Asia Flavours

The Green Mouse

I really like restaurants where the chef leaves the kitchen to chat to the diners. I don't want his or her life history but a short chat about the food is a simple touch which makes the whole dining experience that much more personal. When it occurred on Friday night, it immediately made dinner stand out.

The Green Mouse, a small French restaurant just off Hollywood Road, would not win any awards for decor but the noise levels are good and the service knowledgeable, friendly and attentive. The food is really very good too. In terms of options, there is a choice of a three or four course set menu, an a la carte menu or the tasting menu. We chose the seven-course tasting menu - something which I never thought I'd get through when I saw the size of the first few courses. Luckily, before I panicked too much, we realised that some of the courses were served together on the same plate. 

The fois gras was quite nice but the definite highlight of the first few courses was the lobster and prawn course. The flavours were delightful and the seafood cooked to perfection. Equally delightful was the scallop carpaccio which was melt in the mouth. On the theme of melt in the mouth, the steak, which came accompanied by duck breast, was beautiful and the vegetable sides really interesting. 

Perhaps the only slightly weak course was the pudding which came as a selection of little taster plates - the floating island was quite nice but I wasn't over-awed by the panna cotta or the clafoutis. 

Why anyone would name a restaurant after a small rodent that is the bain of any clean kitchen is somewhat beyond me but it was a nice dinner with excellent service. Definitely a bit of a winner.  

The Green Mouse
33 Peel Street
Tel: 25440389

La Bons Cafe (6/10)

I'd promised myself a bit of a stomach detox this week. The seemingly sensible decision to stick with smart restaurants in Cambodia had rather back-fired in one particular 5* hotel in Siem Reap and my stomach still hadn't forgiven me several days later. Unfortunately, the detox didn't quite go to plan - it turns out that I have absolutely no willpower whatsoever. The first problem that presented itself was Sunday brunch at the Mandarin Grill. I was completely powerless to resist the all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink food-fest. 

Then, the next day, with my stomach's festering grievances now getting close to boiling point, I was tempted into yet more over-indulgence. R.L. and S.J. had recommended a French restaurant in Wan Chai which they reckoned was a perfect credit-crunch friendly mid-week dinner place. All would have been well but somehow, when we got to La Bons Cafe on Ship Street, I just couldn't say no to the gooey chocolate pudding. Damn. Must try harder.

While the name of the cafe is a little questionable grammatically (perhaps some hidden ironic statement or an in joke?), the decor at La Bons Cafe is brilliantly French in that "I don't care about decor, it's all about the food" kind of way. What isn't so French, is the incredibly cheerful, polite service which greets you. For full authenticity, that is clearly something they are going to have to work on. 

The food is really pretty good, particularly considering the price. It's simple, homely cuisine, not perfect but not bad either. In keeping with the present theme of credit crunch carefulness, most of the main courses come as set meals with a salad or soup to start and tea or coffee afterwards. Ok, so the soup and salad are pretty nondescript but with most of the sets less than HKD 100, this can be forgiven. 

Although the chocolate pudding wasn't included in the price it was considered quite imperative by my dining companions. Anyway, true to form, it was excellent, if a little over-powering! Looking back at the other chocolate puddings I've had recently, this gives the considerably more expensive melted chocolate pudding at Jean-Georges on the Bund a real run for its money. Arghhh... getting hungry. Must stop spending time describing the puddings...!

La Bons Cafe

Ship Street

Wan Chai

La Fête - Private Kitchen (6/10)

I went to dinner at La Fête with a little bit of hesitation. We only went there because I couldn’t get a table at Gong Guan and we wanted to go to a conveniently located private kitchen. The review in the HK Magazine had been a bit ambivalent and while the occasion was fun, the food at the only other French private kitchen I’d been to, Le Blanc, was pretty poor.

My little bit of hesitation turned into quite serious regret when we arrived at the stated address and completely failed to find the entrance. The address was advertised as being St Francis Street but the door to the apartment block was locked and the intercom not working. All in all, not a good start. Anyway, eventually, after walking through a park to see if there was another entrance, we found the main entrance which was round the back of the building, nowhere near St Francis Street. Quite serious regret was now turning to abject fear of impending disaster.

With trepidation we walked into the dining room. The décor is quite similar to Le Blanc in terms of the obsession with household clutter and the enthusiasm for twigs attached to the ceiling but, unlike the private dining rooms of Le Blanc, La Fête has more of a bistro feel to it with good sized tables spread around the room. The tables were beautifully laid out in a rustic fashion with a large cold platter of shellfish as the centrepiece. As the attentive waiting staff hurriedly put our bottles of white into chill and brought us bread and pâté to start, my fears of culinary disaster started to subside.

Don’t get me wrong, the meal was not perfect but it was pretty good. The mountain of shellfish with the accompanying dressing of half olive oil and half crushed garlic was definitely the star of the show but the other five courses were also quite good - not haute cuisine but good rustic bistro fayre. The pork chops were particularly good, beautifully cooked and full of flavour. The only course which people weren’t convinced by was the mushroom soup which people felt was a bit take-it-or-leave-it.

At HKD 380 for six courses it represents pretty good value and was certainly significantly better than Le Blanc. My friend E.L. even rated it higher than Gong Guan - I can’t agree in terms of food but I do concede in terms of atmosphere and service. As with all these things, it is partly the company that makes a dining experience and it was a particularly raucous evening that night (mainly our table, admittedly) which probably added to the atmosphere. All in all, I’d say worth a try…

La Fête
1/F Block 3, Hoover Towers
15 St Francis Street
(but actually entrance on Kwong Ming Street)
Tel: 2893 5891

Le Blanc

I've been on a quest lately to find good places to host dinner parties - ones where hosting doesn't involve slaving over a hot stove or doing the endless washing up at three on the morning... So far, Gong Guan, with its visually stunning Shanghainese banquet, is winning in the Asian corner but from a European perspective, Le Blanc is holding its own. The food is not going to knock your socks off (unlike Gong Guan) but the venue is just brilliant, even if everyone did decide the decor was more Bavarian German than French...

The restaurant is a virtual rabbit warren of private rooms, each decorated with, well, to be honest, random stuff that was probably collected by the owner while on holiday and a load of tree branches from his garden for good measure. I've made it sound hideous but it really does work - it's like having a dinner party in a private den, the sort that the one from your childhood looked like (in your mind).

Unlike other private kitchens, it is not a set menu and indeed, I was quite surprised how lengthy the menu was - there were about 15 main courses. The fennel soup was good as were the mussels although I wasn't convinced by the creamed watercress in which my main course of seafood was sitting. That course probably wasn't aided by the fact that the central star, the king prawn, was seriously overcooked. By the time we got to the puddings I was somewhat defeated by the amount of food but the clafoutis wasn't that exciting so I didn't mind. To be honest, it's not the food that makes it such a great evening - it is the fact that you are in such a kooky relaxed private setting with a BYO policy meaning that the wine is flowing. The food takes a backseat. 

I'd heard reports of dodgy service but the service was good and they had a great system of marking each filled-in menu with a number representing where you were sitting - at least, it was a good system until in a fit of over-enthusiasm I set my menu on fire and burnt off the number. Still, it all worked out well in the end...

Le Blanc
6/F, 83 Wan Chai Road
Tel: 3428 5824

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