Restaurant review: Tempura Taki, Central – not enough tempura on pricier menu set, for all its tasty dishes

Disappointment came early at Tempura Taki. It wasn’t that the tempura was bad – but there wasn’t enough of it.

It’s partly our fault for not checking; we assumed it would be like every other high-end Japanese restaurant we’ve been to, where, if there are different omakase “sets”, then the cheapest one offers a certain number of dishes that are the speciality of the house, while subsequent ones give you those, plus extra.

Here, the tempura omakase (HK$880 plus 10 per cent) consisted of 10 pieces of tempura, in addition to appetiser, rice and dessert, but the taki omakase (HK$1,180) and kiwami omakase (HK$1,480) gave sashimi and hot dish, and sashimi, hot dish and wagyu, respectively, in place of (rather than in addition to) several tempura pieces. We went for the mid-priced omakase.

Restaurant review: Henry’s in Stanley – familiar decor and decent sized dishes done well

The meal started with several of our favourite ingredients, all in one dish: sweet, fresh kegani meat (Japanese hairy crab), uni, kani miso (crab guts) and quail egg. Separately they are delicious, together, they’re even better.

The appetiser course sounds like a lot: homemade Japanese tofu with plum sauce, duck breast with miso, seaweed jelly with uni and seaweed in vinegar with mountain yam. But the flavours were cool, light and varied. Matsutake clear soup was lovely, with the subtle but distinctive flavours of the seasonal mushrooms enhanced by finely sliced yuzu zest.

Restaurant review: Hung Tong in Hung Hom – Chinese comfort food with a view

We would have been happy, in retrospect, to give up the sashimi course for more tempura. The yellowtail, alphonsino and two types of toro (chu-toro and o-toro) were good but we’ve had much better at places specialising in raw fish.