Ah, waiter. We'll start with a Dream Come True. Then two orders of Natural Beauty, with a side dish of Spring Returns. For the main course, make it Life Is Fun and finish with a dessert of Bosom Buddies. At Winner vegetarian restaurant, every dish is romantic poetry and each concoction is a painting. The 50-odd dishes, all originals, run the gamut from Meadow Swing to Shredded Green Satin, and, straight from the boudoir, Riding On A Cloud. Highly evocative, the name of every dish is a story in itself. For example, Bosom Buddies combines two unlike ingredients: pomelo skin with shredded dried bean curd. Green Valley is indeed a valley of green (broccoli) over a white landscape (bean curd paste). As for Spring Returns, this is truly light and breezy, a meadow of vermicelli with coriander sprigs. Winner, which opened at the end of last year, is in that labyrinth of staircases and escalators called China City. But, once found, it is never forgotten. The room, in white and green, with lovely Chinese scrolls on the wall, is chaste. The teapot is filled from a kettle with water boiling along Shantung pebbles (for purity). The service is friendly and charming. And the menu is a classic of poetry and pictures. Reading it is an unending delight, but be prepared for disappointment: those marked with a little sticker (a good 80 per cent) have to be ordered in advance. But don't dismiss the place yet. For $188, two diners are supplied with eight to 10 little dishes, with the list changing daily. So what we had isn't necessarily what you will have. But every assortment is interesting. And if the titles sound a little gooey perhaps you're too jaded for the experience. We began with Eternal Youth. This was vermicelli lightly fried atop the freshest lettuce leaves, then covered with a peanut sauce. After that came Dream Come True, a more complicated dish of needle mushrooms in a mayonnaise-like sauce made from crushed lily bulbs. Lemon shreds added to the sauce gave it a piquant tang. My favourite was Spring Returns. This is like a powder of coriander and vermicelli together, the latter hiding the taste of the former. It was like a whiff of tastes. The Mellow Soup was better than it sounded. It looked like those awful sweet desserts, but was actually a bean paste soup with the satiny texture of seaweed and beancurd skin. One interesting dish was Queen's Farewell, a thickish stew with fresh mushrooms, balls of beancurd and hops. Not much taste, but an interesting combination. All Dressed Up was simply Chinese black mushrooms stuffed with mashed taro. I loved the flavour, but my guest felt taro and sago were best left in the South Pacific. We agreed that the Chrysanthemum Basket was an original. So original, in fact, that the Hong Kong Tourist Association asked the chef to demonstrate it. Actually, there are no chrysanthemums. The plate consists of an eggplant shaped like a flower, then lightly fried, with a little tomato sauce on top. After all that we were getting full, but not too full to try House of Gold. This was lily plants in a very light curry sauce. A bit of turmeric and cream did the trick. Next came Spring Green And Autumn Fruit. This was simply fresh greens with what we were told was 'sauteed myotonin'. Nowhere can I find that word, but they tasted like puffed rice or barley grains. Of course, there was the standard turnip cake and noodles, but the restaurant's regular dinner as well as the few extra dishes we ordered were different. As is the progenitor of Winner restaurant. So Yue-wah is soft-spoken but is as extraordinarily zany as her dishes. A former children's kung-fu instructor, she decided to open a restaurant without the slightest idea of how to cook. 'But I would put together these ingredients and think of them as my children,' she said. 'Then I would give them names. Or sometimes I would see, in my mind, a beautiful picture and then I would put together the ingredients and give it a name.' Does it always work? You may not want names like Threefold Trouble (poached spinach heart with three sauces) or the Pouch (stuffed tomatoes) or the Great Muddle (greens and diced dough soup), but how could anyone resist Three Kingdoms or Buddha's Eastern Crusade or Tree-lined Lake? I won't tell you what the ingredients are for White Ape With Fruit, you'll just have to go and find out for yourself. WINNER RESTAURANT Shop 41-53, Upper Ground Floor (near McDonald's), China Hong Kong City, Tsim Sha Tsui. Tel: 2314-9142. Hours: Open 11am-10pm. Overall: ***. Value: ****
