THE Grunge School of Chinese Restaurant Selection is alive if not well. This is the discipline which says that evidence of things sanitary or Chinese or graceful in a Chinese restaurant indicate that the restaurant has appalling Chinese food.
You know the form: ''Sing Fat Sing? What an awful place! Chinese lanterns all over the ceiling. English-language menus! The waiters wear uniforms! and describe the recipes. Obviously the food must be terrible.'' Next comes the recommendation: ''If you want really authentic food, try this little place in Mongkok, overlooking the sewer. The plates are cracked. The chopsticks are splintered. Instead of a bill, they count the stains on your napkin. The manager is Oscar the Grouch. It's the best restaurant in town! It's the real thing.'' Which it isn't.
This is not to say that a few grungy restaurants don't have praiseworthy individual dishes. But for the most part, Grunge by itself is hardly the criteria for satisfactory dining.
Nonetheless, a restaurant as dazzling as Hei Fung Terrace inevitably creates suspicions. Walking up the driveway and the 80-year-old stairways from Repulse Bay Road is such an impressive experience that one suspects mediocre food might make up for the visual joy.
The stairs, once leading to the open verandah and the finest Sunday buffets in Asia, now proceed to an enclosed European restaurant. Through here, up a floor in the lift, one goes through a labyrinth etched out in rustic loveliness. Suzhou-style wooden windows which peer down on to the open piazza below. Bushes and plants glistening below the waterfalls. (Actually the waterfall falls during the day, rarely at night.) Relatively massive stone cliffs rise where the garden of Repulse Bay used to be.
A cobblestone walkway leads to the restaurant itself. This is decidedly not grunge. The 50-metre-long restaurant seems to go into a rock garden, but this, again, is an illusion. All is enclosed. But the enclosure works. Hei Fung Terrace is supposed to look like a Suzhou-styled pavilion in a Suzhou garden, suitable for about 150 guests. And the illusion actually is successful.