golden gate dessert house

Sometimes I’m just really easily impressed. Or, maybe because it’s the fact that it’s Christmas soon and it’ll be the first time I won’t be spending it at home (in Hong Kong) with family that makes me hyper-appreciate things that remind me of the great 852 – like this simple dessert house on Shaftesbury Avenue. I’ve always lamented about the lack of good Chinese dessert places or HK/Taiwan-style teahouses in London – places like Hui Lau Shan and Honeymoon Desserts/Moon Kee (滿記), with their scrummy fresh fruit desserts, or even Saints Alp Teahouse or RBT and their bubble tea (tapioca pearl tea) and Taiwanese nibbles.

In Hong Kong, things never end after dinner out – we’d simply move on to a dessert place (because everyone ALWAYS has a second stomach for desserts!) and spend hours there chatting away while nibbling at our desserts and/or tea. While places like Cafe TPT and Cafe de Hong Kong do some desserts and bubble teas (the former has the best silken tofu dessert I have ever tasted in London to date), there was never a place purely dedicated to gluttonous consumption of sweets that I knew of. So, I’m probaby really late in the game with this post, but Golden Gate Dessert House definitely fulfils my criteria for a great dessert destination – it’s cheap, the cakes and desserts look great, and they do a myriad of drinks that I’d find not out of place in a menu back in Hong Kong. They had sago desserts (though, unfortunately, not immersed in coconut milk), gui ling go (herbal turtle jelly), mango pancakes, and soft, ethreal sponge cakes in a myriad of flavours and colours – we had the black forest, and a matcha version.

Along with the obligatory bubble teas, they had some perennial favourites such as HK-style milk tea, and Milo (a chocolatey drink that I recall from my childhood!); some snacks available included another HK favourite – curry fishballs!

The style of cakes reminded me of a fabulous place in Taipei (but originally from Japan) called Afternoon Tea, which I fell in love with. I adore such light, cloudy cakes that just feel like they’re about to float away!

The waitresses were really charming and made us feel very welcome. I could see myself coming back here often, for that essential post-dinner dessert and drink… It certainly made me feel like I was back home, if only for a little while.

Golden Gate Dessert House
110 Shaftesbury Avenue
London W1D 5EJ
020 7494 3840

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

are you in the mood for love?

Goldfinch Restaurant may not be a familiar name to most, but perhaps its dimly lit interiors, smoked mirrors and characteristic leather booths will stir up memories of one of Wong Kar-wai’s most famous films, In the Mood for Love, where the small, intimate restaurant is the unique setting for So Lai-chen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan’s (Tony Leung) first dinner together.

It can be said that restaurants like Goldfinch laid the foundations of Hong Kong’s first ‘fusion’ movement; it opened in the 1960’s when the economy was only starting to see some light, and dining out was more of a luxury. With a nod to Hong Kong’s colonial identity, restauranteurs and chefs began integrating more ‘Western’ style dishes into their menus, such as steak and pasta, while adding a Chinese twist – thus serving ’see yau sai chaan’ (literally ’soy sauce Western meals’), the colloquial description that has come to characterise such unique eateries.