So... this is goodbye

Our little group of foodies gathered at Hoi King Heen (B2, Intercontinental Grand Stanford, 70 Mody Road, Tsim Sha Tsui) one last time with Lady Agar, who is due to fly off to new horizons in just a couple of days. Hoi King Heen is highly praised by a few local foodies, and I was curious to see what the hype is all about. There was (as usual) too much food, so a few of us left with doggie bags - not that the dishes were out of proportions, but I think we pre-ordered quite generously. Overall, we had a pretty good meal and the service was swift and coordinated. Now would I rate this place as one of the top places in town for Cantonese food? Maybe more likely in the top 25 than in the top 5... none of the dishes was bad or really disappointing, but the use of MSG and chicken powder was quite obvious in some of them. Quite a few dishes had a very similar appearance, due to the omnipresence of little balls of everything - winter melon, papaya, cantaloupe... *yawn* No one had probably made so much use of a cuillère Parisienne since the 80s...

Tea smoked scallops

I did not find this dish very enjoyable. Strangely, some of the scallops had been sliced after being smoked, they were lacking in moisture, and the taste was far from subtle - the very strong smoke flavour completely overpowered the delicate shellfish and was a bit bitter. A good idea in itself but poor execution - I do not think this method of smoking should be employed for anything that doesn't have a skin to block the harshest notes of the smoke, and it probably works best on fatty rather than lean flesh.

Braised winter melon stuffed with black olives and preserved veggies

Quite a spectacularly beautiful dish, shaped like a bunch of grapes...

Braised winter melon stuffed with black olives and preserved veggies - close up

Some of us joked that they looked like the eyeballs in the soup in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom... the slimy sauce didn't help obviously. I found this dish very bland. Winter melon in itself doesn't have much flavour, so it is quite challenging to pair it without overpowering it - here the preserved veggies and olives filling was probably a bit too subtle. More pleasure for the eye than for the palate in this dish...

Stir-fried giant prawns

The texture was perfect, sign of some expert cooking - the prawns had that bouncy bite that only super-fresh seafood has. Taste-wise, not a hint of baking soda could be felt in the flesh, which is always appreciated, but some unnaturally strong umami was present in the thin glazing on the prawns - I suspect there might haven been a touch of MSG involved...

Steamed garoupa - a star in its own show...

Now that was one crowded dish... the sauce in the plate was made with salted egg yolks and crab roe and was pretty delish, with some additional smokey aroma I couldn't quite identify. The green disc at the bottom was spinach and tasted impeccably fresh and not "earthy" (as sometimes spinach does), and on top of it came a shiitake mushroom cap filled with shrimp paste - the mushroom was ok but frankly, I don't care for shrimp paste, which I find completely uninteresting (unless it's done the Vietnamese way and barbecued around sugar cane sticks, but then again most of the enjoyment then comes from chewing on the sticks and most of the taste from the BBQ smoke...). I would say both veggie layers did not bring much to the dish, apart from some height... The garoupa itself was pretty good and wrapped around a "matchstick" of pretty tasty yunnan ham, but the textures of both ingredients did not really work together and it was impossible to cut through the ham without completely destroying the fish. The dish was topped with a chive flower bud and sprinkled with some pretty sweet dried carrot. Each flavour taken separately was quite pure and beautiful, but the dish just didn't work for me.



Beggar's chicken

Looking too neat and tidy to be honest... and what's with the aluminium foil!?



Beggar's chicken, deboned - where is the stuffing??

Beggar's chicken - the verdict...

... guilty of blandness! To be fair, this was good quality chicken, with a good dose of fat an some pretty concentrated chicken-y flavours, but it tasted nothing like the woody, leafy and mushroomy delicacy I had come to expect after a few visits at Tien Heung Lau. The meat certainly was very moist, but lacked in flavour as the stuffing was very scarce. The lotus leaf aroma was noticeably absent, and no wonderful liquorice aroma could be detected either.

Braised beef with papaya

A very good dish. Tasty chunks of beef, very tender from the long braising and helped by the enzymes in the fruit, in a tasty (MSG?) gravy... but what's with the fruit balls!?

An Elf-esque swoosh on my plate :-)

Pork ribs with sweet prune and sesame sauce

This was pretty good. The fatty pork had been deep-fried and was coated in a sweet and sligthly sticky prune sauce - a bit like an upmarket version of your traditional sweet and sour pork... Why did this dish require melon balls? Only Chef knows...

Fish soup with rice noodles

I love a good milky fish soup, but this was clearly a miss... the fish flavours were way too discreet and the mushrooms used were not fragrant enough to save the dish. The use of chicken powder in the broth was quite obvious and not very pleasant.

Pan-fried dumplings

The texture was very nice - crispy at the bottom, sticky on the top. I was less convinced by the filling though, which had a very strong (too strong...) taste of pork fat (so porky it was almost dirty, if you see what I mean...), even though it had an interesting and contrasting crunchy texture.

Custard puffs

At first I thought someone had mistakenly ordered turnip puffs for dessert :o)




These were ok. The puff pastry was flaky and buttery, but the filling was a bit too thick and was probably enhanced by synthetic vanilla.

 

Almond cream with egg white - one of my favourite desserts :-)

This was whipped up tableside by the staff... amazing (never seen this elsewhere). The texture was very nice with a decent almond flavour but the cream was too sweet for my taste.