Asia Flavours

Fu Sing Shark Seafood Restaurant (9/10)

Why did no one tell me about this restaurant earlier? 

This unassuming restaurant has some of the best dim sum I've tried in Hong Kong. 

There is very little more I can say. The office block the restaurant is located in is all rather non-descript and the decor isn't going to win any awards but the food is fantastic. I think the photos say it all: 

WARNING: DO NOT VIEW THE FOLLOWING ON AN EMPTY STOMACH. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. 

1/F, Sunshine Plaza

353 Lockhart Road 

Wan Chai

Tel: 2893 0881

Dim Sum at the Shangri-la, Shenzhen

Dim sum at the Shang Palace in Shenzhen's Shangri-la Hotel was something of a Jekyll and Hyde experience. Some of the aspects like the decor and the steamed dumpings were outstanding and some, like the cha siu bao and the rice paper rolls, were severely underwhelming. Quite bizarrely, there was absolutely no middle ground whatsoever - it was all outstanding or severely underwhelming, nothing was simply "ok". 

The entrance to the restaurant is impressive - all sophisticated, moody dark reds and blacks with artsy features - and the service was very attentive. We started off with some red and green peppers stuffed with minced pork which were full of flavour and then a selection of steamed dumplings that were totally spot on. The pork and chive dumpling was particularly good although the prawn dumpling and the siu mai were so close that it was nearly a dead-heat as to my favourite. Had we ended the selection process there, it would have been an outstanding meal. 

Unfortunately, I'm a foreigner and therefore part of my genetic make-up means that I can't have a dim sum meal without a cha siu bao. When they arrived, they looked so good, all white and fluffy. But the taste... the taste was just plain odd. It was as if they had added honey to the mixture. The filling was overly sweet and, probably to compensate for the sickliness, there was a lot more bun than the filling required. Cha siu bao buns are not all that flavoursome in their own right and so  I was left totally unsatisfied by the experience. The other severely underwhelming dishes were the rice paper rolls, both the prawn one and the barbeque pork one. The filling was rather limited and the soy poured over the top just sort of disappeared without a trace into the roll itself. The result was basically a mouthful of thick flavourless rice paper. Island Tang's rice paper rolls have nothing to fear! 

It didn't inspire me to want to pop across just for a meal but if I was in Shenzhen again then I would probably head to the Shangri-la (if only to use the bathrooms after the griminess of the shopping mall). Frankly though, the trauma of all that excess form filling H1N1 red-tape at the border was enough to put any future trips across the border on hold until it's subsided...

Shangri-la Hotel

East Side, Railway Station

1002 Jianshe Road

Shenzhen 518001

(86 755) 8233 0888

Island Tang ... again (8/10)

My first experience of lunch at Island Tang was rather underwhelming. The sophisticated decor was great and the atmosphere lively with the buzz of a Parisian cafe, but the food was expensive and lacked an edge. I felt at the time that it might be the fault of the set menu, having a little bit of a churned out feel to it, so this time we made the point of sticking with the dim sum menu. It was a hundred times better. 

The menu isn't huge but is sufficient for a filing lunch, and the dim sum was fresh and flavoursome. In particular, the prawn rice paper rolls were excellent, filled with huge and juicy prawns. 

Surprisingly the bill wasn't as large as I'd expected (not that I'd go as far as to say that it was cheap - you pay for the setting). All in all, it's relative good value for a sophisticated dim sum lunch in a smart, sophisticated setting. Definitely a place to take visitors to in Hong Kong... 

Island Tang

Shop 222, The Galleria,

9 Queens Road Central

Tel: 2526 8798