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2013-10-05
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Last night I was drinking with a group of HKU people in Wan Chai and one of them, a local Hong Konger, suggested this place. I will say straight-up that the food here was fantastic. There was a significant wait time to get a table (~45 minutes) BUT this was mitigated by the fact that they gave us seats and free beer (!!!) for the wait and also we were a party of 10. They don't take reservations, so if you come, be prepared to wait, cuz it's popular.Ming Kee does have English menus, but I didn't
Ming Kee does have English menus, but I didn't do any of the ordering so I don't know the exact names of the dishes below.
The first dish that came was the fish cake. This was so good that we ordered it again. As you can tell from the picture, I had trouble getting a picture without someone grabbing more. It was just a fishcake, but the texture was perfect, it was really crispy on the outside, and the chili sauce it came with had some respectable heat. A+
I also highly recommend the spicy snails. First of all, they're pretty meaty. But I actually don't recommend the snails for the snails. They come in this chili and black bean sauce that is delicious and intensely spicy. I put it on rice and it was great. A+
We also had clams in a black bean sauce. They had way fewer chilis, but the sauce was still pretty good, and the clams were fresh and tender. B+
We had several fried things, all of which were pretty good. I think this was taro, though I can't say for sure (it was like taro, at least). Like the other fried things it came with a spicy (but not too spicy) and sweet dipping sauce. I liked this one reasonably well. B+
Again, I'm not absolutely sure about all the dishes, but I think this was fish maw (the swim bladder-- it's homologous to human lungs). This was my first fish maw, but I thought it was great-- nice and meaty and fried till crispy but not greasy. B+
Also my first chicken soft bone. Is it really bones? How do they do that? Mostly the texture was as of tendons or gristle. I can't really imagine why this is a thing, but hey, there was nothing bad about it. C
Also my first mantis shrimp. These aren't actually shrimp, but a related crustacean. The ones here were small in comparison to many I've seen, and they were pretty difficult to eat, and kind of unrewarding given the size. The meat's alright-- closer to lobster than shrimp, and the sauce it was put in was, as is par for this place, pretty tasty. B-
Oyster pancake: what can I say? Pretty standard rendition here. C+
We had three other dishes as well. The two not pictured were some plain noodles (nothing exciting) and fried pork in thousand island sauce (kind of gross if you ask me). The one here is some sort of vegetable, I don't know what it's name is. It was cooked until it was very wilty, but I sort of liked it that way. The broth it was cooked in seemed more flavorful than the standard corn-starch-and-chicken-broth thing they do at Cantonese places. I like it. B+As I said, the food here is fantastic. The dishes are small-ish (we had 13 for 10 people), but that's good-- you can order more things. The price is reasonable (we paid $120 or so a head, and we drank a fair amount of beer). It's probably a bit difficult to navigate with no Cantonese, but they do have an English menu. I loved the place. A
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Review Key: A, excellent; B, good; C, average; D, poor; F, terrible.
(The above review is the personal opinion of a user which does not represent OpenRice's point of view.)
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