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2012-12-27
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提供法式超濃郁芝士！環境優雅，服務專業有禮．食物有扳有眼，海鮮處理得很不錯．適合慶祝紀念日．Lovely Decor, Great Service;Great news for French Cheese lovers!Price reasonable for the quality;British & French fusion?Excellent Christmas experience. It's Christmas:I have to say I'm quite a boring person when it comes to celebrating festivities. If Mr. USA and Ms. Malaysia hadn't booked this place for us on Christmas, I would have suggested the Colonel's Chicken to my wife instead. (Cultural pointer: Japanese do celebrate Christmas with KFC. It i
環境優雅，服務專業有禮．
食物有扳有眼，海鮮處理得很不錯．
適合慶祝紀念日．
Lovely Decor, Great Service;
Great news for French Cheese lovers!
Price reasonable for the quality;
British & French fusion?
Excellent Christmas experience.
It's Christmas:
I have to say I'm quite a boring person when it comes to celebrating festivities.
If Mr. USA and Ms. Malaysia hadn't booked this place for us on Christmas, I would have suggested the Colonel's Chicken to my wife instead.
(Cultural pointer: Japanese do celebrate Christmas with KFC. It is not an urban myth. You need prior booking if you need a bucket of chicken breasts. Great news for guys. No headaches.)
I'm glad they did. It was a lovely experience.
Lovely decor:
Located inside the Hulett House (ex-Royal Navy bases and HQ for the Royal Hong Kong Marine Police), it has a very elegant colonial feel to it.
It was smaller and cozier than expected. It had about 10 tables of different sizes:
Including bigger tables for bigger groups:
Christmas menu:
Nice and simple.One could choose a 3, 4 or 5 course menu (add HK$100 for each extra course.)
The drink list was pretty substantial. Mr. USA called the shots. We ordered white wine from South Africa as it's supposed to be good with turkey.
Mr. USA, Ms. Malaysia and Ms. Japan ordered:
(1) Oysters
(2) Turkey
(3) Desserts
I ordered:
(1) Terrine
(2) Chestnut soup;
(3) Fish fillet and
(4) Cheese platter (as requested, to share amongst us.)
Bread basket:
The pretty large baskets of bread were served to us with proper butter.
The bread were refreshingly fresh and crisp. I enjoyed the bread basket, especially the smaller one which looked like a fried "Man Tou" and another curly one which had cheese in it. Everyone enjoyed it. Amuse Bouche:
I finished these rather quickly before I could really identify what these were. The obvious one being a piece of parma ham on a small piece of fried dough and the small white stuff in a bowl was what seemed like mashed turnip. The other two were essentially biscuits-like items.Tuna roes and mash:
Well, it's a cold dish, and it does what it says on the tin. It's mashed potatoes with tuna roes placed on top of it. The mash was pretty smooth and the tuna roes were fresh too. Seafood:
My wife's set came with Brittany Oyster cut into little shreds, together with caviar decorated with edible gold and a few small slices of diced tuna.Everyone seemed to like the shredded oyster. I was initially quite skeptical about the act of cutting the oyster up. However, I had a small slice and the taste was very fresh. It certainly made it easier to eat.
I tried the tuna too. Like the oyster and the caviar before it, it's more about sampling different flavours than anything else. Very French indeed.
Chestnut soup with lobster from Maine:
Judging from the portion of the dish, you'd have guessed correctly that it's a dish I ordered.The soup and the lobster meat were served separately. The pan seared lobster meat were already on the plate. It's about the size of a tablespoon. The waiter than poured the chestnut soup from a silver teapot into the plate.
The lobsters from Maine (Boston) were meaty and flavourful. The soup really had a pretty strong chestnut taste. The texture was on the thick side. I have to say, the lobster and the chestnut didn't really have any chemistry with each other.
These two items could be served completely separately without affecting the taste of either of them. The lobsters were good and the chestnut soup had a nice and refreshingly sweet taste to it. No complaints.
More about the food after this song:
Rudolph the red nosed reindeer,
had a very shiny nose.
And if you ever saw him,
you would even say it glows.
All of the other reindeer
used to laugh and call him names.
They never let poor Rudolph
join in any reindeer games.
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
"Rudolph with your nose so bright,
won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"
Then all the reindeer loved him
as they shouted out with glee,
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer,
you'll go down in history!
Terrine:
Instead of having the Oyster, I ordered this:
Say Hi to Rudolph.
It's terrine made of venison (deer) and fois gras. Served with a piece of toast.
Everyone had a taste of Rudolph and really enjoyed it.
It didn't have a lot of fat mixed in this terrine so one could really taste the aromatic flavour of the venison.
The fois gras was also quite firm. The piece of toast that came with it was wonderfully grilled (?) .
Excellent with the terrine.
The sliced red object wasn't Rudolph's red red nose. It's a slice of beetroot with rasberry. Crunchy and tangy. It acted as a good palate cleanser before the main course.
Main course:
Turkey:
What else but turkey for a true Christmas experience?Usually, turkey isn't that popular in this part of the world becuase it's usually quite tough. However, I had a slice and it was both aromatic and tender.
According to Mr. USA, it might have been tenderized naturally (c.f. chemically) by injecting water into the meat, loosening the otherwise tough meat fibre. The effect was very good.
Furthermore, as far as I could recall, it was the first time I had truffels sliced like this.
It's quite a substantial amount. It had a strong, meaty and fungi taste to it. Very good match with the turkey.
Served with Brussels sprouts and French potatos.
Accoring to the friendly French manager, that's what he'd order for a Christmas lunch as well.
Fish:
In spite of overwhelming peer pressure to order turkey on Christmas day, I ordered fish. Not your standard Christmas lunch indeed.The batter was nice and crunchy. The filet was very fresh and tender. The taste was excellent.
The interesting white cube-like things were pan fried gnocchi ! Very interesting to eat. More dry and firm than the normal gnocchi but this goes well with the tender Atlantic sole.
According to the very friendly (and very diplomatic) French manager, this was his favorite dish À la carte too.
Say cheese:
Cheese platter is one of the items on the menu. Though I was quite hesitant about ordering cheese, I didn't mind ordering a plate for sharing since I don't have a sweet tooth anyway.
The rest of the table ordered desserts (chocolate cakes), which in my view was the boring but safe thing to do. The cheese here were really "hard core":
Don't ask me their names. Ask the manager. There is also a visual guide to "French Cheese" placed on the table at the entrance. Essentially, those were French farmed cheese, some from the Alps. One interesting item was the slightly green one. It's homemade by St. George! It had a lot of nuts and dried friuts in it.
There were two different types of goat cheese. One blue cheese. One aged cheese. The drop of white object was melted cheese aged in an oak cask.
The most I could handle was the aged cheese (the long thin one). That taste most simiar to cheddar. That's ok and good with my white wine.
The melted one was very popular with the ladies. They commented that it tasted like milk. It was gone before I had the chance to try it out.
The one with the orange bit was really, really - really, hardcore. I suppose the thing with cheese is NOT to smell it. Ms. Malaysia commented that it smelt like a d**d ra*.
I had about 3mm of the orange stuff and
I almost had to excuse myself from the hall immediately.
My wife could handle 1 cm of that.
Mr. USA stuffed the whole thing in - in one go.
Well done.
The bill came down to about HK$1,200 per head including two bottles of white wine (each for $400) and a bottle of dessert wine ($?)
This concluded a wonderful Christmas experience! Thanks again, M&Z!
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.
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Conclusion:
Elegant and cozy decor.
Very friendly and professional service.
Good food. Pretty good value for what you're getting.
A sommelier is there to assist with choosing your wine.
Highly recommended for cheese lovers!
Other Info. :
We later went off to have cigars at Spasso (to clear the cheese smell)! :P
(The above review is the personal opinion of a user which does not represent OpenRice's point of view.)
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