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2012-05-07
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This restaurant came highly recommended by a goof friend of ours as its counterpart in New York is one of her favourite.This is located at the new LHT Tower in Central, and is divided into two sections - outdoors and indoors with the reception sited at the top of the escalators. The staff member who assisted me in locating our table was actually quite helpless as another one was trying to use the only laptop available to make other reservations.I was then led to one of the round tables near the
This is located at the new LHT Tower in Central, and is divided into two sections - outdoors and indoors with the reception sited at the top of the escalators. The staff member who assisted me in locating our table was actually quite helpless as another one was trying to use the only laptop available to make other reservations.
I was then led to one of the round tables near the entrance which wasn't really an issue apart from the fact that it was much to small for three people - our knees were practically touching each other's. Fine for a couple but for a business lunch, such intimacy was far from ideal. With the lunchtime crowd, the high ceilings did nothing to make the noise more bearable. If one had wanted a little privacy one would have been quite disappointed with the closely packed tables.
We soon found out that no a la carte menu was available for lunch and we thus had to go for one of the set lunches. The setup of the menu looked somewhat complicated but it was actually quite simple once the waiting staff came over to explain. In addition to the buffet, one could opt for a soup, a pizza, a pasta or a main course, each as an additional item/price.
There were essentially two buffet tables, one for the salad, breads & cold cuts and one for desserts. The main buffet table had about a dozen different varieties of pesca antipasti and salad - some more appealing/tasty than others. There were three different types of bread and three cold cuts. But the time we got to the buffet at about 1:10pm, a good number of the items have already run out and we saw no sign of any staff replenishing them. As such I could not comment on a lot of the dishes (lingua with fennel and citrus peels, razor clams with fregula and basil, caponata, cipolla onions and balsamic). Cheese, what cheese? Most of them were pretty ordinary and bland but the ones that stood out are as follows:
- grissini - these bread sticks were crispy with a very balanced taste of cheese
- focaccia - these were rather ordinary with hardly any taste of the herbs sprinkled on the surface
- cucumber slices - these were most bland with hardly any flavour at all
- grilled peppers with anchovies - very yummy
- salami - not too salty nor chewy
- parma ham - a bit too dry to my liking as all the slices were left exposed individually
Two of us got to try the two soups on offer that particular day - mushroom and minestrone. Both these portions were small. My mushroom soup was thickish without the fragrance nor the taste of mushrooms. The minestrone looked acceptable but same again, size was small and the taste was balnd.
The smaller buffet table for desserts was actually well presented with a good variety for every taste bud. We had no issue in finding what we liked - fruits, lemon tarts, panna cotta, cinnamon amaretti cookies, and peanut butter cookies. Some of them have also run out - chocolate bread pudding, Bombolini with cream filling. The lemon tarts were of a good size and a fine balance of sourness and sweetness. The cookies were very impressive with just the right amount of chewiness/crispiness and the taste of individual flavours stood out well but not overbearing.
All in all, it was quite a chaotic experience, and the food was not something one would want to write home about. Oh, they didn't even bother to bring us any vinegar/olive oil nor salt/pepper.
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