Food review: Forum Restaurant is known for expensive seafood, but diners can find other options

When I walked into the Forum Restaurant, which recently relocated from its long-time premises on Lockhart Road to nearby Sino Plaza, I noticed a small, slight figure standing near the hostess. I did a double-take; it was Yeung Koon-yat, known as the “abalone king”. As a World Master of Culinary Arts and a member of the exclusive Le Club les Chefs des Chefs (whose members cook for heads of state), Yeung is as close as Hong Kong gets to a Chinese celebrity chef.

Forum is famous for its expensive dried seafood, especially abalone, which is pricey but delicious. But if you look carefully through the menu, you can spot other good dishes for more reasonable prices.

We started with the soup of the day — a clear, concentrated broth of pork with corn and carrots (HK$220). The highlight of the meal was the braised mushrooms and goose webs (HK$310). The goose webs were huge and perfectly cooked so they stayed intact when we picked them up with our chopsticks, but were tender when we bit through the skin and tendon.

The large, thick, meaty mushrooms had soaked up the intense sauce, which was so good we didn’t want to waste a drop: we ended up spooning it over the last dish of the night, the heavy, soggy, braised rice with fish maw and conpoy in abalone sauce (HK$480).

The rice, and the deep-fried prawns with salted fish and XO sauce (HK$380), were the only disappointing dishes of the night.

Deep-fried crispy chicken (HK$280 for half) was well done, with delicately crunchy skin and moist meat. The stir-fried fish intestines (HK$230) were tender, although more spring onions and ginger would have been nice.