ALFRED'S DELI is devilishly good, we thought. And when the bill came to $666.60, well, what more proof did we need? This Happy Valley newcomer should be hotter than hell when word gets out - especially with its oyster happy hour where $100 buys you a half a dozen oysters and a glass of wine.
Right now, though, it's sitting on Yuen Yuen Street masquerading as the new line in neighbourhood restaurants.
It's a totally wrong impression, not to mention a patronising one. There's nothing cutesy or mom-and-pop about Alfred's, although it is casual. Nor is there anything really deli about it, except perhaps the jumping fish in the logo and the tacky paper place mats, which they should definitely lose. So where they got the deli part of their name from the devil only knows.
This is a restaurant that would hold its own anywhere, even - maybe especially - in Lan Kwai Fong. It's so low-concept it's high-concept.
White walls, white cloths, white plates; lovely and stark and minimal. The decor makes no promises, nor does it pretend to take you anywhere. Everything is a blank canvas for the food and the company.
Perhaps this isn't surprising when you look at who the owners are - seafood distributors in Hong Kong. Their focus is food, not tricks.
It is possible, of course, that they just didn't want to spend outrageous sums of money on fixtures. Mind you, the chairs border on trendy, but there's a very good chance they were inherited from the Japanese restaurant that stood in this spot before Alfred's.
