Restaurant review: Mangiare, Kennedy Town - friendly Italian
Bring an appetite, patience and plenty of friends to Mangiare, where the chef will sing for your supper. The food is wonderful, too, with highlights a fantastic lobster orecchiete and rich Iberico beef
at Mangiare, be prepared to wait: the restaurant doesn't take bookings. Be prepared to talk to strangers: the tables are packed close together, and it's likely you'll be sitting elbow to elbow with neighbouring diners. And if you're eating late, be prepared to sing: after shutting down the kitchen, the tattooed Italian chef came around with a guitar to serenade diners with tunes such as Volare, O Sole Mio (which our group kept singing as Elvis Presley's It's Now or Never), and Bamboléo.
The food is prepared in the open kitchen near the entrance, and the day's dishes are scrawled on a blackboard. The food is served family-style, so it's best to come in a large group.
Polpo (HK$200) was a dish of thick, tender pieces of octopus with potatoes flavoured with lots of garlic and olive oil. Sicilian red prawns (HK$320 for 250 grams) weren't as large or as brightly coloured as we expected, but they were sweet and juicy.
The orecchiette with blue lobster (HK$300) was fantastic: the thick pasta, with cup-like indentations — captured the intensely seafoody sauce, which was so delicious we drank it out of the shallow bowls that serve as plates. Pappardelle Genovese (HK$200) had a rich, meaty ragù coating the wide strands of pasta.
