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2010-10-24
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Found ourselves at the Convention Center, and went to this place to entertain out-of-town guests with good Chinese food.The ambiance was typical mid-scale Chinese restaurant, but not as large as most. White table linens, with no napkins (just a packaged wet-nap). The food was indeed good, but the service was not very foreigner-friendly. I suspect the root problem was that most of the staff had no ability to deal with English. They couldn't answer any basic questions. ("Does your Tsingtao
The ambiance was typical mid-scale Chinese restaurant, but not as large as most. White table linens, with no napkins (just a packaged wet-nap).
The food was indeed good, but the service was not very foreigner-friendly. I suspect the root problem was that most of the staff had no ability to deal with English. They couldn't answer any basic questions. ("Does your Tsingtao Beer come in bottles or cans?") When they directed one more senior waiter to our table, he was rather pushy to get us to order everything right away (no time for thinking). And of course he pushed an expensive steamed garoupa in our direction.
Later, it took three requests over about a 20-minute period before we could get a wine list.
And at the end of the meal, after we had finished our desserts, another waitress came by to push a dessert menu at us, and (probably because of language problems) did not seem to get that we had already ordered, and eaten, our desserts.
All in all, this place was depressingly typical of the declining English standards in HK's service sector.
All of that said, when the food came, it was delicious. We had:
Deep-fried bean curd squares: creamy and elegant inside, with a tasty deep-fried crust
Cold cucumber: Flavorful and fresh-tasting; not at all spicy.
Fried fish (sorry I can't remember which one -- it was on the 60 dollar "small plate" list). Succulent and flavorful, especially when dipped in the soy or flavoured salt accompaniment.
Steamed Garoupa: the outside parts were tender and had a nice flavor of soy and green onions. But we had the impression the fish was not steamed long enough, as the parts nearer the bone seemed to cling to the bone in a manner indicating they weren't cooked enough.
Prawns in black bean sauce: Good, not great
Kale with garlic: Yummy. Cooked enough to be soft, but still slightly crunchy.
Chinese sweet pancake for dessert: This was not the standard thin pancake filled with red bean paste. It was a thicker crepe (almost like a cheung fan), with a sweet dough, of course, and filled with nuts and sweetmeats. Quite tasty, and rather original.
The wine list was pretty expensive -- an ordinary Chablis for 450 dollars. Indeed the price of the whole meal was fairly steep -- including one bottle of house wine, we paid 550 per person.
So I would go back here for the food, but only if I could drag along a HK Chinese friend to do the interface routine.
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