Review | Hong Kong new restaurant review: Chueca – Spanish dishes show cuisine’s scope, despite repetition of ingredients
- Located in SoHo, Chueca goes far beyond the usual Spanish offerings, with stand-out dishes including the ‘Chef’s canelón’ and Basque-style cheesecake
- The three-course set dinner includes too many doses of ikura and avocado, but this will hopefully be ironed out over time
Visiting a Spanish restaurant in Hong Kong can be predictable. Without even looking at the menu, you know they’ll be offering patatas bravas (spicy potatoes), gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp), croquetas de jamón (ham croquettes), paella, and a charcuterie platter with Iberico ham and Spanish cheeses.
All these are listed (among many other dishes) on the online version of the menu at Chueca, a new Spanish restaurant in SoHo. We weren’t complaining, because we like all those dishes, and they’re also what many traditional restaurants in Spain offer.
But we visited Chueca in its soft opening phase, when it was so new that the only option was a three-course set dinner at a bargain HK$550 (US$70) plus 10 per cent per person. And that menu showed us that the scope of traditional Spanish cuisine goes far beyond jamón and paella.
However, we noticed immediately that although we liked almost everything we were served, there was some repetition of ingredients that is very obvious on such a small menu.
It’s one thing if you deliberately order two or three dishes that have avocado, ikura (Japanese salmon caviar) or truffle, but this repetition was on a menu where we didn’t have choices. Chueca, though, is a very new restaurant, and things like this can be ironed out with time.