Restaurant review: Tenkai, SoHo – Hong Kong’s tempura central has a new venue

The area on and around Aberdeen Street seems to be tempura central – within a few blocks there are three places specialising in the Japanese fried dish. The elegant, refined Ippoh (at 39 Aberdeen Street) was the first (and remains my favourite), Tenshu (at 6-10 Kau U Fong) opened a few months ago, and now there’s Tenkai.

Like the others, Tenkai is small – there are only nine seats around the counter behind which the sole chef works. Unlike the others, which offer several menus, some of which, apart from appetiser, soup and dessert, are tempura-only, Tenkai has only one omakase dinner menu (priced at HK$1,300 plus 10 per cent) and it includes sashimi and other non-fried dishes.

The meal started with chawanmushi: delicate, smooth custard with tiny bits of shrimp and bamboo shoots. The second appetiser, which the waitress described as “Japanese New Year food”, included glossy, sweet black soybeans, crunchy herring roe, a nice slice of duck, delicious cod eggs with ginger, too-sweet dried sardines and an ordinary boiled shrimp.

One reason I go for the tempura-only menus at this type of restaurant is that the non-tempura dishes are often disappointing. So it was with the sashimi course. The shimaaji was very nice, but the maguro was sinewy and the amaebi lacked sweetness.

Tempura was served in two flights, and of the first, we liked the shrimp, snow crab, lotus root and asparagus. The boiled octopus had great flavour but was so tough we couldn’t bite it – we had to eat it in one huge mouthful and it took a took a long time to chew it so it was tender enough to swallow.

We had the same complaint about the hamaguri clam in the clear soup – it was very tough.