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2013-10-03
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Cuisine Cuisine is one of those mightily pretentious places that has to tell you what it does - twice. Well Cuisine Cuisine, no no, bad bad… So up its own derrière (look, I can do pretentious too), that you have to either wait for a table until an exact time, or book to the minute, to gain entry through the hallowed doors of this mainly empty restaurant.Yes, walking up at 1.55pm on two different days, I was told to wait 20mins to precisely 2.15pm before I could get a table. The place was EMPTY a
Yes, walking up at 1.55pm on two different days, I was told to wait 20mins to precisely 2.15pm before I could get a table. The place was EMPTY and still I was being told to wait, so the only walking I did - was away.
One day out of sheer desperation for dim sum, I phoned ahead to make a booking, and was given the same exact time of 2.15pm. Again, on arrival I note the restaurant only 10% full.
So, once you get over the horrendous door policy (which Mrs PieEatingMan says makes about as much sense as getting into a Newport nightclub), the food is not that bad. Really, it is not that bad at all. Well presented (albeit a little fussy for my dim sum needs), tasty, a good variety, and some unexpected dishes that are not so common in HK.
However (and you knew it was coming), pork is NOT a vegetable! It really isn’t despite what a number of Chinese restaurants try to tell you. If it gives birth, I see it as being and animal.
Now, I speak both English and Cantonese, and made it very clear to the waiter that every dish had to be meat free. I asked for a description of each individual dish, and confirmed that each one had not meat. I did this in both English and Chinese. I was given may nods of approval and confirmation, perhaps I should have assumed that the waiter had a very loose neck and could only bob his head up and down like Zippy.
Unfortunately halfway through a vegetable dumpling, Mrs PieEatingMan bit into some “lap-cheong”, or dried pork sausage. We have established the pork is meat, have we not? When we confronted the same waiter, and now the maitre d’, their response was literally, “Oh, yeah. That’s meat. Yes, that has got meat in it.”. No apology, no explanation, just the “I don’t understand you, Chinese wall of silence”, which incidentally doesn’t work if you both speak the same language - it’s just rude. Needless to say, lunch ruined, we paid and left.
Mrs PieEatingMan did contact the restaurant afterwards, and they were totally apathetic with their apology. So much so, we shan’t be frequenting again anytime soon.
On a final and rather damning note, this restaurant serves sharks fin. I won’t overly preach, but Cuisine Cuisine, this is just plain wrong, wrong.
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