From left: South East, NASH, Triple B sliders

Having got that off your chest, Sip & Slide’s Triple B slider is covered in luscious melted American cheese, ultimate burger cheese, bar none. The colour of orange plastic seating in Department of Motor Vehicles waiting rooms, its plastic-laminate blandness is burger-perfect. You love it. When it comes to burgers, it’s your belief that the kind of cheese that wears a tilted beret is unsuited. You don’t worship at the altar of Wagyu beef, but their burger is made from Wagyu custom-blended with several other cuts, and it is undeniably one of the most delicious (if not, the most delicious) burgers you’ve ever had. Ground beef is difficult to cook just right, almost always overdone. By some genius, they ideally cook it to medium rare so that at the very centre it’s between pink and red. There’s a salty, smoky, crispy piece of Parma ham on top of the meat, as though a Frisbee landed on its noggin. There’s beetroot jam that is innovative and completely works. Lettuce brings good snap. Superb!

This slider (and all their sliders) are served on perfect brioche-like rolls, made with Japanese flour, both light and robust. You don’t know if Japanese flour is better than American or Chinese flour, but this shows that they are fine-focused on even the littlest details of their operation. If a Tesla turned into a slider bun, this is what you’d get.

The fried chicken on their NASH (short for “Nashville hot“) slider has a terrific ultra-crunchy, nubbled crust made from plain flour and cornflour. It is perfection. As some are fearful of snakes, you are fearful of biting into chicken cartilage, but their dark-meat chicken (which they custom-brine) is cartilage free and cooked perfectly. It is superbly contrasted by crunchy pickles and shredded purple cabbage, ranch and spicy oil. Your touchstone for fried chicken slider excellence has long been the version at Bakehouse, and this, though smaller, equals it.

Their South East – cousin to a banh mi – is filled with a good portion of pork neck, which is one of your favourite meats. Your great fear is that this cut of meat will be discovered as skirt steak has been (consequent to the popularity of fajitas) and become hard-to-find-crazy-expensive. It’s crunched up with slivered carrot and green papaya in the manner of Vietnamese salads. The sauce – sweet, salty, spicy – is in the manner of a green papaya salad as well. Original! Commendable! Scrumptious!

From left: Peking Quack and Miso Sakana sliders

Their Miso Sakana is basa fish, similar to cod, glazed with miso and apple, cooked perfectly. All the other sliders are pretty, but this one is particularly artful in its presentation, with the cucumber folded like a bow tie. There’s a great melange of crunchy veg. This is a restaurant that always layers flavours and textures with keen thoughtfulness.

Their Peking Quack is the prettiest of a pretty lot, capped by a perfect sunny-side-up quail egg, and while you don’t dislike it, it is the one you like least. It’s made with pulled duck in a sauce that is so hoisin rich, you can’t taste the duck. It might as well be chicken. What this dish needs is excellent duck confit (so easy to make), barely sauced (if at all), so that its ducky taste can come through. The skin should be salted and left on to amp the flavour. Probably your average HK BBQ duck would work just as well. The key is not to drown the delicate duck flavour.

You are not as excited by their sides as their slides. The yuba yuzu fettucine is based on ribbons of tofu skin. You like the sauce, which is made from soy sauce, yuzu purée and rice vinegar (with chopped scallion, crisp garlic granules and mint). And you like the mushrooms (shiitake, you think), but it simply isn’t as delicious as traditional noodles of some sort or another. It lacks chew. In your view, silver needle noodles would be ideal here. You admire the risk-taking to go this route, but it doesn’t work for you.

Nor does the mac and cheese. The truffled breadcrumb topping is great. But the macaroni seems flimsy. It needs a sturdier Italian pasta with significant bite. And you’d like a much more creamy, cheesy sauce.

You had a rosemary and passion-fruit gin rickey, minus the gin because their liquor licence hadn’t come through yet. You adored the passion fruit, couldn’t taste any rosemary and thought it was a bit too sweet. To be fair, when they add in the gin, it will probably come out just right.

Their iced oooolong ginger tea is extremely refreshing, its tannins nicely counterbalancing the unctuous mains and sides.

Having grown up in New York, you won’t give your heart away to just any cheesecake that comes knocking at your door with a come-hither look in her eyes, even if they’re scantily clad in nothing more than yuzu sauce. But to theirs – a New York yuzu cheesecake – you will. Commonly too dry and too dense, this was neither. It was like a sumo wrestler, both fatty and, somehow, at the same time, buff. You recommend it.

Whereas Wingman (by the same owners) played great 70s pop, including the classic Curtis Mayfield gems “Freddie’s Dead” and “Superfly”, all you heard here was rap. One of the songs had a lot to say about “homies” and “bitches”, by which you hope they mean female dogs. Words make a difference in shaping people’s views. Honestly, it’s a toxic word, and it should not be given a forum.

The service had the amble of a family meal, but at a restaurant of this sort, at this price point, that’s quite fine. The servers were warm and personable, which you appreciated.

Though casual as a tracksuit, Sip & Slide still pays meticulous attention to the myriad details of serious cuisine. All the ingredients are pristine. In addition to each slider’s central item, there is a notably wide and interesting palette of embellishments, mainly vegetal. They’re particularly attentive to contrasting textures and colours. Almost every slider (and the mac and cheese) has a layer of crunch. Each dish is unique and deeply thought out, informed by cheffy intelligence and an artful eye. There are outstanding flavour accents, such as wasabi mayo and hot oil, that help to make the food sing. They approach their food creation not as emulators but as innovators, which you quite admire. The prices are low – two sliders at $98, a dozen for $558.

Certainly Sip & Slide is fine for dates, but you think it would also be great with kids and pals. Unlike most restaurants that are organised by type of cuisine, this is organised by type of dish: sliders. And then it runs the gamut of cuisines. It took discernment to identify this niche. It took sharp intelligence and technical virtuosity to fill it. They’ve done so with excellence.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 4

Ambience: 2.5

Service: 3

Overall greatness: 4

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

This meal was comped.

5/F, Cheung Hing Commercial Building, 37–43 Cochrane Street, Central, 5171 6796, book online

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Sip & Slide appeared first on Foodie.

It never was.

You think that so-called “creative cocktails” are often made the same way. Like a chef throwing fancy ingredients at a dish (recently, you had caviar and truffle on a lamb chop), some mixologists try to overawe with a multitude of fancy spirits. So you get cocktails loaded with stuff like Elephant sloe gin, St George absinthe, Regan’s orange bitters, Zubrowka bison grass vodka, oolong tea and Kimino yuzu soda. And you get wild garnishes (burning cinnamon sticks seem to be in vogue). But in your experience, if you put aside the razzle-dazzle, these drinks are usually insipid. There are brilliant exceptions, of course. But you think most creative cocktails – some now available canned – taste vaguely fruity and sweet, a lot like watered-down Life Savers. With all the designer liqueurs, liquors, sodas, bitters and teas thrown in and listed, most also strike you as pretentious, a form of liquid name-dropping.

Smug in your superior understanding, you journeyed to The Old Man in Central, a bar that was rated the best bar in Asia a few years back and that you heard takes inspiration from Ernest Hemingway. The Hemingway bit – which struck you as an attempt to confer his juju on themselves – reinforced your ‘tude.

Down a set of stairs, hidden from the road, it was difficult to find. This gave The Old Man a sense of exclusivity you couldn’t help liking. You also immediately liked the interior, dim, snug, comforting, comfortable, vibey for romance. Like the prep counter at a Cold Stone ice-cream shop, a chilled metal surface for your drinks ran the centre of the bar.

The bartender was backdropped by Willy Wonka machinery and had the aura of a necromancer.

You started with a drink called A Moveable Feast, a kind of transparent Bloody Mary. They just activated a new menu, and this is a popular holdover from before. A Bloody Mary is a good drink, but not so great that you’d choose it as your last drink before they strap you into Old Sparky. Just one sip of this drink though and your mind changed. A Moveable Feast is exactly the drink you want before they strap you into Old Sparky. It knocked you on your tuchus, awestruck.

The mixology here is at the extraordinary level of Elon-Musk-flip-the-rocket-and-land-it, staggering complexity to give the illusion of elegant simplicity, daunting to capture in words. The nucleus of this drink is a) tomato water. In your experience, it’s made by puréeing tomatoes and putting them in a cheesecloth in order for the clear, intensely flavourful plasma to drip through. The Old Man vastly improves this process by using a centrifuge. They use flavour-intense cherry tomatoes with Tabasco and Worcester sauce (you’ve already been on Amazon looking for kitchen centrifuges with a notion of trying to duplicate this). This is mixed with b) fresh clams cooked in a rotovap (a rotary evaporator that is a kind of distillation machine) with vodka and three different salts, c) centrifuged fresh lemon juice, d) sweetened and salted coconut water. Finally, e) the drink lists “oyster” as an ingredient, which is sly. It is oyster, not the crustacean but the leaf, oyster leaf, which tastes astonishingly just like an oyster. You’ve never heard (or conceived) of such a leaf before, and if you hadn’t tasted it, you’d scoff. You take a bite of the improbably flavoured leaf and then a sip of the drink. It’s served in a smallish glass with a large, square, transparent ice cube. No easy thing to make transparent ice cubes, but they do it here. Ultra tomatoey! Ravishingly delicious! Elegant as a young John Travolta in a tuxedo at the White House dancing with Princess Diana! And, like almost all the cocktails here, $120 – an excellent deal.

You drank many drinks, and given the complexity of each (plus the cumulative alcohol), describing them strains your literary biceps. Yet “yours not to make reply, yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die,” you’ll briefly take a go at a few more.

Dreams of Lions. The old man in The Old Man and the Sea would often dream of lions he’d seen walking on the beaches of Africa when he was a young man, one of your favourite literary images. To you, it evocatively conjures sentinels patrolling the margin between two unknowns. As though walking the battlements of a castle, the lions overlook the mystery of infinitude. Can this drink possibly equal such genius? Yes!

One of the major ingredients is a low-alcohol brew from rye bread fermented in water. Rum is cooked with scamorza cheese and strained, which somehow imparts smokiness. Clove, coriander, dill seed are added. Coffee and cacao nibs infuse their flavour. Somehow banana makes its way in. It’s boiled with milk and lemon juice, which curdles it, and is then strained to remove the colour, which reminds you of adding whipped egg white to a stock and straining it through a cheesecloth in order to clarify it. Then, in a daring stroke of brilliance, a wooden cap is put in place with a hole in the centre and a small applewood fire is started. The smoke goes into the glass. Before drinking it, you eat a homemade candy of miso caramel wrapped in rice paper as a kind of taste and texture segue. Had you not had this drink, you would have thought it was pretentious, silly and fussy, a joke. In fact, it sounds like the basis of a Saturday Night Live parody skit. Having had the drink though, you can only say, forgive the cliché, you’re blown away. Your wife tries to get more than her share. So do you. Only advanced conflict resolution settles things. You both adore it.

Doomsday also has a fire. In this case, it’s sandalwool-infused steel wool. When it lights up, it looks like a nebula in outer space dying, stars flashing, supernova and blinking out. Or an MRI of the brain of someone having a seizure, flashes of neurons lit brightly and carbonised darkness. Or Doomsday. It’s dramatic! And satisfying to your inner pyromaniac.

Vetiver, an Indian root, is infused in rye. Sherry is infused with grapefruit and jasmine flowers. Gum syrup is made from tonka beans, which brings a slight viscosity to the drink. The fire is started on a lid with a hole in it, leaving its exhaust lingering above the liquid like chimney smoke on a pond. The drink exceeds excellent. Miraculous is apt.

Sustained by excellent potato chips replenished attentively (the bar is too small for a kitchen), you have many other drinks. All were standouts – proof of how utterly wrong preconceived notions can be – but a few were particularly striking.

Lost Generation. There’s a cold mango daquiri below and a hot coconut crème brûlée on top. The mango is fermented with Cascade hops and infused with cheese-gum syrup. Brazil nut is shaved on top, and it’s spritzed with a perfume of pink guava. The contrast of temperatures reminds you of putting your cold hands inside warm mittens. You love the contrast in flavours and temperatures. It’s delicious and comforting.

Wax Puppy. It is redolent of mushroom. The mushroom has been lacto-fermented, which somehow brings forth its woodland essence. House-made soy caramel is added to vermouth and centrifuged. Irish whiskey, bergamot and black pepper are added. Their goal is to “capture the feel of a morning forest after the rain”. Though your wife doesn’t care for the drink, you adore it. The flavour profile is unlike any other you’ve ever had. Deeply evocative of old forest and the ferment of autumn, it is a contemplative sipper. It is the cocktail that woodland elves drink at elf bars. Good Lord, how did they think this up?

Solitary Man. This is a Bellini made with patchouli distilled with Scotch and black pepper, plus fermented peach. Marzipan somehow finds its way in. It is garnished with fresh tarragon and one of the most delicious fruits you have ever eaten, a Japanese baby peach. By far, the best Bellini you’ve ever had.

Over the Hill. The entire glass is dusted with tart, delicious plum powder, which makes the glass itself delicious. There is grappa with plum seed, marigold flower, lime cordial, orange liqueur, Sichuan baijiu (a highly alcoholic Chinese liquor), champagne. The simple garnish is an Indonesian plum that is as insanely delicious as the Japanese peach.

And on and on. Each drink phenomenal. Each an epiphany. Each immensely clever, not for the sake of cleverness, but to illuminate tastes most of us can’t begin to fathom.

How does this relate to Hemingway? Hemingway surely loved to tilt a few. And, a bon vivant, he was discerning about what he tilted. Partaking of this spirit, the restaurant’s name pays tribute to the book that prompted his Nobel Prize, The Old Man and the Sea.

The problem with writing this review is that it has required you to use so many superlatives that they lose potency. But that doesn’t negate the truth that this is an extraordinary bar. Perhaps it requires Hemingway’s prose to do it justice. Its drinks combine a knowledge of food chemistry, an encyclopedic knowledge of alcoholic and non-alcoholic libations, incandescent imagination and poetry. In anything but the hands of a master, the ingredients used to make these drinks would yield swill.

Each drink served here contains within it a rare, spiritual ingredient that is not found elsewhere. Perhaps it’s the ingredients that are responsible for making them extraordinary: lions overlooking the mystery of infinitude.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Drinks: 5

Ambience: 5

Service: 5

Overall greatness: 5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

The drinks were comped.

LG/F, 37 Aberdeen Street, SoHo, Central, 2703 1899

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… The Old Man appeared first on Foodie.

You visited twice before, and they were closed. Wanting to go there when they were open, you called to ask about their hours. And they hung up on you. They don’t speak English. This whet your appetite.

The name of the restaurant is problematic. The sign outside the place is in Chinese (老川皇), which you can’t read. You picked up this name, Lao Chuan Huang, from TripAdvisor. You see it nowhere else. So it’s possible the name is different or untranslatable.

The menu is just the sort you love, with photos of each dish. Some have English names, but others are only Chinese. When you asked the servers what they were, they not only couldn’t respond because they don’t speak English, but they clearly had no interest in responding. You sensed that this was because they had no interest in someone who would ask such elementary questions. Having grown up with the rude waiters at NYC Jewish delis, you found all of the above charming. You like folks who know their own minds. You don’t need to be pals. If you’re looking for pals, join a quilting circle.

Your gang of four ordered so much food that they moved you from a table for four to a table for six in order to hold the bounty. You think you ordered 12 dishes in total and four large Tsingtaos (and rice), and the cost for the whole shooting match was $960, super cheap, just what you dream of. Main courses at a number of restaurants in town cost more than this.

Smoked fresh bamboo shoots with smoked beef. Amazing amazing amazing. You liked it so much that you ordered a second helping. No food at a three-star Michelin is more delicious than this.

Sizzling lamb. Thinly sliced lamb with cumin. Crazy good.

Sizzling squid keel. Squid tentacles and onion and other stuff, all in a cuminy sauce. It’s worth playing Squid Game for their squid keel. You loved it.

Sour beans with pork. Long beans, chopped into short segments, pickled (you think), served with ground pork. Scrumptious. Startling in its uniqueness.

All of the above dishes are good enough to warrant a trip here just by themselves.

Deep-fried boneless chicken chunks with lots of dried chilli peppers. You wish it had contained peanuts or cashews and cloves of garlic and scallion. But this is one of the better versions of this dish you’ve had, rich in Sichuan peppercorns, which brought a delightful citrus element. Very good, but shy of excellent.

Cold slices of pork belly slathered in garlic sauce on top of slivered cucumber. The sauce had a large element of vinegar and some sweetness. You liked this dish, but you wish they’d used less fatty pork.

Potstickers with a pork-chive filling. The filling was great. But you were disappointed by the pre-made dumpling skins. Okay at best.

Sesame noodles. Pretty good, but nowhere near Golden Glove.

Homemade mung-bean noodles. Not as good as Sichuan Lab’s (because they weren’t as chewy), though you really liked the chilli-crisp sauce. Somehow it managed to be deeply flavourful without overbearing heat.

A pancake. Like a scallion pancake, but without the scallion. Good enough.

Smoked duck. Good, but not close to the best versions of this you’ve ever had (such as the camphor duck at Wing Lai Yuen), which are more redolent of smoke. Nor did it come with steamed buns, which is how you like it.

The place is clean and spare. Puppy videos, proven by science to be more therapeutic than talk or drug therapy, play constantly on wall-mounted flat screens. So perhaps you could deduct a meal here as a medical expense. The menu is quite extensive, worthy of multiple exploratory missions.

You wouldn’t say that this is your favourite Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong, but you’d rank it with your other top faves: Liao Za Lie, Lao Zhang Gui Dongbei, Wing Lai Yuen and Tan’s Gourmet (and Café Hunan and Hu Nan Heen, which you love, though they are too spicy for your wife). You think it’s probably the cheapest of the bunch.

This is real foodie territory. If you want to be smacked upside the head with deliciousness but don’t want to overpay for the privilege, it’s vital you come here. Vital! Seriously, get off your booty and do it. It’s the meaning of life.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 4

Ambience: 2

Service: 1

Overall greatness: 4

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

114 Portland Street, Mongkok, 2730 8881

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Lao Chuan Huang appeared first on Foodie.

Their French fries were not amongst the best you’ve ever had. They were the best. Though just double-fried, they somehow managed to outclass the excellent triple-fried bad characters at Jean May and Rubia. You don’t know how they did it, but it’s undeniable (you wonder if there was some kind of coating on them that enhanced their crispness. No one could tell you). They came hot, greaseless, with extravagantly flavourful truffled mayonnaise. Tour de force!

Your meal actually started with polpo alla griglia (grilled octopus) and affettati e formaggi (platter of Italian cold cuts and cheese). The grilled octopus, served with salad, was quite good, but you’re almost positive it wasn’t done over charcoal, which would have lofted it higher. Nor was it crisped, charred or blistered lightly, which is what you believe this dish requires for maximum flavour, as they do it at Machneyuda – where the servers match you drink for drink – in Jerusalem. There was a romesco sauce with it that you liked so much you wanted more.

The cold cuts, mortadella, prosciutto, pepperoni, were excellent standard fare. There were two cheeses that you thought were too mild and too similar. On the side were wonderful pearl onions slow-cooked in balsamic vinegar (you think) that at first you mistook for stewed figs because they were so sweet.

Still, their hand-sliced Ibérico ham would probably have been a more interesting choice. You could see its hoof peeking over the windowsill of the glass-enclosed kitchen, beckoning you.

The bread was only fair, nowhere near killer like Amber’s or Levain’s or Bakehouse’s or Brut’s or MONO’s. This surprised you, given this restaurant’s bakery chops.

For the meat courses, they gave you a box of knives from which to choose. Your knives were sharp and had heft, which you liked.

Your wife ordered Wagyu al foie gras (filet mignon medium rare with seared foie gras in a blackcurrant sauce). The dish didn’t click. Ordered medium rare, it came (as confirmed by your gracious server) medium well done, which by itself will ruin any fine piece of meat. The foie gras was slightly overcooked (it should have come au point) and oddly flavourless, which was baffling. There was also some sinew remaining in it that put your wife off. The sauce was too sweet and the taste of blackcurrant indistinct. Some fresh currants strewn over at the last moment would have helped in this respect.

You had costata di agnello al pistacchio (rack of lamb crusted with chopped pistachio), plated artfully with a melange of vegetables and mashed potato. You asked for the lamb medium rare, but it came medium (probably because it kept cooking on the plate from residual heat), which may seem trivial, but it isn’t. The sauce, based on some kind of reduction, was tasty though not memorable, as were all the other components. Doneness aside, the dish was good, not great. A more interesting sauce – for instance, mint – would have done it wonders.

You felt the food could use more salt. In fact, salt might have been the missing ingredient necessary to enliven the foie gras. There’s no salt (or pepper) provided on the table. Instead, they bring an elegant glass cloche containing a stone of pink Himalayan salt that looks like an idol in a shrine. The server dons black gloves (salt-grating gloves?) and grates it onto a plate, which they then pour over the food. The restaurant clearly has ambitions of elegance with this, but the process is far too clunky. By the time you flag down a server, they don gloves, bring the salt over, grate it onto a plate and pour it on your food, your food has cooled. And then, what if you want more salt? The process must repeat. A salt grinder or small bowl of salt really belongs on the table. A pepper grinder too. Please.

You split three desserts. You adored the rum raisin gelato, notable for its silkiness and the rumminess of the raisins.

You got two pastries, a Saint Honoré and a Grazia, a dacquoise with vanilla mousse and cold, semi-candied strawberries. Both were as beautiful as Christmas tree ornaments. And both were less than exemplary.

The Saint Honoré supposedly contained Grand Marnier. Though you and your wife paid sharp attention, you couldn’t detect its taste. It was a bit dry.

The Grazia was sweet, but neither of you could distinguish any specificity of flavour. It was sweet with a flavour you would call unidentifiable/non-specific, certainly not vanilla. You felt it was slightly over-gelatinised. It was described as a dacquoise. In your experience (and this is confirmed when you check online), a dacquoise is a pastry made with layers of crisp meringue. Perhaps in Italy, dacquoise has another meaning. Though the two of you were keenly attentive, you could detect no meringue whatsoever.

The restaurant is top-cabin, as though you’re sitting in a high-end, inside-out hatbox. It reminds you of the tony restaurants in the flagship department stores of New York City (e.g., Macy’s) of your childhood, the kind of restaurant where little girls sported patent leather Mary Janes and their moms’ fur stoles and expensive perfumes intermingled. In your mind, this is the sort of restaurant that Eloise’s mother would have taken her to when she’s in town (you do know the classic Eloise picture books, don’t you? If not, read them, pronto!).

The servers wore earpieces, as though they were moonlighting as Secret Service agents. They were distinctly gracious and helpful. You’re used to being assigned one server, and in this case, it seemed as though several helped interchangeably, like they had overlapping territories. This was mildly confusing when it came to calling upon a server for help. You couldn’t quite figure out exactly who your server was.

High culinary intelligence animates the kitchen. The spectacular pasta dish couldn’t have been made elsewise. However, based on your small sampling, it seems possible to you that the restaurant hasn’t quite got its groove yet when it comes to precision cooking meats or saucing. They’ve only been open a short while, which could be why.

You would have predicted spectacular pastries. After all, pastries are this restaurant’s calling card. Maybe it was just chance, but yours were meh.

There are many more menu items that might well be spectacular, including the fish dishes and pizza. Based on what you ate, you advise aiming for the pasta and gelato (and it’s vital you get the frites). Then revel in the swanky setting, and you’ll have a top-tier Italian meal.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food : 3.5

Ambience: 4

Service: 3.5

Overall greatness: 3.5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

This meal was comped.

G/F, Two Chinachem Plaza, 135 Des Voeux Road Central, Central, 2755 1088

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Giovanni Pina in Central appeared first on Foodie.

Thus you find yourself at Associazione Chianti, an Italian steakhouse, for your birthday dinner. Your wife, impelled by her love to take a major risk, has allowed you off lead. She carefully monitors you though. Who knows, at any moment you might grab an entire prosciutto between your jaws from the big red slicer and start tearing around the restaurant at top speed chased by the chef swinging a cleaver.

Black Sheep Restaurants thoroughly understands the culture and theatre of food. Patrons not only visit to eat, but to be cared for and entertained. You arrive somewhat early, and the entire staff are in a pre-dinner huddle, but a waiter immediately breaks away, warmly greets you, leads you to a table and takes your drink order, nestling you into the fold. Soon the restaurant fills, which, considering it’s early on a Wednesday night, is a tribute to its allure. You’re pleased to see not only couples and social groups but also families with younger children. Such a mix creates the best buzz of all, essential to an optimal experience, like a Sunday dinner.

As you sip your Prosecco, you eye the interior, which bears no relation to any restaurant you’ve ever visited in Italy. It actually seems to be a riff on the Bronx Italian restaurant in The Godfather where Michael Corleone shoots Virgil Sollozzo and Captain Mark McCluskey. Old-fashioned cleavers hang on the wall. There’s a pleasant sense of impending bloodshed that is just right given the meaty meal ahead. The place would be apropos for mob hits.

They bring a perfect bowl of chilled crudités, including fennel, radicchio and jicama, and two dips, oil-salt-pepper and what you think your server called almond dip (maybe you misunderstood him, and he meant something else). You strain to catch a taste of almond, or any taste, but the dip is utterly flavourless.

You’re also served addictively delicious garlic knots, freshly baked dough knots flavoured with lots of garlic and prosciutto. Had the entire meal consisted of just these, you would not have left unhappy.

Drinking a lovely Tuscan red, Pio Cesare Barbera d’Alba, priced fairly at $708, you start with an insalata Cesare (Caesar salad) and a platter of salumi misti (cured meats). Served commonly at Italian restaurants, it’s interesting that this salad originated (probably) in Tijuana, Mexico. This version, based brilliantly on chicory, is delicious, but you wish the garlic and anchovy were stronger. You sense they were dialled down to accommodate those with timid palates (though your wife, who can handle a lot of torque, says that it’s just right). Maybe a restaurant has no choice but to do this. If this is so, you think the salad should be offered “mild” and “wild”. Also, you wish that it was prepared tableside, as was once commonly done (à la Mad Men) and is still done at Carbone (at least the NYC branch) and many Vegas restaurants.

The cured meats are tasty but standard stuff that you can get at any number of Italian restaurants. These meats would be much more special if they were house-cured and if a little creativity were applied. Why not an item from goose or duck or lamb? For instance, duck prosciutto (which is insanely delicious) is of Italian lineage. Likewise goose prosciutto. Certainly Black Sheep has the chops to pull this off.

Tagliatelle with artichoke. Fresh pasta is the devil to make well. It tends strongly to mushiness. Theirs, made solely with 00 flour and egg yolks, is outstanding, with a satisfying bite. Had they come by with a chunk of Parmesan and a grater to dust the pasta, as they used to do at serious NYC Italian restos (when waiters weren’t aspiring actors but dignified lifetime professionals), it would have been better yet.

We ourselves are mainly steak. And given the average body mass index these days, most of us are well-marbled Prime. In fact, with our massages and alcohol intake, most of us are A5 Wagyu. So there can be nothing more natural than eating steak. It’s us. Associazione Chianti’s steaks are dry-aged – 20 days, if you remember correctly.

Many the bistecca alla Fiorentina you’ve wolfed in Tuscany. Usually, you’ve had it accompanied by grilled provolone, hockey pucks of provolone banged over glowing charcoal until it’s semi-molten and bubbled and blistered on both sides, served with superb bread, usually charcoal-grilled itself. This is common at small village restaurants in Italy. You’ve never had it at a big-city restaurant though and wish that Black Sheep would bring it on board.

Your wife, who’s eaten here once before and felt her steak had been just a bit too bloody, orders a filetto (filet mignon) between medium and medium rare. You order a costata (rib-eye, your favourite) medium rare (which, in your view, is the only way to have steak). You also order salsa di manzo, a Chianti and peppercorn sauce.

It is the charred, caramelised exterior that makes steaks great, far more delicious in your view than prime rib or beef Wellington, which are are mainly (or entirely) without it. The Maillard reaction accounts for this. It’s also what accounts for the outstanding taste of toast, toasted marshmallows and roasted vegetables, something to do with amino acids and reduced sugars.

Both your steaks are Maillard reaction exemplars, charred deliciously over their entire surfaces. Your steak is accurately cooked, your wife’s not quite, coming out medium and consequently too dry. But, then again, filet mignon, which is less fatty than many other cuts, tends to dryness.

The salsa di manzo is tasty but, in your view, needs to be reduced at least 20 per cent more to be more of a syrup, more concentrated in flavour. And you think it would be better with whole green peppercorns, fresh if possible.

Along with your steaks, you get broccolini in a bagna càuda sauce. You love bagna càuda (a fondue of garlic, anchovy and olive oil, sometimes butter and cream) and wear a medical bracelet telling emergency responders to only put bagna càuda in your IV feed. This is a good bagna càuda, but again a bit mild. Broccolini is good, but broccoli rabe (which is distinctly more bitter) would have been better to your taste. You sense a caution in the kitchen to sometimes dial down when you wish they would dial up.

For dessert, the two of you split a dacquoise – a cake made with layers of meringue and whipped cream and, in this case, studded with berries and chocolate – and it’s phenomenal, memorable. It’s your birthday, and four servers come up and sing a birthday song (to be frank, you forget what it was…. you’d been drinking), but it is spirited and fun and you appreciate it.

Though not perfect, the meal was excellent, and – the food, service, decor, fun, all knit together – had just the right heft for a birthday. At $2,989, it wasn’t cheap, but considering the Prosecco, the mid-priced bottle of wine, the outstanding steaks, the handmade pasta, the consistent high quality and the cost of doing business in Hong Kong, the price was fair. You would happily return. Associazione Chianti lives up to its excellent reputation. It is a paragon of Italian cuisine.

Docile from overindulgence, you depart. Good dog.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 4.5

Ambience: 4.5

Service: 4.5

Overall greatness: 4.5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

15 Ship Street, Wanchai, 3619 3360, book online

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Associazione Chianti appeared first on Foodie.

Outside Nepal Restaurant & Bar, which opens onto pulsating Staunton Street, is a bas-relief of Lajja Gauri, the Hindu goddess of abundance, fertility and sexuality. Disdaining mortal modesty, Ms Gauri beckons you in with more, much more, than open arms. You enter a handsome space adorned with Nepalese objets d’art.

You begin lunch with bhenta tareko (deep-fried aubergine) along with a troika of chutneys, tamarind, tomato and coriander-chilli, with amperage to equal its colour intensity. Coated in cornflour, the unsung hero of crisp coatings, the aubergine is sweet, spare, scrumptious, oil free.

Since you’ve arrived in Hong Kong, you’ve joyously eaten mo’ and mo’ momos, and those at Nepal Restaurant are the best you’ve had. The obvious reason is the skins, indistinguishable from great soup-dumpling wrappers, which are house-made. You can’t pinpoint why, but house-made wrappers have a satisfying heft and chew that no pre-made dumpling skin can equal. The chicken forcemeat is juicy and flavourful. The momos and the bhenta tareko are standouts.

The haas ko chhoila (spicy duck flambé with fenugreek seeds) uses duck that comes to them pre-smoked. While good, it falls short of its promise. The duck tastes somewhat processed (perhaps for shelf life), and though apparently smoked, it lacks the beguiling nose of in-house smoking that you get, for instance, with Chinese camphor-smoked duck. You would have preferred a crisp skin. You’ve read that fenugreek seeds provide the compounds for artificial maple syrup. You get no taste from them at all. But you adore their crunch.

The khasi ko sekuwa (BBQ lamb) is delicious with the blistered butter naan and perfectly cooked saffron basmati rice. You like the warm, but essentially raw, sweet onion slivers served with it, a pleasurable counterpoint to the charred meat.

The tarkari rana khandani (mixed vegetable curry) contains broccoli, string beans, mushrooms and paneer (which they make in-house) in a smooth, comforting cashew sauce. Therapeutically mild, it knits the ravelled sleeve of care.

Your wife has a mango smoothie – mango, orange juice, ice – that she likes. You drink Nepalese Mustang beer, which is refreshing, similar to Tsingtao but down a half-note, ideal for this chow.

For dessert, you have shikarni (sweetened, chilled yoghurt with aromatic spices garnished with pistachio and saffron). The snappy yoghurt is house-made, the saffron barely distinguishable, if at all. It is dulcified by lovely honey imported from India, as is a bowl of kiwi and orange.

No slouch operation, you’re pleased to see that the chef wears a pleated toque, a badge of professional pride.

Find the Hindu goddess of abundance, fertility and sexuality on Staunton Street

Nepal Restaurant is good for dates, families, pals. This is not a Black Sheep restaurant with every conceivable detail polished to the utmost. It has a homespun, family quality, as though you’re eating at a friend’s nice home. Your server is pleasant and brisk. The food, much of it in the vernacular of Indian cuisine, is not designed to dazzle but to deliciously satisfy. Nepal Restaurant is your go-to for momos. You will certainly return when you pine for Nepalese delights.

Having learned from your wife never to get sideways of a goddess, you respectfully bid farewell to Ms Gauri. You and your wife, apex goddess, amble homeward.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 3.5

Ambience: 3

Service: 3

Overall greatness: 3.5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

This meal was comped.

14 Staunton Street, SoHo, Central, 2869 6212

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Nepal Restaurant & Bar appeared first on Foodie.

The fried sauerkraut vermicelli – sweet potato vermicelli and sauerkraut with chunks of poached garlic – is so improbably, addictively, madly delicious, so primordially slurpable, so texturally gratifying that it makes your eyeballs boing out and back, cartoon style. Good God, how’d they come up with this? It’s so simple and obvious, yet utterly original. Served without fanfare, it’s a revelation.

The fact that Tan’s Gourmet in Sai Ying Pun has no website, that they’re not listed on TripAdvisor, that no critic has yet taken the trouble to review them or even acknowledge their existence, that you must call to make reservations and almost no one speaks English, is baffling but also charming. It’s as though they’re running analog in a digital world. This is good though, shunting walk-ins elsewhere, leaving the place more for gastronomes (some might say food snobs… like yourself) who are willing to work for it.

In a weird parallel with German cuisine, the fried sauerkraut vermicelli goes particularly well with their showpiece of golden honey crispy pork – schnitzel-thin slices of pork in a crisp, ethereal batter, glazed with honey sauce, studded by more wonderful poached garlic. This restaurant has a proper reverence for garlic, which they often poach, thus retaining its flavour while muting its sting.

Their Sichuan spicy popcorn chicken with dried chilli peppers is the best rendition of this dish you’ve ever had. The chicken pieces are plump, boneless, maximally crisp, imbued with more pepper flavour than heat, strewn with peanuts and scallions and yet more garlic. This seemingly simple dish actually takes great technique to pull off well – there are so many moving parts. Thankfully, the kitchen knows the best line around a corner.

The stir-fried lamb with cumin is also best-version, lean, jacked by capsaicin, thrumming with cumin. Garlic is not in absentia.

The dry-fried green beans with minced pork contain not only garlic but Sichuan peppercorns, which are not commonly found in this dish but should be. They always jolt you happy, a natural alternative to electroconvulsive therapy. The green beans surely were hit by wok hei, the breath of the wok (or, put another way, Vesuvian heat), to blister so well.

The lamb kebabs are wonderfully crisped and cumined. Your wife finds them fatty, but you like the crisp nubs of fat that are so intensely flavourful. Crisp fat needs more respect. They need more salt though.

The tossed potato clear noodles with shredded pork in horseradish, garlic and sesame dressing have a fascinating flavour profile that you taste within the recesses of your nose as much as your tongue. You suspect that what they call “horseradish” is actually mustard oil, which you’ve occasionally experienced at more feral Chinese and Indian restaurants – at least it scours your sinuses the same way. Much as you love it and strong as it is, you want it stronger. It needs to be cranked with more sesame, more mustard oil, more garlic, more leafage, more oink.

The cucumber salad is average.

The cold Hunan sautéed salted duck has a jerky quality. Its flavour is slightly disagreeable.

There’s much more on the menu to try and you’re feverish to go back. Amongst other things, you’re interested in their dessert of strawberries that, from the menu photo, look like they might be done in the manner of spun-sugar apples.

Alas, there are no potstickers on the menu, a heart-rending omission.

The interior is pleasant, not warm. The service is pleasant, not warm. The prices are moderate.

This is rustic food, your favourite sort, done uncommonly well. Tan’s Gourmet is a thrilling find. Visit soon before they become internationally famous, franchise and morph into Panda Express. Dally not.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 4 (true, the food isn’t uniformly excellent, but the excellent dishes are such standouts that they up the score)

Ambience: 2.5

Service: 2.5

Overall greatness: 4

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

39–41 High Street, Sai Ying Pun, 2368 7188

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Tan’s Gourmet appeared first on Foodie.

The tables are set with monogrammed cloth napkins. The cutlery is elegantly engraved with the restaurant’s name. The dining room buzzes with conversation lilted with laughter. Beautiful food wafts by, and you clench your hands together so that neither will insubordinately snag a morsel. You feel a sense of well-being and happy anticipation. Good stuff is nigh.

The menu lists not only Indian dishes but also Mediterranean. That’s quite a range. Can they handle it all? You make a tactical decision to only order Indian, leaving the rest for another day.

There’s hardly a better way to survey a restaurant’s terrain than with samplers. You order two: an Old Delhi chaat platter (street-food snacks) and a Chef’s Choice platter (tandoori). Naturally, of sound mind, you order butter naan and saffron-poppy-seed-almond naan. And raita (yoghurt sauce). And saffron pilau (perfectly cooked basmati rice with saffron and scattered cumin seed).

There are three kinds of chaat: dahi bhalla, dahi puri and papri chaat. The dahi bhalla is a black lentil patty in a puri (a crisp, deep-fried Indian bread), doused with yoghurt, tamarind chutney and mint chutney.

All the chutneys, and the yoghurt, are house-made. You particularly like the yoghurt, which astounds you with its cheeky freshness, so much better than shop-bought that it’s almost a different substance altogether. The tamarind chutney is sweet, sour, sultry. The mint chutney pops like a flash bang.

The dahi puri is crisp spheres filled with potato, yoghurt and tamarind.

The papri chaat is small, crisp discs with yoghurt, tamarind and mint.

They’re amped by neon pomegranate seeds and sev – like the fibres in Shredded Wheat, but made from chickpea flour. They’re an utterly delectable demolition derby of flavours-textures-colours-scents, with no Western equivalent. They’re so delicious that you must suppress a tendency to growl and snap at your wife’s fingers as the two of you consume them.

All the tandoori items are moist-spiced-caramelised-charred-flavourful, great with the naan, raita and chutneys (the sesame, OMG) – chicken tikka, chicken pahadi, tandoori king prawn, lamb chop, mackerel tikka, lamb seekh kebab. They’re so good that there’s hardly a standout, but you savoured the perfect texture and flavour of the sashimi-grade king prawn. Your wife went full piranha on the lamb chop with nutmeg in the spicing. The mackerel was snapping fresh, clearly receptive to the tandoor’s caress.

Like an anaconda unhinging its jaws to take in a cow, you gird for one more main, Sindhi gosht, or slow-cooked New Zealand mutton with sliced onion, cardamom, bay leaf and the “chef’s special spices”. It’s chunks of fork-tender lamb in a mild, silky gravy. It’s a dish suited ideally to saffron pilau or naan, dolloped with raita. It’s a sigh of contentment.

The finale is two desserts: pista kulfi and gulab jaman. The pista kulfi is unchurned ice cream, like a semifreddo, sweet, assertively saffron flavoured, scattered with pistachio bits. It mauls you with pleasure. You hesitate to say that it’s the most delicious dessert you’ve ever eaten, but it might be.

The gulab jaman is deep-fried beignets – made from milk curd, flour, cardamom and saffron – soaked in saffron syrup and sprinkled with pistachio and almond bits, served hot. It’s so delicious, surely it can’t be legal. Brutal to say, Café du Monde’s renowned beignets are T-ball by comparison. These desserts together are a binary explosive. Beware.

Drinks? It is a restaurant reviewer’s job to swing their lantern high, selflessly lighting the way for others. So you and your wife selflessly order a Gems and Spices (house-infused cardamom vodka, fennel seed, house-made ginger syrup, Peychaud’s Bitters, lime juice, absinthe-rinsed glass) and a…

… Bollywood Afterparty (house-infused cinnamon gin, house-made honey syrup, aromatic bitters, pure cacao bitters, lemon juice, aquafaba).

Selflessness unbounded, you order a second round, a Pink Diamond (house-infused raspberry and clove rum, crème de peche, cherry blossom syrup, orange bitters, lime juice, fresh raspberries, egg white) and a…

… Divine Intervention (cognac, rye whisky, fine ruby port, Campari, aromatic bitters, smoked peat mist).

All are so complex that you eye them sceptically. A sip though and your eyes widen. If you worship at the altar of mixology, these are musts, on another continuum altogether from the typical, overpriced Hawaiian Punch cocktails (with the provenance of every ingredient listed) dispensed commonly. They are sprung from the mixological genius of Daniel Whitely. If the Queen of England ever happens in and tilts back a few, knighthood is his.

Your favourite is Gems and Spices, like a long note on a cardamom cello. It’s amongst the greatest (if not THE greatest) cocktails you’ve ever had. Close runner-up is Bollywood Afterparty. Deep as an old leather chair, it’s capped with aquafaba, frothed chickpea cooking liquid that is, unlikely as it seems, luscious. Pink Diamond, luminous with berry and peach, is its equal. And Divine Intervention (which is finished with a spray of smoky Islay single-malt whisky) is a contemplative sipper with a retro quality that will incline you to speak with a transatlantic accent.

Mango lassi is served as a digestif. It’s made with their fresh, homemade yoghurt and puréed Alphonso mango, imported from India, plus a little mango syrup. It gladdens your gizzard.

All the cocktails are priced at $108. Very fair.

The owner of Carat, Atul, is also a gem dealer, hence the restaurant’s name. Gems are precious stones forged by time, heat and pressure. The food and drink created by this restaurant are gems produced in just the same way, forged by the time, heat and pressure of extraordinary intelligence, talent and experience. And as if this were not enough, the prices are reasonable.

Carat is great for families, for friends, for dates. It has an outside deck that looks ideal for parties. It is well worth a trip across town. Boy, do you recommend it.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 5

Ambience: 4

Service: 4

Overall greatness: 5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

This meal was comped.

4/F, Winfield Commercial Building, 6–8 Prat Avenue, TST, 2391 3929 (there’s another branch in Lan Kwai Fong, Central)

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Carat appeared first on Foodie.

Soufflés, space flight, happy marriages, Olympic medals, mountaineering and homemade puff pastry all have one thing in common: daring. Daring requires you to dream, to consult your fighting spirit, to apply everything in life that you’ve learned and to leap into the unknown. Of course, knowledge, planning, strength and good sense must accompany daring in order to succeed, but daring is the leap itself. No achievement is possible without it. Cheeky Dog, a hot-dog restaurant in Kennedy Town that’s been open for less than a year, dares.

Its heart is the dogs themselves: 30-day-aged beef, pork-apple, chicken and Käsekrainer cheese. Each is notably flavourful and juicy. The Käsekrainer cheese sausage, made from beef and pork, is most similar to a traditional hot dog. It’s delicious, though you hardly taste the cheese in it, if at all. The pork-apple is slightly sweet, appley, balanced delightfully. The chicken conveys the delicate essence of chicken, thankfully without the horrifying flecks of cartilage you’ve encountered elsewhere. The beef hot dog is not just generically meaty, but distinctly beefy. For all your loyalty to all-beef Hebrew National, Cheeky Dog’s beef dogs are beefier.

The buns are brioche-like, far outclassing supermarket fare. They’d fit right in at a swell breakfast, toasted with butter and jam. This makes sense because they come from Bakehouse, bakery extraordinaire.

The Plain Jane is just that, a plain beef hot dog in a bun with just mustard, ketchup and house-made caramelised onion. It’s like the best ballpark frank you’ve ever had.

Cheeky Dog’s fanciful offerings are what really make it special. Sweet Digs is a sausage coated in panko and deep-fried. There is a house-made rosemary-ginger-pineapple compote, back bacon and katsu sauce. The complexity of this preparation is a prescription for failure. Yet it soars unexpectedly, the flavours layering instead of muddling. You particularly like the texture of the panko against the meat and bread and the way in which the salt of the bacon plays against the sweetness of the compote.

Numb Cheeks, house-made mapo tofu slathered on a dog, shouldn’t work; it’s far too much of a non-sequitur, like pickles and peanut butter. But it’s fabulous, possibly your favourite dog of the pack. The fine-ground Sichuan peppercorn makes you crazy with pleasure. Might there be some way a customer could up the dosage? A shaker of the stuff, perhaps. It was slightly too hot for your wife.

The Ooey Gooey has five melted cheeses and house-made onion marmalade. Sweet and cheesy and meaty and bready – if destiny chooses you for death by cholesterol overdose, may this be the cheese bomb that causes it, so you’ll depart this mortal coil happy.

Hot Mess is a bacon-wrapped sausage with house-made pico de gallo, hot sauce and a Greek yoghurt dressing. You and your wife fought over this one. Having survived two weeks in quarantine together, which would stress-test any marriage, this wasn’t going to bring you down, but you could feel the strain. If your relationship isn’t robust, this doggy is too delicious for sharing.

Sides are where restaurants often slip. Not here. The nachos with pulled pork were terrific. The chips crisp, the pulled pork flavourful, with real melted cheese, not the ubiquitous liquefied cheese glop that’s so often inflicted.

The potato flavour of their shoestring fries really shone through, though they could have been a little crisper, a little hotter. Would it be possible to double- or even triple-fry them like they do at Rubia and Jean May? You’re almost certain this would loft them even higher.

You were impressed by Cheeky Dog’s thoughtfully curated beverages, not the standard Tsingtao and Coke Zero. Your wife’s Gingergella Karma drink was by far the best ginger ale either of you have ever had, zingy, with a fresh ginger taste. You had two great, hoppy brews, an Australian and a New Zealand. But Hong Kong is now producing many superb craft beers. Why not showcase them?

The interior is a handsome (your wife says “cute”), sparkling clean nook that is not visible from the street, giving it a sense of exclusivity. The service is prompt and personable. The music track includes a lot of 70s–80s gold, which warmed your gizzard. The washroom is immaculate.

Prices are amazingly reasonable, with dogs starting at $58. The most expensive is $98. Cheeky Dog is excellent for a date or a bunch of pals. Excellent for kiddles, with food they’d surely like. Excellent for a good brewski or a glass of grape.

All restaurants are daring simply because they’re such risky enterprises. But Cheeky Dog is particularly daring because it has chosen the humblest of foods, the hot dog, as its ride to glory (oh so wisely, it has avoided puff pastry). You admire the audacity and imagination as much as the excellence of their chow. It’s top dog! Credit goes to the visionary founders (who still work the floor), Bibiana Ling and Joe Chan.

You and your wife loved Cheeky Dog. Few restaurants at this price point deliver such consistently excellent food. You highly recommend it. Go.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food 4.5

Ambience: 4

Service: 4

Overall greatness: 4.5

Restaurants are intuitively rated within their particular realms. So Michelin restaurants, pizza places and stand-up sandwich joints are judged against like restaurants, not each other. A 5 for a high-end restaurant is not meant to be the same as a 5 for street food.

From my website, here’s how I rate food: “I believe the quality of a restaurant’s food is vastly more important than any other factor. Even if I love a restaurant’s food, I’m very conservative about giving out 4s or 5s. I reserve 4s for food that is uniformly excellent. Preponderantly excellent tends to get a lower score. 5s are for food that is uniformly stunning.”

This meal was comped.

Shop 29, G/F, Hoi Tao Building, 711 Belcher’s Street (alleyway entrance on Sai Cheung Street), Kennedy Town, info@cheekydoghk.com

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post David Greenberg Reviews… Cheeky Dog appeared first on Foodie.

US swimmer Mark Spitz won seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics. He had a pornstash. He planted the rumour that his stash was scientifically shaped to reduce drag, increasing his swim speed. At the next Olympics, Russian swimmers sported pornstashes.

Photo credit: Mark Spitz Facebook

Will fine restaurants (gold seekers, all) follow suit, every employee pornstashed? Probably. In the meantime, they lure their customers with stuff no less striking. You’ve been served olive oil from olives picked at the full moon, fish caught at extreme depths, caviar from almost extinct sturgeon, beef from cows that were regularly massaged and fed beer, hummingbird foie gras, truffles sniffed out by pigs (not dogs), bread flown in from Spain, pear cider from 300-year-old trees, aged monkfish, 100-year-old salt. You’ve been served dishes so complex and delicate they were tweezer-made.

Sometimes, this chow is so delicious you kneel in reverence. Frantzén’s Kitchen’s truffled French toast would be an example of this. Other times, it’s good enough but often feels manic, an obstacle course of caviar blobs, flower petals, sauce squiggles, gold leaf like too much glitter make-up on a tween. A serious BLT from an inexpensive restaurant would be better.

Inexpensive restaurants often serve the tastiest chow of all. Poking into alleys, corners and basements, burning up the bus lines, you’ve assiduously explored Hong Kong’s restaurants for four years now in order to winnow out the inexpensive gems. What follows are your howl-at-the-moon finds. Most are unsung, so far off the radar they’re barely reviewed, if at all. So it’s deeply pleasing to sing their praises. The scrumptiousness of much of the food served at these restaurants rivals that of the Michelin heavies. But unlike most Michelin meals that will chomp an entire mortgage payment from your bank account, these will barely dent your wallet.

Liao Za Lie

You walked in, and though you didn’t know how you knew, you just knew – the food would be delicious. Their baby cucumbers with yellow blossoms in spicy sauce made you spasm with pleasure. You ate one bowl and promptly ordered another. Their improbably long, house-made biang biang noodles (which must be docked with scissors) are al-dente Möbius strips of happiness. Get them with ribs or dumplings (or both). Their pork-dill dumplings, either fried or boiled, are apogee, going as high as dumplings can go. If you’re scared of heights, step back. You had an excessive meal for four here at $1,200, including an entire leg of lamb for $300.

Lao Zhang Gui Dongbei

Their potstickers are goddesses. Worship them. They have the best Peking duck in Hong Kong at a fraction of the cost elsewhere, $425 last visit. True, it’s not carved before you by a waiter wearing white gloves. Who cares? You love their okra, their noodle salads, their boneless, deep-fried lamb ribs. You’ve eaten massive, beery meals here for four for less than $1,000.

Little Chilli

Their potstickers – thick, house-made dough, crisp bottoms, luscious filling – demand exaltation. Their crispy chicken (ask for it boneless) with peanuts and dried chilli peppers is bliss. The dried chillies mainly impart flavour, minimal heat. Their seared string beans are paradigmatic. You’ve filled your tank here many times for less than $200 a person. It’s open daily, 11am–5am. Finally, hours to match yours.

Wing Lai Yuen (Chuk Un)

There are two restaurants by this name. You mean the one on Fung Tak Road. Their pork vermicelli is one of the most delicious items you’ve eaten in Hong Kong, lean slices of pork belly draped over mung-bean noodles in a garlicky sauce. Their camphor duck, their wontons in spicy sauce, their potstickers are also apex. Their salt-and-pepper squid is possibly the best you’ve ever had. Four of you ate a meal here, well beered, for $740.

Go Go Goose

Special order their sucking pig for $888. Served with wrappers, cuke batons, shredded scallion, hoisin, it’s like Peking duck. But pork has more torque. The pig skin crunches audibly when you bite down, which whips you into a frenzy. Remember, if pig skin, you kin too.

Hu Nan Heen

Everything is cheap and almost everything is hyper-scrumptious. The ambience (no windows) and service (indifferent, rude, little English) are atrocious, which is adorable. Like a highway caution sign, the menu has a “warm prompt” to warn you that the food is thermal. Standouts are simmer bamboo shoots pork, dried turnip fried marinated meat and tea oil steamed salted beef. You ache to return but prefer to dine with your wife, and she, heat averse, won’t. Marriage is a rough ride.

Chief’s Blend

Their sandwiches are exceptional. You particularly like their avo-pomsmash, an open-faced avocado sandwich with lots (and lots) of pomegranate seeds and feta. You also love their prego steak ciabatta; the beef is cooked medium, as ordained by God. But what really stands out for you is their dessert, koeksisters, deep-fried dough soaked in a syrup with orange and lemon slices, cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, lavender petals, chilled. Wunderbar! Most items are $100 or less. Dogs drink free.

Sichuan Lab

“Innovative” applies rarely to Sichuan food, but it does here. Their sous-vide smoked duck is among the greatest duck dishes you’ve ever eaten, so ducky, smoky, cooked to the perfect point between medium and medium rare. Their clear noodles in spicy sauce are house-made, chubby, chewy, like cherubs’ earlobes. Prices are on the high side of low. Apparently there are some weekend deals.

Café Hunan (Wanchai)

Taste-bud heaven. Your faves: shrimp with tea leaf, pudgy shrimp fried so hot, they peel crisp like potato chips. Stir-fried sautéed preserved pork with dried radish, the delicious salty pork almost a jerky contrast to the chewy-crunchy-dried radish. Stir-fried smoked Hunan-style beef, like bresaola but with the comforting scent of campfire smoke. So cheap it’s like they’re paying you.

Twelve Flavours (many branches)

Extravagantly delicious, Death Row, last-meal level. Though many dishes are great, you pine for their dry hot pot. Dry hot pot is like soupy hot pot, but better, the flavours undiluted by broth, nothing soggy, concentrated. It’s really akin to a dish you learned to love in Uzbekistan called lagman. You get to choose what you want in the pot. You usually get beef, pork neck, lotus root, cauliflower, rice sticks, some kind of green and – this is vital – wide starch vermicelli (or mung-bean noodles). The wide starch vermicelli is a force multiplier. Even the least spicy version of this dish is spicy from the many different kinds of chilli peppers and glorious Sichuan peppercorns. There is a soybean hot pot, not spicy at all, that’s pretty amazingly good too. You can’t recommend this place enough. An overloaded dry hot pot with more food than two can eat and a drink or three will come out around $350.

For some, value for dollar is irrelevant. Even so, the food at these cheap restaurants has a higher tastiness coefficient than many of the royals. Let your rich uncle take you to the swanky spots. Slap your plastic at these places for high return and at least as much taste.

Need recommendations? Gotta tip? Email.

And for God’s sake, shave that moustache.

Oh, the hummingbird foie gras. Just messing with you.

Read more of David’s reviews for many Hong Kong restaurants on his website, ardentgourmet.com, and remember to like Foodie on Facebook

If you’d like to be on David’s Ardent Gourmet mailing list in order to receive his newest restaurant reviews, please contact him at authilus@teleport.com or follow him on Instagram

The post Hong Kong’s Most Extraordinary Inexpensive Restaurants appeared first on Foodie.