THE latest East Ocean Seafood restaurant is a welcome addition to the Quarry Bay food scene. Although this area has not fulfilled the expectations of restaurateurs and investors - they were optimistically calling it the 'new Lan Kwai Fong' a few years ago - it does have a good range of international cuisines. It is the home of The Continental, Thai Cafe, Q, Wild Orchids, and a branch of Grappa's. Surprisingly, it lacks good-quality Chinese food.
Most of the Chinese restaurants in Quarry Bay cater to office workers: fast and cheap are the operative words. And if you want dim sum, the only options are the Lucky House, which has improved recently but still tends to be unrefined and greasy, and mass-produced frozen dim sum, steamed at fast-food take-away shops.
East Ocean helps to fill the gap. While it does not reach the heights of sister restaurant Victoria City - often cited as having some of the best dim sum in Hong Kong - the food is noticeably better than that offered by other Chinese restaurants in the area.
On a recent visit we tried the dim sum, so we could compare them with Victoria City's.
At Victoria City (in Sun Hung Kai Centre, with another branch in Citic Tower), most of the steamed and pan-fried dim sum dishes are cooked to order. This ensures the dishes are at their best, and not cold from being walked around the restaurant until the servers can offload them on diners.
At East Ocean, unfortunately, servers carry the cooked dim sum around on trays. This is not a problem with some items, but others, especially the steamed dishes, need to be eaten hot. The spicy, salty, deep-fried 'milk fish' was cold, which made the coating soggy and accentuated the strong taste of the not-quite-fresh frying oil.
But we were lucky with most of the other dishes, and got our dim sum fresh and steaming hot. The har gau were rather large and unwieldy, but had thin skins and big pieces of fresh shrimp. We also had two rice-flour rolls: steamed and filled with char siu and pan-fried with XO sauce. Both were excellent: light and delicately flavoured.