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2004-12-21
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The Food Forum in the Times Square is probably the most boisterous dining conglomeration in Hong Kong. Diners virtually clustered to there like moths around the flame (clichque but true). You can see a long queue lining up for lifts at the ground floor to get to various floors of this four-storied dining forum during peak dinner hours seven days a week. Chances are, even if you are lucky enough to survive the first one, it is likely for you to find another obstacle waiting in your dining quest:
The dcor of Chung’s Kitchen is very chic. The ceiling is heavily paneled with brownish wood and engraved with some mawkish Chinese poems. A rarity for Chinese restaurants is also evident: an open kitchen that’s scrupulously spick and span with an energetic fleet of young cooks showing off their culinary skills inside. All are reasonably styled to remind the diners one fact - they are eating in an upscale spot rather than in a mainstream homey teahouse –so that heftier prices can be charged accordingly. The leather-covered bilingual menu is extensive but not authentic. A glance of it proves there is something to cater the need of everyone, especially for foreigners who don’t know too much about the fare of Chinese food. In short: it is pretentious and expensive. This is not the place for Chinese food mavens: ten-minute strides to other ends of Causeway Bay will led you to some less showy restaurants that charge you half the price with Chinese cuisine that is twice as good.
Enough about the settings, lets talk about the food. The first dish we ordered the double boiled soup of lean pork and conch. While the main ingredients were self-descriptive, there was also a ladleful of other ingredients as well: in this case, the soup was boiled together with an abundance of Chinese wild yam, wolfberry and chicken feets. As you can see from the pictures, the ingredients were drained and placed on a dish to serve alone. It is very customary to do this in Hong Kong. The reasons why being: a) to testify the flavor of the soup is really came from these ingredients rather than from MSG, and hence worths every drip of its salt; and b) none wants to fritter away the ingredients. The flesh of the conch in particular is considered to be very prestigious. If this soup is cooked right, the sweetness from the lean pork as well as the freshness from the conch should anoint the soup with a spellbinding sweet flavor. But this one here failed to achieve so. The best take of this soup, in my opinion, comes from the Sheung Hing Restaurant in Sheung Wan.
The next dish, which in my opinion the best one in our dinner, was the soy sauce flavored chicken in clay pot. You may consider it a chicken casserole –the differences being this one is very dry with sauce and cooked very fast, instead of slowly simmered. The timing was good so that the meat was fresh and moist. The Tai Wing Wah in Yuen Long, however, is doing a much better job with this dish.
Another dish was the deep fried pork neck with sweet and sour sauce. Instead of the charcoal grilled pork neck that all we Hong Kongers are getting quite tired with, the kitchen adapted the sweet and sour pork nugget that uses the pork ribs and came up with this modification. It was original but isn’t good. Somehow, deep-frying the slices of pork neck and coating them with seasoned flour made them lost its tenderness. Pork neck, by all means, is best known for its tenderness among various cuts of pork. And where is the pineapple? As such, I’d rather they stay true to the classic.
The so-called Chinese style fried beef fillet was disastrous. The real Chinese style usually mixes the beef fillet with juliennes of kale and a smidgen of red peppers. But this kitchen decided to reinvent this dish and to mix the fillet with a big mush of curry and mustard jus. If anything, the fillet was over marinated with soda powder and the flavor of beef was all gone.
But my review of Chung’s Kitchen won’t be full without a complaint on the bizarre set up of the Chinese flatware. All the bowls were square in shape. Is there anyone fond of these Frankensteins out there but the designer himself? Bowl, I pray, evolved from any other shape to the round one in our Chinese culinary history for a good reason. All the chopsticks were round-shaped too and all of us in the table hated using these. None uses this kind of chopsticks at home in China. I can guarantee you these round-shaped chopsticks sell as good as the album of William Hung in Hong Kong (and all over the world, for that matter). With this flatware, even a well executed dinner can be spoiled .
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