waiter, is that a pantyhose in my tea?

Many times I’d walked past 蘭芳園 (Lan Fong Yuen) and gazed at it in wonder, but never stopped because I thought it to be more of a take-away stall (though I noted that you could perch on the small wooden stools on the raised platform in the front). Sneaky peeps – turns out there’s an entire restaurant hidden behind that facade! Entrance is from that small corridor on the left of the stall.

Who knew?

I was meeting two friends who happened to work in the Central district, so we arranged to have lunch there. Unfortunately, between the hours of 12:30-1:30, all the restaurants (even so-so ones) in the area are attacked by the brigade of OLs (office ladies) and besuited bankers and other working folk. When I got to Lan Fong Yuen at 12:50 the place was already heaving and there was a queue steadily forming outside. Because of its popularity, they have a policy that if all members of your party aren’t present, you can’t get a table. Two of us ended up waiting for the last person just outside of the restaurant, behind the stall, which was basically their kitchen. We watched the efficient staff do their magic in the tiny space – one man was in charge of making the famous ‘pantyhose’ milk tea (practically five orders a minute, from what we saw), another in charge of their equally famed thick toasts with peanut butter/condensed milk as well as their pork chop buns, and another piling on the toppings onto platefuls of steaming-hot ramen before the waiters would whisk them off into the restaurant.

Left: A worker busily makes cup after cup of milk tea. There are about 4-5 kettles on the boil at once on the stove. Right: My cuppa. Note the happy men in the background slurping up their ramen!

We were eventually seated at a table in the corner, along with two other groups of people – they come and go quite quickly, so in the span of half an hour there was a cheerful group of young male office workers, a young-woman/old-man couple, two teenagers, and then a tourist couple from mainland China. It’s certainly elbow-to-elbow dining, but it’s fun because you get to peek at what everyone else is ordering (the satay beef noodles looked a bit putrid, but judging from the reactions, it was divine; seeing different dishes also made me wish I’d ordered a pork chop bun – it’s so round and cute!).

I already knew what I wanted to order – I had their signature braised ramen noodles with pan-fried chicken breast and scallion oil, and a hot cup of pantyhose tea. Who knew that such simple fare could be so good? I’m not generally a fan of instant ramen, but at the very least, it was cooked very well – al dente and not soggy and watery. The pan-fried chicken breast was also surprisingly good – juicy, and with a crisp skin and SO. MUCH. FLAVOUR. There was sliced cabbage for texture, and the scallion oil was magnificent, it really brought the whole dish together. Humble food but oh-so-good (and probably oh-so-unhealthy!). It cost $36 for the lunch together (roughly £2.50) and we left feeling happy and satisfied. It’s worth noting as well that the service was really friendly – which you don’t really expect it to be, considering how busy and popular the place is (as a rule of thumb, the more popular a place is here, the less staff feel like they have to try hard with good service).

It’s worth mentioning that ‘pantyhose’ tea doesn’t really refer to what’s in it (bless you), but it does refer slightly to how it’s made. The brew is filtered through a nylon fabric that hangs like a stocking, thus its name as ‘pantyhose’ tea – reason being it really filters out any imperfections and grains in the tea, as well as somehow integrating the evaporated milk and tea together more smoothly, which results in a super silky brew. The strength of the tea is also a result of it being brewed for exactly 13 minutes, according to the owner. At times, I’m tempted to try it on my own with an unworn pair of stockings just for fun. (A trick that my dad uses to make his tea smoother, actually, is to add discarded egg shells into the pot – allegedly, some famous milk tea vendors also add this to their brew – the remaining egg white sticking to the inside of the shell somehow helps to add a smooth texture to the tea. You still have to filter it, of course, but in this case we just use a fine sieve.) By the way, the above image is courtesy of Reuters, who wrote a pretty good article on pantyhose tea, as well as Lan Fong Yuen (take a look at the related video!).

Afterwards I had a good stroll around the markets of Gage Street (where Lan Fong Yuen is located) and Graham Street. I swear I never get bored of doing so (I’ve already been twice in the week I’ve been back in Hong Kong). There’s just something so alive about these markets and streets that I can’t help but feel a pang of sadness every time I think about how they’re going to tear it down. A post about the area will probably follow, eventually.

蘭芳園 (Lan Fong Yuen)
2 Gage St, Central, Hong Kong
Tel: 2544 3895
Open daily 7am-6pm

good vietnamese food? nha.

Yeah, I should have known better than to trust a hyped-up food critic way past his day. Or one simply of his standing – one of the most recognised critics in Hong Kong – as if a restaurant would dare serve him substandard crap! His glowing review of Cafe Locomotive, however, caught our eye. If you’re interested in why, he deemed their beef broth to be as glorious as the ones he’d had in Vietnam. We’re always on the lookout for decent Vietnamese joints in Hong Kong, since they’re few and far between and always erring on the side of inauthenticity. We decided that we’d troop all the way there like lemmings to indulge in the fabled broth.

As is usual with me, I woke up late and took even longer to paint my face; by the time we’d gotten on the bus my mom was fretting over the fact that we’d hit the restaurant during the lunch peak. At 12:45, the place was full, but there were no visible queues or anyone loitering around for a seat. The waitress took our name down and we waited for just 5 minutes before a table was ready.

It looked promising – all airy and with dark wooden furniture, high ceilings and some interesting decor. On a warm winter’s day (?!) in Hong Kong, this is the perfect kind of environment for a laid back lunch. There aren’t very many seats, but at least the high ceilings and semi-al fresco seating helps eliminate any inklings of claustrophobia.
I absolutely loved the decor. It was modern meets traditional – the restaurant itself is based on the story of a street stall based near a train station in Vietnam that would attract hordes of people with their mouthwatering pho, and a gigantic photographic print of the station in question hangs on one wall (as the only photo with the print in it includes my unsightly mug, it is not shown here). The two walls are also lined with luggage racks to simulate the inside of train carriages – charming! If only the food was as inspiring.

The menu boasts ‘authentic Vietnamese beef soup & chicken stock’, and the big seller is the ‘Locomotive signature rice noodle soup’, but we were far from impressed. The stock, to put it bluntly, lacked BEEFINESS – it was also surprisingly sweet, unappetisingly so. Squeezes of lime helped slightly, but overall it was a disappointment, considering this was their supposed selling point. I prefer a simple pho bo, but their signature dish included beef balls, beef tripe and beef tendons. My mom found the beef tendons in the noodles undercooked and bland, and I don’t think either of us touched the tripe – it looked exactly as what we thought it would taste – rubbery and flavourless. I’m tempted to say this was possibly the most underwhelming pho I’ve ever eaten in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure if it’s because of its own failings or due to my high expectations.

Moving on… after a disappointing encounter with a prawn and pomelo salad at Nha Trang earlier in the week, I ordered Locomotive’s version, which came beautifully presented. So pretty that the couple next to us were whispering loudly about it and subsequently asked the waiter to tell them what it was (side note: are Hong Kongers so unfriendly towards each other that a simple question to the table next door is totally impossible?). Its looks, however, belied its less-than-gorgeous taste. I expected a flavour explosion here – crisp, juicy pomelo contrasting with salty-sweet cabbage and carrots, a tang from the limes, a subtle aniseedy kick from the Asian basil… you get the picture. What resulted was a half-hearted assault on the tastebuds from limp flavours and way too much of the basil (bad memories of liquorice allsorts came flooding back…). The prawns were tepid and would have benefited from a bit of grilling; instead they seemed to have just been brought back from the freezer-dead and boiled. What I found at the bottom was a large amount of extremely watery nuoc cham, which didn’t help at all in the flavour stakes.

I was really confused about it all. Alas, Choi Lan, I knew better than to trust you and your smarmy ways. If only I’d read the 37 bad reviews (versus 9 good ones) over at OpenRice beforehand. The common folk are, again, the ones to trust. I always feel sad about writing off a place, especially one as nicely done as Locomotive – but as usual, the food speaks volumes. Sometimes it’s hard to know who’s really right, though (the media are positively fawning over the place), and who knows – maybe you’d like it. Perhaps I’ll give it another go somewhere along the line… maybe.

Cafe Locomotive (Contemporary Vietnamese Cuisine)
11 Wun Sha Rd, Tai Hang, Hong Kong
2882 8227
www.cafelocomotive.com

mmmmacau: lai kei, wong chi kei and tai lee loi kei

The Chinese really like their kei’s. It’s almost like the Cantonese version of the Japanese attachment of ‘-san’, except there’s a greater sense of closeness and familiarity when tacking ‘kei’ onto the end of something. It’s casual and homely.

Like snippets of a daydream, my recollections of my trip to Macau this August are hazy. But one look at the photos I took there and like some Pavlovian puppy, I start to salivate. How embarassing. Here are three of the best places I went to (though I only went to four, Solmar wasn’t really worth mentioning even though it claims to be the best, and the oldest, Portuguese restaurant in Macau).

1. The nostalgic ice cream joint

hong kong food expo 2007

Or rather, the annual junk food parade and venue of agonisingly slow taste testing. It took us nearly three hours to navigate the sea of people surging throughout the convention hall, in all I think I only managed to sample about 10 things. Somehow, I’m just not convinced that hanging around a stall that is already five-deep with people to sample instant noodles passed out in a thimble like vessel (and eaten with two toothpicks) is worth it. I waited for the dumplings instead (served WHOLE! Not cut up into mice-like portions! In a watercooler paper cone!), salivating each time the girl manning the boiling pot lifted the lid away, allowing my nostrils to be filled with the steamy aroma of meaty stock. That was worth it. Maybe.

are you phở real?

One of the things I had been anticipating since my return to Hong Kong was to go back to Phở, a Vietnamese eatery that had opened last summer. It was only last summer that I really began to appreciate Vietnamese food, having never really experienced it before one of my friends dragged me to a down-and-dirty phở joint one night in Causeway Bay.

Phở (what an original name?) is apparently a franchise that began out in America, and finally made its way over here, opening its second branch only this year. It’s hard to google the facts, what with its generic name. The first time I went, I was impressed by their full, hearty broth and crisp, succulent butter garlic chicken wings – ignoring the high fat content for a moment, these were the most deliciously rich and garlicky finger-licking good wings I have ever eaten in my life. They come to the table resting on fresh green lettuce leaves, and are fried to a perfect golden brown, and topped with mounds of crispy garlic. I’m a garlic fiend, in case you haven’t deduced it by now. It may be a bit scary for those watching their weight (the buttery taste is immense) and those frightened of going home smelling of garlic, but to that I say HAR! Try it at least once.

Anyways, after going down that tangent of praise for Phở, I was most disappointed when I went for lunch today with my mom. It is well worth noting never to go there during the lunch/dinner rush (wise advice for any foodie who wants to get their money’s worth) – the quality of the food inevitably falters because of the chaos.

We ordered two bowls of phở bò, translated literally in Chinese as ‘raw beef hor fun noodles’, and a side of Vietnamese spring rolls (which were fine and not worth going into detail about). When they finally came to our table, my beef slices, drowning in hot steaming broth, were completely cooked save for one or two corners that were gasping for air above the surface. I was furious but (and this is just me) I wasn’t bothered to complain – the last time I did so at the restaurant, the waiter laughed and told me to order the beef to come to the table separately instead. The only reason why I hadn’t done so this time was because I didn’t believe they would do that again, as that last time had been an anomaly. How unfortunate then, that the same fate would befall my poor bowl of noodles.

When it was time to get the bill, my mom challenged the waitress and asked pointedly, “So, what’s the difference between your raw beef noodles and cooked beef noodles?” – testing to see if she had just gotten our order wrong. She hadn’t. When we mentioned that our beef slices were cooked through to the point of dryness, she flippantly suggested we order our beef separately next time.

Are you for real? When I ask for something that is on the menu, I expect pretty much for the food that is served in front of me to be what was advertised on the menu. I don’t go into a restaurant for sashimi and and expect to receive a platter of nearly-cooked fish, do I? I don’t specifically say to the barista ‘extra-hot’ please, and expect to get a lukewarm latte, am I right? You say raw beef, I want raw beef. It can be cooked from the heat slightly, even I can’t deny the work of heat molecules, but I don’t expect bleeding slices of sashimi beef either. I just don’t expect something the consistency of overcooked roast on (or shall I say, under) my noodles. Now, I understand that during the lunch rush, bowls may be left on their own before a frazzled waiter/waitress comes over to deliver it, but at least tell us that if we weren’t satisfied, we could have it exchanged next time. Don’t tell us to do some extra footwork to ensure that the food in front of us is the same as what is on the menu.

It’s quite appalling that the same thing happened once at a more high-end restaurant, Rice Paper in World Trade Center, also in Causeway Bay (the above image is from that visit). This time it was blatantly obvious that we were served beef that wasn’t fresh, and possibly of the roast variety – the texture and colour said it all. There was a metallic sheen on of the pieces that raised some alarm bells. This time though, at least the manager struck it off the bill.

I’m not giving up on Phở though, because at least on three other occasions I have had good quality food and service. I suspect it was because of the lunch rush (thus my advice at the beginning of this post). I think they need to work on their customer relations though – to brush us off in that way and suggest that we should do something to ensure that our food was made proper, was simply unbelievable.

But anyways, go there when it’s calmer, and try the chicken wings. Trust me.

Phở Vietnamese Restaurant
G/F, Circle Tower
28 Tang Lung Street
Causeway Bay
Hong Kong
Tel: 2574 177

L8-3, Megabox
Enterprise Square 5
38 Wang Chiu Road
Kowloon Bay, Kowloon
Tel: 2359 0117