88), Prawn & Tomato ($58) and Mango Crab Flatbread ($88). The Burrata is rich and creamy complimented nicely by the marinated eggplant.

There are two new salads Watermelon & Feta ($68/$128) and Mango Salsa Salad ($63/$108) available in small and large portions. The mango salsa is nice but like several of the other dishes on the menu it lacks that little extra freshness/ bite that has your tastebuds going… I want more!

The range of new pastas includes, as our waitress informed us, the already popular Baby Scallop Linguine ($143); Omnipork Penne Aglio Olio ($108) made with a plant based ‘pork’ and flavoured with fennel, water chestnut, garlic and mushroom; A Prawn Risotto ($148) cooked in a pomodoro sauce with garlic oil, onion and white wine tossed prawns and clams; Penne alla Norma ($118) a classic Italian pasta with eggplant, cherry tomatoes, basil, ricotta, pomodoro sauce and drizzled with garlic oil.

The new selection makes for a difficult choice when dining solo or in duo as there are several that sound tempting. bc opted for the Penne alla Norma which was filling and tasty.

Pizza Express has a bit of summer fun with it’s customers via the Burger Formaggi ($138) – one of four new pizzas on the menu – which tastes like a burger and is already proving popular. The other new pizzas are the Pancetta Garden ($138) and two vegetarian / vegan options Omnipork Bianco ($128) and Flori ($138).

The one new desert is the light Pineapple Cake with Ice Cream ($73) which is not too sweet and makes a pleasant finale to your meal.

The Pizza Express Vegan Menu has been revamped and offers a wide range of vegan dishes featuring vegan cheese and vegan pork. With an increasing awareness of healthy eating and vegan diners it’s good to see a big chain restaurant offering these options on a regular basis.

bc also likes the Lee Tung Street Pizza Express branch because it has a juice bar offering fresh juice ($68), smoothies ($68) and the new Watermelon Lemonade ($38) and Mrs Peroni ($68).

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Penne alla Norma ($118)

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Pineapple Cake ($73)

PizzaExpress x JUST Egg Vegan Pizza

The assorted healthy / diet fads that are sweeping the web and restaurants both locally and internationally often obscures the fact that some people really cannot eat gluten, dairy, eggs etc. And it can be really difficult for those with dietary restrictions to safely enjoy a meal out with friends.

PizzaExpress has teamed up with JUST Egg to expand it’s vegan and vegetarian menu offerings with new pizza and pasta dishes. JUST Egg is a new mung bean based plant alternative to egg that is high in protein and cholesterol free. Like real eggs Just Egg scrambles nicely to create a light fluffy texture and it also works well in cooking as both a binding and emulsifying agent.

The two new vegan dishes are currently only available at the recently opened Pizza Express Lee Tung in Wanchai. The JUST Pizza ($138) is dressed with tomato sauce and topped with scrambled JUST Egg, crumbled vegan sausage, button mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, vegan mozzarella and fresh rosemary.

The JUST Spaghetti ($128) is made with a JUST Egg, mushroom, liquid smoke puree and tossed with chopped peppadew and parsley.

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Pizza Express Lee Tung

Shop G31, Lee Tung Avenue, 200 Queen’s Road East, Wanchai
Tel: 3164 1303
www.pizzaexpress.com.hk

Note: JUST Egg was previously known as JUST Scramble

Confusion Plant Based Kitchen

After a few hiccups during construction Confusion Plant Based Kitchen is open in Sheung Wan and hopes to show that “Plant based cuisine is more than just salads and raw fruit. It can be an adventure in variety, a dance upon your taste buds.”

Confusion Plant Based Kitchen

103, Jervois Street, Sheung Wan

Hong Kong

Tel: 2563 3699
Open: 9am-9pm

www.confusion.hk
www.facebook.com/confusionhk

Vegetarian Cook Off @ Pizza Express Empire Centre – 6 June, 2017

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Pizza Express have opened a new outlet at Empire Centre in TST East. The ground floor restaurant is also one the five participating in Pizza Express Cook Off 2. A vegetarian palate buster between Wan Veggie Mom Christine Cheng and PE’s Product Development Manager Sophia Cheung using vegetarian ‘fake’ meat.
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Maya Cafe Grand Opening – 24 October, 2015

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The Grand Opening of Maya Cafe @ 173 Des Voeux Road took place on 21 October.
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Megabites: Portobello Burger

New on the Maya takeaway menu is the delicious Portobello burger – layers of either cashew truffle cheeze or spicy sunflower cheeze with lettuce and tomato sandwiched between two massive portobello mushrooms with some raw mash on the side ($88). And no I’m not one of those health food obsessed vegetarians, I’m a healthy meat loving hedonist, who isn’t put off by the raw, vegan, gluten free mumbo and just enjoys good tasty food, well prepared. That my body may benefit is pleasant a side-affect. Just as stress relief is happy side effect of a night drinking Jack Daniels with friends.

Maya Cafe
Shop G7, Nan Fung Tower, 173 des Voeux Road, Central. Tel: 2111 4553

Megabites – 31 July, 2015

Newly Open: Maya Cafe Takeaway
It’s all very good saying you want to eat healthy, but locally it can be a hassle to find a place offering fresh tasty food that you actually want to eat regularly; even more difficult to find takeaway! No longer. The team behind Maya Cafe (forcefully shutdown by a greedy landlord) have now opened a takeaway shop at 173 Des Voeux Road, midway between Central Sheung Wan.

The new outlet offers a broad menu of vegetarian, vegan and gluton-free meals, drinks, snacks and desserts. As much as possible the ingredients are organically sourced from local farms, with most dishes made fresh when you order them.

If you still harbour the illusion that vegetarian food means a dull plain lettuce, tomato, cucumber salad then wake up. Maya’s menu, as was the Wanchai Cafe’s, is full of tasty, textured and flavoured dishes that more than hold their own against the best restaurants in town. bc opted to try the quinoa salad, frittata with tomato sauce and the zoodles with alfredo truffle sauce

The baked eggless frittata in tomato sauce and herbed mashed potato is made locally sourced organic tofu that perfectly imitates the texture of a traditional frittata not too soft or too hard and with a lovely rich soya bean flavour the tomato sauce contrasted delightfully and mashed potatoes made fresh and blended with cashew cream and herbs set off the frittata and tomatoes sauce nicely.

Zoodles are noodles made from spiralised zucchini, an intriguing crisp fresh alternative to pasta – although you do need to eat them promptly as unlike many of the other dishes on the menu zoodles do not sit well in the fridge. The alfredo truffle sauce is cashew cream with a truffle twist and goes great with the crisp fresh zoodles for a light filling meal. A very flexible ingredient, even suitable for vegans, cashew cream is simply finely ground cashews which have a slight natural sweetness, allowing the creation of a wide range of sweet and savoury sauces.

Maya Cafe’s signature quinoa salad is lovely blend of textures, tastes and flavours, the crunchy slightly tart red cabbage, contrasting the green cabbage and cashew cream slaw. The carrots a slight sweetness and the quinoa a grainy healthy texture and flavour. An uber healthy salad that tastes delicious.

It’s not only takeaway, a delivery service will soon be up and running and they offer corporate and social catering – everything from a boardroom lunch to a junk trip.

Maya Café Takeaway
Shop G7, Nan Fung Tower, 173 Des Voeus Road, Tel: 2111 4553
Nan Fung Tower is a new building, the main entrance is actually on Wing Wo Street.

Closing
Delaney’s Wanchai has been shoved out the door by it’s landlord of 21 years and will be closing on the 13 August. Until then all standard drinks are at 1994 prices.