Satisfying French and Cantonese cuisine at Roots in Wan Chai
- The one-page menu lists only four snacks, five starters, five mains and three desserts, but they mostly proved as tasty as they sounded
- Shrimp toast was delicious, the cherry tomato salad refreshing, and foie gras terrine had enjoyable flavours
The menu at Roots in Wan Chai (not to be confused with the new Root restaurant in Central) is just one page long, and lists only four snacks, five starters, five mains and three desserts. But we had a hard time deciding what to order because so much sounded tempting.
A snack of shrimp toast with house pickled onions and salmon roe (two for HK$88) was up first. We loved this dish which featured crunchy toast, and about as much salmon roe as minced shrimp paste. The tomatoes in the Yuen Long heirloom cherry tomato salad (HK$88) had been peeled, and were sweet and refreshing.
Our helpful waiter warned us that the beef tartare (HK$138) was spicy, and he was right, although it wasn’t overwhelmingly so.
The meat was roughly textured and hand-chopped, and was laid in a neat disc on the plate with generous dots of Yu Kwen Yick chilli sauce. There was a raw egg yolk in the centre of the disc, which we mixed in, and it tempered the spiciness of the chilli sauce and made the ingredients creamy and rich.
