DESPITE attempts by Swire Properties to make Taikoo Place a 'happening' area, the restaurants and eateries' main clientele remains the daytime office crowds.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at the new Tung Lok Hin Restaurant in Oxford House, which boasts of 'Chinese dining in Western dining settings'. The menu offers many 'fusion' dishes, such as stir-fried prawns with strawberry. The restaurant also caters to more conventional Chinese tastes, with plenty of good traditional dishes.
Tung Lok Hin is certainly a lovely restaurant. Tables are set far apart and the piped-in classical music creates a soft and relaxing ambience.
The relatively large tables are set Western-style, with knives and forks, as well as chopsticks, and it is a pleasure not to have the waiters portioning out our food for us.
Reading the menu is highly entertaining; even the drinks menu is interesting - with names such as Apple Tree (apple juice, lime juice and Sprite) and Pretty Pretty (grapefruit juice, lime juice and Sprite). And at $20 each - and almost 50 per cent off on the second order - it is certainly a lot cheaper than what's available at many restaurants of the same ranking. Even the Chinese tea is served in individual strainers.
If the drinks are cheap, the same cannot be said of the main dishes, which average about $100 or more. We start with the conventional mock goose ($39) and spicy gluten ($39), to be followed by a salmon and garlic dish ($48).
The mock goose - mushrooms and vegetables wrapped in bean curd sheets - is palatable and not too oily, although I would have preferred it a little more crunchy. The spicy gluten is hardly spicy, but surprisingly spongy.