Asia Flavours

Under Bridge Spicy Crab

This is a place for the tourists - and locals if they don't have westerners with them.

We walked into the restaurant and were immediately pounced upon by a woman who wanted us to buy two crabs for HKD1,800. Now, I'm sure they were excellent crabs, freshly flown in from Australia, but still, it was the way they pushed them onto us like this was the only option. We'd just come for a quick bite after work and really didn't want to spend that much money on two crabs.

By this point feeling suspicious about everything the waiters told us, we were assisted by the table next to us who suggested the set menu they'd had. The set menu for five was basically enough to feed about two people. Needless to say, no one was that happy. The "super big prawns" were big but they only gave us two of them. They piled the deep-fried chili garlic on top but there is only so much of that you can eat. The clams which came in a thick sort of gravy were perfectly pleasant but the fried pak choi and noodles were seriously oily. There was a pot of unidentified offal which was a bit slimy and frankly, was less than inspiring. The only other dish included in our set menu were two deep-fried crabs with chili and garlic. Very small crabs. Without any crab meat in the body of the shell. And four tonnes of deep-fried chili garlic piled on top to disguise the serious lack of substance.

All-in-all, not somewhere I'd go back to.

Under Bridge Spicy Crab
Lockhart Road, Wan Chai

Lei Gardens

With friends from the UK in town, we wanted to go to a traditional Chinese restaurant (rather than one more aimed at westerners). We decided upon Lei Gardens in Wan Chai which, as promised, was heaving with HK locals. Indeed, there were certain (not unsurmountable) challenges to being a non-Canto speaker when dining at Lei Gardens.

The restaurant setting is slightly odd in that the dining room is just off the lobby of an office building. Indeed, the toilets are not actually specific to the restaurant but are back out across the lobby. Still, HK is a slightly odd place like that with restaurants often located in shopping malls and several levels up in office tower blocks.

The first thing you notice when you enter are the fish tanks and in particular, the one brute of a fish that seems to take up most of the space. Other than the fish and assorted crustacians, the interior design is seriously uninspired - an assortment of insipid colours decking out the walls, tables and waiters' uniforms. I suspect that the sheer size of the room doesn't help but still...

We failed to be organised enough to pre-order Peking Duck so we had an assortment of fish, chicken, pork and vegetable dishes. Rather accidentally we ended up ordering two dishes - pork cooked in a claypot with ginger, shallots, garlic and chili, and chicken cooked in a claypot with blackbean and spring onion - which, while tasty, were virtually identical. We also tried fish in a crisp chinese tempura (our Canto didn't extend to what sort of fish it was) and pak choi stir-fried with garlic.

All good but the stars of the show were definitely the deserts - a real surprise to me because I've never really enjoyed Chinese puddings to date and I absolutely cannot stand glutinous rice. We started with lotus paste buns made of the same bread as char siu bao (the BBQ pork dim sum buns) which were lovely, not too sweet. Then we tried peanut glutinous rice dumplings with sesame paste. Now I know what I said about hating glutinous rice but this was so glutinous that you couldn't tell there was rice involved. The peanut dusting on the outside was a lovely contrast to the glutinous rice and the sweet sesame filing.

Overall it was a good meal (and excellent value as we didn't have any unusual ingredients like abalone). Next stop, the IFC version of Lei Gardens.

Lei Gardens
Wan Chai