Asia Flavours

Izakaya Misaki

Just when I think I'm starting to get there, another area of Hong Kong I've never heard of pops out of the woodwork - and, rather embarrassingly, I'm not talking about random bits of the New Territories which it's kind of excusable not to know. My latest "new" area is Tai Hang, a former fishing village within spitting distance of Causeway Bay. J.L. and I stumbled on Tai Hang on Saturday evening in pursuit of the rather impressive Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance Procession.  

After inhaling more incense than our lungs could possibly cope with we headed for Izakaya Misaki, a small Japanese restaurant in the heart of Tai Hang. The reviews on Openrice, I've subsequently learnt, haven't been that favourable but we had a great time - nice food, great service - and I'd definitely go back. 

We started with red clam sashimi which was tasty and beautifully presented on the clam shells. Then came what in my mind was the star of the show - the fire dragon roll. The middle part had been lightly battered and had this wonderful crunchy texture. It also tasted really delicious. The other star was the pumpkin tempura. The pumpkin was perfectly cooked and the tempura light and delicate. So good in fact that my friend C.L., who joined us after her family's Mid-Autumn Festival dinner, ordered a second helping!

The king crab claw was beautifully simple - so good that it didn't need any sauce - and the sea urchin sushi something that I tried because I'd always meant to but wouldn't necessarily rush back to. 

We didn't have any problems with excess mayonnaise - seemingly the issue that most people on Openrice were unhappy about - but the broiled mackerel salad did have excess dressing. The beautiful tasting marinated mackerel came on a bed of rather dull iceberg lettuce that was literally swimming in an oil/vinegar dressing. It was a shame because the mackerel was fantastic and would have benefited from a much more sophisticated lettuce bed. 

The guy running the show was fantastically enthusiastic and attentive which gave it a relaxed pub-like feel that an izakaya should have. Definitely a winner in my books.

2 Sun Chun Street
Tai Hang

Tel: 3488 5543

Modern Toilet"

Taking that good Yorkshire expression - "where there's muck there's brass" - to whole new levels, the Modern Toilet restaurant in Causeway Bay is, well, an interesting experience. Every single aspect of the restaurant has been themed from the decor to the crockery to the somewhat dubious descriptions of the dishes on the menu. 

Diners sit on full-sized toilets (padded to protect your derriere from what could otherwise be quite an uncomfortable experience) and at tables with ceramic sinks below the glass top; the walls are decorated with bathroom features such as tiles and shower heads. Even the crockery is themed with food served in miniature ceramic toilets or baths, and with drinks served in miniature ceramic urinals. They were probably the most disconcerting feature. For some reason, my mind started playing tricks on me and I started to smell things that simply weren't there - all of which made drinking my urinal of coke rather tricky! 

If toilet humour is your thing then I suggest going with someone who is able to read Chinese. The English translations say things like "Indian curry chicken" and "chocolate ice-cream" but the Chinese versions breach the boundaries of good taste with descriptions that are distinctly stomach-turning and graphic! 

I was expecting the food to be absolutely terrible and while it wasn't exactly going to win culinary awards, it wasn't totally inedible either. I opted for the Indian curry chicken while my friend C.L. chose the curry chicken gratin, both of which came with soup to start. The soup was pretty rubbish but the mains were standard, if somewhat stodgy, cheap'n'cheerful fare - and frankly, haute cuisine served in mini-toilets would have been a bit wrong. The clear star of the show was the "constipation ice-cream" which was absolutely ginormous - and which gave us a seriously extreme sugar rush because of all the jellies, sweets, sauces, red beans and biscuits, not to mention the poo-shaped ice-cream swirls ... extremely dangerous given C.L. and I were heading to Times Square for a spot of retail therapy afterwards. 

Not a great culinary experience but at HK$100 a head for soup, main, shared pudding and a drink, it's worth it for the sheer comedy value - and as an interesting insight into Taiwanese psyche!

Modern Toilet
Shop 4E, 4th Floor, Capitol Centre
5-19 Jardine's Bazaar
Causeway Bay

Tel: 28956288

The Farmhouse

The Farmhouse is a bit of a strange place. For starters, it's on the first floor of a commercial building with one of the most macho marble lobbies I've ever seen, the restaurant is so cold that they willingly give out thick woollen pashminas and there are shelves filled with dried bits of abalone that wouldn't look out of place in a dusty old museum... 

Despite the unusual surroundings, the food is pretty good although I'll admit that some of the dishes were a little bit too traditional for my liking, especially the "healthy" soup. 

The house-speciality are these rather genius deep-fried stuffed chicken wings which have been de-boned and stuffed with glutinous rice, seafood and mushrooms, among other things. They were definitely the star of the show. 

One of the other dishes we had was an egg-white with seafood mixture which was interesting although I have a fundamental problem with the consistency that I just don't seem to be able to get over. In my mind, these Cantonese egg-white dishes have the consistency of a pudding, not a main course. Combine it with bits of seafood and serious alarm bells start ringing in my mind...

The slow-cooked pork dish was divine but also about the least healthy dish ever invented. It just melted in your mouth. 

We had a couple of other dishes including a chicken with pineapple dish which were good and a couple that were not so great - the balance unfortunately falling slightly on the less-good side. For example, less interesting in my books was the "healthy" soup which we had - frankly a bit uninspired on the taste front, as was the plate of debris from the soup which we were presented with! While the soup may have been "healthy", the rest of the meal was definitely not healthy at all. Interesting but I'm not sure I'd rush back.... 

1/F, 18 Hysan Avenue

Causeway Bay 

Tel: 2881 41331

Bicho (9.0)

You're pretty much guaranteed to improve your chances of an authentic Japanese dining experience by picking a restaurant near to Sogo in Causeway Bay and Bicho has the advantage of being virtually on top of it. The intimate yakitori restaurant with its simple but excellent - and incredibly reasonably priced - food is on the 26th floor of a commercial building crammed full of more sushi restaurants than you could ever possibly visit. 

We ordered about three dishes each, having wolfed through the raw veggies provided at the start of the meal. We started on a slight damp note with the lychee and pork which we weren't totally sure about, mainly because neither component had a particularly strong flavour. However, things quickly improved. On the veggie front, the vegetable cake tempura was excellent and the aubergine with miso, delicious and interesting. The beef and the pork neck more than made up for the lychee/pork dish on the flavour front. The pork neck was fantastic - not at all fatty. Another slight disappointment were the stuffed chicken wings - the meat was beautifully cooked but the stuffing wasn't my thing. However, the tofu with sesame dressing was a great fresh accompaniment to the mains. 

The meat and vegetables were excellent but the star was the squid-ink coated fried udon noodles. Not only did they taste delicious but there was added comedy value in that everyone had temporary moments of Gothic-black lipstick or dirty pirate-teeth!

Small things, small minds and all that but I liked the little touches like the fact that you got to choose your own design of sake cup and that the dining experience was complemented by really helpful and cheerful staff. The other thing I liked was that we ordered three dishes each - which was plenty - and a bottle of house sake for HKD230 a head. Serious value. 

Continental Diamond Plaza

523-527 Hennessy Road

Causeway Bay

Tel: 28387022

Irori (7/10)

Irori is a great little restaurant. It's homestyle Japanese food at its best with a lively atmosphere and friendly, enthusiastic service. The restaurant itself is pretty small (with the lack of natural light making it seem even smaller) but the noise level means that you just don't notice that the tables are actually quite close together. 

Completely thrown by the seriously extensive and varied menu, we ended up ordering a little bit of everything. Some of the dishes like the salmon sashimi and cod with teriyaki sauce were excellent. The mixed tempura was beautifully light and non-greasy; the soft shell crab handroll that my friend KK had was apparently delicious. 

Almost as interesting as the successful dishes were the slightly odd ones we accumulated through our somewhat random ordering policy. The Japanese rice flour pizza was really tasty but wasn't going to make Italian pizza makers quake in their boots - it was almost impossible to speak for the five minutes it took to shift the sticky rice base from one side of the roof of your mouth to the other and back again. Then there were the really beautifully presented fermented soybeans. Frankly, an acquired taste and not one that any of us acquired, despite repeated attempts. Covered in quail egg yolk, they were seriously bitter with an aftertaste that made you physically squirm. 

Working out at just over HK$200 a head, including sake, it was very good value for money. 

2F, Bartlock Centre

3 Yiu Wa Street

Causeway Bay

Tel: 2838 5939

TakeHachi

Should you find yourself shopping in Causeway Bay and with a sudden urge for some good sashimi, this is the place. It's decor is dowdy to say the least but the food more than compensates for that. My foodie friend L.L. recommended it to me and as she has yet to be wrong when it comes to interesting restaurant choices, I was pretty confident it was going to be good. 

The menu gives you the choice between a larger single dish or a "lunch set" of two smaller ones. Either way, the meal comes with a salad, miso soup and in our case, a dish of unidentified seafood with chilli, all of which makes it extremely good value for money. Lunch also includes one of the best seafood egg custards (something I’m still struggling to get my head round as a concept - I keep expecting it to be sweet like normal egg custards but then it’s got lumps of seafood in it… odd). My sashimi dish was excellent - huge chunks of sashimi (tuna, salmon, prawn, yellowtail and others) - all for HKD 126. 

L.L. and N.W. both had the two dish options with the chopped fatty tuna winning rave reviews. L.L. was equally full of praise for the salmon and salmon roe option, feeling that the salmon roe at TakeHachi was particularly good (and indeed far better than that at SenRyo in the IFC which she feels is a bit disappointing). N.W. had the beef option which I think was probably a little safe but nonetheless tasty.

 
TakeHachi

2/F Henry House

40-42 Yun Ping Road

Causeway Bay

Tel: 28954178

Le Pain Grille

Off the back of a great lunch at Le Pain Grille a couple of months ago, we decided to re-visit the restaurant to celebrate my friend L.'s exciting new job. The experience was a serious disappointment.

On paper, the meal should have been fantastic. The restaurant, designed to look like a sophisticated, classic French bistro with a light, airy feel, was heaving. The menu looked great, covering all the typical French dishes you would expect. The staff were friendly and welcoming, and there seemed to be more than enough of them to go round despite the fact that the place was so busy. The problem was that every aspect fell disappointingly short of the expected standard.

A horribly stereotyped (but probably accurate) view of French waiters is that they are rather sniffy and rude when it comes to customers, but it is also usually true that they are incredibly professional and efficient. The waiters in Le Pain Grille were not at all sniffy or rude but unfortunately they were just not very good - seemingly regardless of whether English or Cantonese was used. For example, an orangina never turned up, an espresso arrived instead of a cappucino, the duck arrived with potato gratin, rather than the requested frites and then re-arrived with neither gratin nor frites and so on....

All would have been forgiven if the food had been up to scratch but, unfortunately, that fell short too. I had the Cassoulet des Landes, a traditional dish from the Landes area of France, south of Bordeaux. As expected, it was a tomato-based dish containing duck confit, pork belly, duck sausage and white kidney beans (otherwise known as cannellini beans). It tasted nice, especially the duck sausage, but was over-cooked and the duck was really not as tender as it should have been. This was a bit of a theme because N. wasn't convinced by her duck confit which she felt was a bit dry. As a random tangent, in case you were wondering, confit is a way of preserving meat through the process of curing with salt and then poaching in its own fat - not exactly a healthy experience but one that should make the meat particularly tender.

Unfortunately we made the crucial error of choosing the taster plate for pudding - consisting of creme brulee, profiteroles, chocolate cake, nougat ice-cream and apple tart. No chef should have let that creme brulee out of the kitchen. It was seriously over-cooked with an unpleasant rubbery consistency. The profiteroles were little better, the choux pastry feeling and looking stale. All-in-all, a bit of a disaster. The pudding section was only slightly rescued by the arrival of a complimentary chocolate/strawberry mousse cake. It wasn't the best cake in the world but was considerably better than the contents of the taster plate.

The thing that really annoyed me about this meal was that I had had such a good lunch there a couple of months ago. Perhaps the kitchen is better able to cope with lunch or perhaps it was just a bad day for them. Either way, it has put me off going back in a hurry.

Agnes B's Le Pain Grille
111 Leighton Road
Causeway Bay

Tel 2577 2718
Agnes B's Le Pain Grille

The Mon

You're not going to be blown away by the food at The Mon but the food is good enough, the decor interesting enough and the bill painless enough to warrant a return visit.

The restaurant is in the rather nondescript Goldmark Building in Causeway Bay. It looks nothing from the outside and indeed the communal areas are hardly inspired but step out of the lift and you step into a different world. Ok, so the decor is truly "done" in a verging on Disney-esque manner but it is at least interesting with all the dark wood, drapes and mood lighting.

The menu is pretty comprehensive with sushi and sashimi as well as plenty of cooked dishes. We started with the stir-fried clams with miso which were very nice, slightly sweet. The grilled eggplant was reasonably juicy and therefore felt quite healthy in comparison to everything else which we ordered. For example, the deep-fried crab coquette was great comfort food but was quite heavy and I suspect I would have struggled to finish another one. After a recent good experience with a rice stone pot at Mi Ga, the Korean restaurant upstairs from The Mon, I was disappointed by the blandness of the fried ginger pork with rice in a stone pot. Having said that, I suspect my enjoyment of the Mi Ga version probably had a lot to do with the chili sauce we added - it, too, would probably have been quite bland without it. The elusive omelette with crab meat finally arrived right at the end of the meal after we'd checked on its progress (the unsmiling waitress' explanation for the delay was that it took a long time to make an omelette from fresh ... um, really?). Still, as C. had predicted, the omelette was a high point of the meal, fresh tasting and slightly sweet so I'm glad we waited for it.

A low point of the meal though was the grumpy service. The staff seemed quite confused - forgetting the omlette and bringing the wrong bill, among other things - although one look at the website suggests that this may be company policy: they are still wishing viewers Merry Christmas (in June...)!

We were thoroughly full by the end and it came to only HKD300 for two. As such, it definitely counts as an interesting, great value restaurant for mid-week dining.

The Mon (bizarrely they use the sub-line "Japanese dining stage" ... somewhat pretentious, n'est pas?)
4/F The Goldmark
502 Hennessy Road
Tel: 2504 3313

Mi Ga Korean Restaurant

Today was a great day in that I had the opportunity to indulge, albeit not at the same time, in my two latest obessions: pu erh tea and Korean BBQ.

Pu erh is a slightly odd tasting drink - sort of earthy and damp - so it's a bit of a surprise to find myself addicted to it. To some extent, it's probably laughter therapy - even after multiple cups of tea, saying the name to myself phonetically still makes me chuckle... Yep, not very mature.

For the Korean BBQ fix, we tried Mi Ga in Causeway Bay. The restaurant is a stark contrast to my last experience of Korean BBQ at a very 'local' restaurant in Kowloon (the name of which escapes me). Mi Ga is modern, clean and well-lit with light wood furnishings. You should note at this point, when I say my 'last experience', what I really mean is my 'last and only experience' so I hold my hands up to not being anything of an expert in Korean food or the delights on kimchi.

The first obvious difference was that Mi Ga's dishes, especially the cold assortment to go with the BBQ, weren't spicy unlike those at the original place. From research it seems that this might be something to do with a north/south divide: the northern Koreans apparently use less salt and less red chili. Equally, it seems that kimchi can be made of, and seasoned with, just about anything going so frankly, it might be nothing to do with the north/south divide... I'm normally somewhat pathetic when it comes to 'spicy' food but I did prefer the spicier level at the original restaurant. Having said that, the food at Mi Ga was tasty, especially when the optional chili was added.

We had an assorted sea food BBQ which was good although the fact that the waiters dealt with the BBQ did mean that the boys weren't able to indulge their inner caveman instincts. For me, Korean BBQ is as much entertainment as it is about the food and so I prefer BBQs where you are left to your own devices. Better on the food front was the refreshing leek salad (one of the few veggie dishes on the menu) and the vegetable hot stone pot with rice which, with the added chili, was excellent - delightfully crunchy in consistency. Even the boys were full after all that so we probably didn't do the beef noodle hot pot justice and unfortunately it suffered in comparison to the rice stone pot, lacking the strong flavours (and probably the high fat content too!).

So I had a good meal but I didn't have any meat. One of my friends, V., went on a separate occasion and had some of the meat BBQ options. While she concurred about the leek salad and vegetable hot stone pot, she wasn't convinced by the spicy chicken she ordered. To some extent I think this probably highlights the flaw in Korean BBQs - they tend to be cheap meals which is fine but the dishes are often cuts of meat with only a marinade, if any sauce at all. As such, it would be better if the cost was more and the quality of meat higher. Still, fun once in a while...

Mi Ga Korean Restaurant
9/F Goldmark
502 Hennessy Road
Causeway Bay
Tel: 2576 2078