Delicious cooking lacking in finesse

From the outside Nam Garden Chiu Chow Restaurant looks small. But venture inside the Times Square restaurant and you quickly realise how airy and spacious it is, with several large private rooms at the rear.

If you choose carefully you will enjoy a good meal. We ordered some well-known Chiu Chow dishes, such as soy goose, pan-fried oyster pancake with scrambled egg, and congee with minced pork and baby oysters. We also tried several lesser-known items.

Many of the dishes lacked finesse - a little more effort by the cooks would have produced delicious food.

Take the double-boiled duck with salted lemon in soup. The sight of the oil floating in the soup was far from appetising. All the cooks needed to do was to remove the fat and skin from the duck before cooking it, and skim off the residual grease afterwards. The broth was good, however, with a unique, well-balanced flavour - rich and lemony, but not astringent.

Fried E-Fu noodles Chiu Chow style, too, could have been better with a little more work. This is a dish that tastes much better than it sounds. The orange-coloured noodles are pan-fried in a thin cake until brown and crisp on the outside and soft inside. The cake is cut in squares, to be eaten with brown vinegar and castor sugar. Trust me, it tastes very good.

But the cooks had taken a short cut and fried only one side of the noodle cake. With the bottom not browned, the cake was not as crisp as it should have been. The cooks might think that customers do not notice, but we do.

For those more familiar with Cantonese crispy-skinned roast goose, soy goose might seem a bit strange. The skin is soft, and it is dipped in garlicky vinegar instead of plum sauce. The goose this restaurant served was not a perfect example - the flavour was good but the meat was tough.