Should blue skies ever return to Hong Kong, you should immediately stop what you're doing and book a table at Cococabana, a stunning beach-side restaurant in Deep Water Bay. The view itself is well worth the trip to this al fresco restaurant and the excellent food an added bonus.
The restaurant is right on the beach and has great views across the bay to the hillside along which the Ocean Park cable-car runs. It's therefore a great place to watch the sun-setting, particularly as the subtle cable-car lights don't go off until quite late, highlighting the hillside against the black sky. Sounds idyllic right? Well, it is although, like most restaurants in Hong Kong, there is something slightly odd about its location. Usually it's the fact that it's a swish restaurant situated in a shopping mall or high up in a hum-drum office block but in this case, it's that it is situated on top of the public toilet block! Luckily, however, this fact is quickly forgotten as soon as you enter the restaurant!
In the evenings they offer a set three course menu for HK$390 which allows you anything from the extensive menu. I chose pan-fried fresh foie gras on a turnip confit with a balsamico sauce as my starter and was not disappointed. The slightly salty turnip beautifully complemented the stunning foie gras. Given we were by the sea I felt obligated to have some form of seafood as my main course and so I opted for the piri piri king prawns with garlic and chili on cous cous with tomato and shallot salad.
The prawns were perfectly cooked as was the cous cous - sounds silly to judge a restaurant on this because cous cous is so simple to cook but lots of restaurants cut corners turning it into either a single massive lump of cous cous or, even worse, a soggy mess.
My choice of main was good but I did get a little bit of food envy when I tasted my friend L.'s choice. She chose the John Dory with wind dried tomatoes which I have to say I overlooked because I felt it sounded a bit boring. Totally wrong, it tasted gorgeous. Still, I defeated the green eyed monster eventually...
I love coffee, I love chocolate and I love mascarpone which means that Tiramisu was pretty much designed with me in mind. Wonderfully they had tiramisu on the menu. However, I was totally gutted when I tasted it. It was an overly sweet cream desert with virtually no coffee flavour. It tasted good but shouldn't have been advertised as tiramisu. Some of my friends had the apple tart with vanilla ice cream which they enjoyed but they found the bits of apple skin in the desert a little off-putting.
Despite the mis-labeling of the tiramisu, I still think this is one of the nicest restaurants I've been to in Hong Kong.
Upper G/F Beach Building
Deep Water Bay
Tel: 2812 2226
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