Foodle

Lunch at @silka

This little hidden gem of an Indian restaurant, tucked away underneath Borough Market was incredible. I started off with a mango caparina which was delicious, great flavour and not to sweet. Next was samosa papdi chat, a street food inspired Punjab samosa, spicy chickpeas, tamarind chutney, yoghurt and puffed rice. I love this starter, big flavours, great textures, so delicious. For mains, my favourite Indian dish, the Tandoori mixed grill. Awadhi lamb chop, Chicken Tikka, Hara Prawn, Gilafi Seekh Kebab and Tandoori Chicken. Absolutely loved it, served with crispy garlic naan bread and pilau rice. Perfect lunch

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People always ask me, “Where do you usually go when you’re out of the office but still need to get work done?”

Without hesitation, my answer is always @beknowncoffee in Little River. ☕️

Whether I’m writing reviews, having meetings, or catching up on emails, this is the spot. Their honey lavender latte (made with locally sourced honey from Carolina Bay Apiaries) is my personal favorite and the perfect companion for a productive morning.

Join me in congratulating Be Known Coffee on being named the @littleriversc Chamber’s Member of the Month; a well-deserved recognition. 💚 Less

It’s taken a while, but Hong Kong is now at peak three-yellow chicken.

The prized local bird wasn’t on my mind on a Friday evening, when I scanned the bar menu of a clubby, decorated hotel-restaurant and found a $75 charcuterie plate and wagyu burger for $130 (both USD). Instead, my mind went to @leela.hkg ‘s bone marrow and beef cheek biryani. I remembered it from months ago, during my first meal there — the ‘dum’ seal broken with the surgical hand of someone who probably deboned Dover sole for a living, unleashing a plume sharp with clove and curry leaf; the cross-section of the bone, as broad as a pig’s snout; the appealingly chewy rice, dewy with the supremely rich marrow; and the spices that cut through it all. It’s the kind of dish that convulses you with pleasure and commands you to travel across the city just to have it, as I did earlier tonight. Arriving at Leela, though, and learning of a new, large format tandoori-spiced three-yellow chicken rice changed this jaded but (still) wide-eyed critic’s mind. “I hope you have nothing planned tomorrow,” James, the manager, tells me as I pine. “But yes, it’s very good.”

Before the dish arrives, a server presents a plump bird that had been wet-brined, hung for hours, slow-roasted, brushed with masala spices, then roasted again. It’s beastly but beautiful, with a reddish, lacquered tandoori hue, burnished at the tips; and freckled with chives. Then it’s whisked away, where it gets a final roast before the bird is carved and served on a floral-patterned cake stand. The dish comes with a side (a gloriously indulgent rice, much like the biryani, with meaty Yunnan porcini, which I mistook for chicken liver), as well as an aside: “Can you finish it?”

If it at first it seems like a dare, it won’t be on once you find yourself prying smoky, fatty but well-rendered skin from (impeccably moist) flesh, not stopping until the bones are clean and untethered. You don’t conquer the bird so much as surrender to it, and in this city, that may be the only winning move. Less

The abalone may have a soft, extravagant bounce to it, and the bird’s nest may well be silky and true, but taking credit for them is a bit like claiming Bernard Antony’s cheese as your own. It doesn’t really count.

The braver — and ultimately wrong — move, at the three-Michelin-starred T’ang Court, in Kowloon, is to order the basics. At lunch, that means a relatively cheaper set menu ($75 USD) or a few dim sum plates. No smiling captain will upsell you on the “treasures of the day,” nor a $175 (USD) glass of Perrier-Jouët to celebrate a Tuesday. The enormous, bi-level dining room is staid and dark, with thick crimson-colored carpets, a draped ceiling upstairs and graying chairs reminiscent of a funeral home dabbling in the occult. In tone, and in jest, servers glide between tables and whisper, as if you’re on your last legs towards a journey you’d hope would end sooner.

Food isn’t as well-choreographed. They appear in spurts, and depending on the kitchen’s temperament, may begin with spring rolls that don’t have much of a spring left in them, or baked puff-pastries filled with nondescript meat (roasted duck and Yunnan ham, I’m told). I wouldn’t have known if their char siu buns came from a highly-decorated kitchen, because the ones at T’ang Court could very well have emerged a foggy food warmer at a neon-lit bodega — mealy dough shielding fluorescent meat that chews like play-doh.

But the bigger transgressors are simpler still: fried beef noodles arrive as a tangled, flavorless pile — so greasy it could double as a fire hazard. And the roasted duckling carries the faint musk of socks that had been freed after a hot day.

Yes, there are more merciful ways to go. The thin, crystalline skins on har gau have a nice drape, and the siu mai are equally delicate. There may even be gems lurking in the restaurant’s $420 USD “greatest hits” menu, but you’ll find them buried under all the ceremony. Alas, it appears that no one, not even those Michelin-hunters, is here to dig. Less

I don’t know when Caprice turned.

Twenty years ago, it opened with great fanfare in a tall room with crystal chandeliers that draped like tents, framing wide views of the harbor. The team came from Le Cinq, and the chef Vincent Thierry maintained the polish of Philippe Legendre’s kitchen, whose cooking, as I remember from the year prior, in Paris, was colorless but precise. You’d notice the tight haircuts; the way servers move briskly, with confidence; and the longstanding captain plucked from Gaddi’s. The food was classical yet thoughtful.

Not much on the surface has changed over my half-dozen visits. The dining room still shimmers. So do the gastrotourists pocketing another three-star and those influencers patiently photographing themselves before the food. But my meals there began to fade, and at one point, lunch was tended by unkempt server ferrying visibly flawed dishes, like prematurely carved venison hemorrhaging its juices onto the plate.

Those episodes kept me away until others insisted that the latest chef had found his stride. There’s verve again, they said. Go! So I returned, searching for the Caprice that once moved me.

It never arrived, but there are flickers of craft. The first of it from a $400 (USD) menu appears after a ferry of wan crowd-pleasers — an unremarkable beef tartare and a clean, if blandly austere, slab of foie terrine, with a muted fruit marmalade hijacked by black pepper — and it’s a consommé with enthralling depth, warm with ginger, coriander and timut pepper, that may have overtaken the lean sweetness of the red mullet, but still felt alive. Sadly, the denouement begins with flawlessly-cooked lamb undone by nondescript, mushy celtuce and an over-reduced jus, followed by a promised millefeuille that ate like a dense, day-old napoleon.

Caprice doesn’t have a true analog in Hong Kong; the closest is Singapore’s Les Amis. And while the latter unfairly bludgeons diners with caviar, the soul of its simpler dishes isn’t lost, and a meal there on their best day doesn’t veer far from a well-established, old-school Parisian eatery.

If Paris is the promise, this one feels like the postcard. Beautiful, glossy, and stamped long ago. Less

The first thing you notice about the fish at @estro.hk is the jolt: a bright-green fig emulsion cut with enough fish sauce to make your head spin. It carries a pearlescent cod, cooked to the brink so it flakes on command, and it’ll haunt you. The second is how the curves of this dish — as in the slender ribbons of zucchini, stacked atop each other, gracefully wrought into an tilde — mimics the room, as if you’re in Elven cottage inhabited by a Neapolitan grandma who runs errands with her Bugatti, bartered her Impressionist-era Dali for the choicest truffles, and couldn’t care less if her ragu is traditional.

Estro’s chef, Antimo Maria Merone, is behind this thoughtful and deftly-executed menu, filled with cerebral dishes like the cod. And the restaurant is designed not by some worldly, renegade grandma but by the architect, André Fu. Instead of paying upwards of $1,000 (USD) for a hotel room designed by him (no shade), diners here — myself included, a month ago — get at least two hours designed for both pleasure and appetite.

A reasonably priced meal (lunch from $75 USD; dinner from $215) may open with king crab under slivered cucumber and a cold emulsion resonant with lime. But the first dishes that make your heart race, besides the fish, are the pasta courses. The first one is a twirl of linguine cloaked in a potent arugula pesto, crowned with tiny cubes of raw tuna — a la ‘al tonno,’ only sharper — and the second is bottoni, which are silky, miniature discs the size of macarons, paired with fried artichokes and a heady pecorino sauce. It stands tall among the best pasta dishes I’ve had all year, until the next one arrives: the ragu, which has the long-labored depth and a kind of bitterness that invites you in, much like the duck entree. This, too, gently re-introduces bitterness without it thrashing at you. The skin of the duck could be rendered a little more, and yes, dessert sends slivered, slightly underripe peaches.

But the sweets still triumph, the curves hold, and so does the vogue-ish Neapolitan accent. It trails you out the door, which is how you know you’ll return. Less