Dai Pai Dong Encore

When our friend V proposed that we do a Dai Pai Dong run in the forgotten neighborhood of Shum Shui Po, I obliged. We had a great time on our last time out at the restaurant so all we need is just any excuse to go back there to eat. A few more later signed up to this plan and we fixed a Tuesday night to go.

Sneak Preview from the Kitchen

As our friend Fabrice is ready for his new post heading The Tasting Room in Macau after moving on from Caprice, we want to pay him a visit just to catch up, and CYY’s birthday in mid-May gave us the perfect excuse to spend a weekend in town as part of the celebration. So I let him know of our plan in advance and check whether the restaurant would be open then after being closed for the past few months for a makeover.

Old School Hangzhou

I am always on the fence about the food at Tin Heung Lau (天香樓), the old-school restaurant sitting in this quiet street in Tsimshatsui for as long as I remembered. Some friends swore by this humble-looking place serving the best Hanzhou cuisine in town, but from the couple of times that I went, it was a rather meh experience – pricey, apathetic service and quite ordinary in all aspects to be honest.

All Chicken!

An all-chicken Cantonese feast must be something we found it so hard to miss that despite a few last minute changes of plan, we finally made it at the end of April when most of us were free to go. We had a few decent meals at Kin’s Kitchen in Wanchai before so we were happy to be back for this special menu specially designed by Lau Kin-wai and Lau Chun, the father-son team who own the restaurant.

The New but Familiar One

I know what some of you might be thinking… Cheesecake Factory, really? Yeah, there’s really nothing much to blog about the food at this mainstream restaurant chain except the wide selection of delicious cheesecakes and a few other dishes, but the place always has a special place in our hearts. (I know that’s the cheesy way to put it – pun intended) So we were excited that the restaurant finally made its way to this side of the coast with its first outlet right in the heart of Hong Kong inside Harbour City TST.

Dom Perignon Part 2

Of course no one's going to say no to free-flowing champagne on a Sunday afternoon, let alone recent vintage of Dom Perignon. And that's what many of us got to enjoy with more food and drink on a recent weekend, when Ritz-Carlton re-launch their Sunday brunch at Ozone on top of the hotel at Level 118. After my Dom Perignon x On Dining dinner last month, consider this the sequel.

Stellar Shunde Meal

Stellar House is among the handful of new independent restaurants serving traditional Chinese cuisine in a cozy, contemporary setting, providing more fine-dining choices to the local dining scene in a space formerly occupied mostly by those Chinese restaurants inside upscale hotels.

Make-ahead Meat Dishes

From what the names suggest, pork rillettes and gyuniku shigureni sound like two dishes from entirely different worlds, but in reality they were surprisingly similar. Both were meat based and made use of only a small set of ingredients; both involved slow cooking to bring about the intense flavor, and both can be made ahead and served at room temperature (no reheating required!), which made them great candidates as part of a simple home-cooked meal.

Not just another dimsum lunch

I didn’t come to Lung King Heen for meals as often as I would like to, simply because there were way too many good Chinese restaurants around town than I had time to eat. But they do consistently delivered excellent dishes from a few times I was here over the years, including this one weekend afternoon recently when I met up with some foodie friends, joining them for their "quarterly meet-up" at the restaurant.

Travelling afar for breakfast

We took our new toy out for a spin on the last day of Easter long weekend and found ourselves in this unfamiliar neighborhood of Luk Keng Village at the north-eastern tip of Hong Kong early in the morning. It was a very pleasant drive actually with the clear sky and all (we finally got a moonroof! Woohoo!), and only took us slightly less than an hour from where we live, with the last bit though a picturesque two-lane road past the Tai Po country parks along the reservoirs and coastline with a bit of twists and turns until we almost reach the Hong Kong-China border at this rural village with far more visitors than residents on weekends and public holidays.

Barolo Night

We were at Giando one evening during the Easter long weekend for a wine-pairing dinner featuring a few bottles from Barolo with dishes of the cooking style from the same region. I have never been to the restaurant ever since they moved into the Star Street area, and I am glad to see they were as busy as ever with most of the tables filled when we arrived slightly before 8pm when the dinner was supposed to start.