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2016-02-02
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We arrived around 8pm, party of 2, on a Friday, with no reservations. I wasn't entirely sure we'd be able to get a table. The host told us we'd have to wait 40 minutes to an hour, but that we could do so at the bar, looking over the menu, having a drink, and ordering a starter. We were the only ones at the bar (good sign) and the bartender took us through the menu and made various recommendations from each section, some of which we wound up getting. About 10 minutes into our drinks, before we'd
As I said, it was a Friday night in LKF, and there were types. Y'know, like guys who shave their chest and wear very low-cut V-neck shirts and who talk louder than most people yell. We were seated between a table of shout-talkers and a table of people celebrating a birthday. It wasn't quite the concept chef Will Meyrick articulated on the Mama San website:
"An environment where people can feel comfortable to eat, try their hand at cooking or just lounge in a bar. Basically, not needing to leave the space until home time, whatever that time is."
I wish I had read that before going. Nobody invited me back to cook in the kitchen, and I didn't see anybody just lounging for hours, although they didn't tell us we had to give the table back at any time, so there's that. I mean, can I just go back and cook something? Has anyone tried that? Who eats it? Do I have to pay? What's the insurance for that like?
I've had Mama San on my list of places to go since it opened, but I always put it off. I guess I was skeptical of a place that does "Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Malay, Singaporean, Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese," according to their website. That's almost an entire continent and a subcontinent. (Inquiring minds want to know what Laos, Burma, and the Phillippines did to get the axe.) Anyway, here's what we had:
For all the other menu items, I'll give you the menu's description. As you'll see, the menu is not all that helpful. I can't give you the description for this one, because I can't figure out what it was. You see, this dish comes with uncooked rice paper roll wrappers and a bowl of warm water. You quickly cook the wrapper, then fill it with vegetables, sauce, and uncooked fish of some sort. If you go look at the menu, you'll see that nothing is even vaguely described like that. It was very good, whatever it was.
"Tuna betel leaves with lemongrass green tomato sambal matah and bumbu pasih" $22/ pc. Sambal matah is a type of raw sambal from Bali that's made with chilis, shallots, garlic, lime juice, lime leaves, lemongrass, and shrimp paste. Bumbu pasih is a spice paste for fish, and contains some of the same ingredients (shallots and chilis) but also ginger, turmeric, tamarind, and coriander. As you can tell from the list, there's lots of ingredients in this thing, and they're the powerful bold ones I like: chili, citrus, and species of the genus Allium. It's a fantastic flavor combination, and you get a big pile of tuna. I had to eat some with my fork before I was able to fold my betel leaf around it and taco it home. As far as price for quality/ quantity, this may be the best thing on the menu. Only $22 HKD for a big, flavorsome, satisfying pile of tuna. I'll take that any day: highly recommended.
"Crispy salt bush lamb with ginger coriander lemon segments and pomegranate sauce" $158. A saltbush lamb is a particular type of lamb (a dorper) raised in Australia's saltbush country. The marketing gimmick is "seasoned on the hoof"-- get it, it's because they eat so much salt. Anyway, this menu item was recommended by our bartender, and is also recommended by me. We were worried this would be a small amount of food, because the bartender said "three pieces" and nothing on the menu suggests the units of this dish. "Lamb." OK, a whole one? half of one? Anyway, I'm not a meat expert, but I'm going to guess this is shortribs. There's quite a lot of meat on the ribs, the outside is indeed crispy, and the inside extremely moist and tender lamb. Absolutely delicious.
"Crispy whole snapper with three-flavor sauce wild ginger turmeric pineapple chilli and tamarind" $228. We were in a fish mood and decided to go with the crispy snapper, as recommended by our bartender. The menu makes it fairly difficult to figure out what things actually are, omitting crucial information like "these are spring rolls" or "these are ribs" and hitting you with Indonesian terms you're not likely to know. Anyway, "three flavor sauce" is not very descriptive, and it's unclear whether the random list of things following it are the ingredients of the sauce or additional ingredients in the dish. So, admittedly taking all the fancy out of it, I would describe this as sweet and sour fish. The three flavors are sweet, sour, and spicy, and it's a little bit spicy. To be honest, I didn't really like it. It was altogether too sweet for me, and the fish wasn't really tender. I won't say that it was bad, and if you're into sweet sauces, this might be for you. I just wasn't feeling it.
"Dendeng balado caramelized short rib beef with pounded chilli kaffir lime & lemon basil." According to Wikipedia, dendeng balado "is a speciality from Padang, West Sumatra, made from beef which is thinly cut then dried and fried before adding chillies and other ingredients." That's not really what we got. The picture isn't very informative, I'm sorry. This dish was large chunks of beef in a sweet and sour sauce that was very similar to the sauce for the fish, and like the fish it was covered in fried basil.Quite frankly, I think part of why I didn't like the fish and also I didn't much like this was that they seemed to be the same dish, just one with beef and one with fish. The description doesn't sound like you're getting sweet and sour beef, but again, the menu likes to underinform. This was recommended by the bartender, and I believe he said it was their bestseller, so I'm apparently in the minority here. The beef was tender-ish in that you could kinda cut it with your fork, but it was a little dry and chewy too.
This is the drink I got, a "Black Stripe." It's "rum homemade ginger beer Palernum citrusdemirara" (I don't know why the menu writers are so allergic to commas.) I liked it. My wife described it as "Christmasy". Note that this picture is not after I drank half of it. What you see is what you get. And in a paper bag. $78
I'm giving this place a smiley. Admittedly, I didn't relly like the mains we ordered. But it strikes me that that was an accident. I absolutely loved all of the raw bar stuff and the starter. Out of all the other things I the menu, I just happened to order the things in sweet sauce, and that just happens to be something I'm not big on. It does temper my overall view of the restaurant, in that instead of thinking that it's amazing, I think it does some things amazingly. And that's OK, most restaurants don't even make it there. I would come back here, and I suspect I would wrestle with whether to order the same or different things from the early part of the menu, as I liked what we got from there so much.
One final comment: the service is very slow. I understand that they're busy, but everything took forever. Perhaps that's Meyrick's "lounge" concept in action: why don't you just "lounge" there while we take our sweet time with everything. Look Will, at a certain point in the night, it's just time to not be in LKF.
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