Restaurant review: Tang’s Cuisine, Wan Chai - a game lover’s delight
Tender young roast pigeon is a must-try at this Cantonese restaurant, which offers some unusual dishes at palatable prices
Cuisine: Cantonese
Price: about HK$160 without drinks or the service charge.
Ambience: Tang’s Cuisine is part of the China-based group Tang Palace. Unlike sister restaurant Social Place, in Central, Tang’s Cuisine hasn’t received that much attention on social media, which probably explains why it was practically empty on a weeknight.
Pros: the menu isn’t that extensive, but it offers some unusual dishes at reasonable prices. Although we visited about two months after it opened, they were still offering special deals including a free half-pigeon to each person dining at night.
Cons: the only thing we disliked was the presentation of the goose liver cubes with red wine (HK$168). The smooth, rich goose liver pieces came to the table on a large, over-the-top large shape (we couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be) made of crushed ice and splattered with some type of red pulp (it looked like fruit but we didn’t want to taste it).
Recommended dishes: the moist, tender roast pigeon was a young bird that had been poached in master sauce before being fried. The daily soup of pork ribs with pear, apple, fig and snow fungus (HK$138 for a pot large enough for three to six) was unusual and well balanced – light in body but with a deep savoury sweetness.
The vegetable dish we chose – braised tofu with salted pork and preserved vegetable (HK$168) – turned out to be yet another soup, although as it was a cool evening, we didn’t mind. The soft bean curd absorbed the flavours of the pickled mustard greens, fatty pork and mushrooms it was simmered with in the metal pot.
What else? The normal price for the pigeons is HK$68 each.
Tang’s Cuisine, 8/F Hopewell Centre, 183 Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai, tel: 2180 6532.
Open: 10.30am-3pm, 6pm-11pm