Seafood without the big price tag
There are three commandments for enjoying yourself at local seafood restaurants: never order seasonal fish at unlisted prices, especially if they have names like 'wraisse'; never order shark fin; and never patronise restaurants where the waiters patronise patrons.
Sun Sui Wah Seafood Restaurant is a good example of a local seafood restaurant: making a reservation under the name of W A Mozart, I heard the operator snort something about a 'gweilo' before banging down the phone.
Brutally seating us near the kitchen, a waiter gestured at us to pick up the menu, since nobody would bother to speak English with us. 'This,' I told my Japanese guest, 'is going to be a great meal.' He did not smile.
'OK, try this before we order. Walk through the room to the phone and look at the tables. Then try to keep your frown,' I told him.
When he returned, he was beaming. 'It's beautiful,' he said. 'I have never seen so much beautiful food in my life.' The secret at Sun Sui Wah is to avoid the people and get on to important things. Platters dancing with tiny raw shrimps. Golden-brown rectangles of beancurd. Vegetables and crab sauce glowing like emeralds and ivory. On one Tuesday evening, families were eating the kind of beautiful dishes that Franz Hals made paintings of.
While we were only two, we managed to order five platters. The restaurant does have specials: six squab recipes. We took the baked squab with soy sauce. My guest was not enamoured of the sweetish soy sauce; I loved it. But we both loved the incredibly meaty squab.
The shrimp 'Szechuan style' was only faintly spicy, although a few dips in the chilli sauce rectified that. Instead, they could be noted for a crispness, almost scallop-like in texture.
The deep-fried clams intrigued my guest, mainly because they were not clams. They were actually crabs, the meat extracted and fried a golden-brown. As with the squab, he had rarely seen such a large amount of meat in one dish. With this was a portion of red vinegar and ginger which added zing to the dish.
Had this been an Italian meal, the simple bak choi could have been described as al dente. Quick stirred, they were almost stiff with freshness in a lightly soyed butter-like sauce.
Finally came the 'eel balls'. Eel is loved in Japan on its own. But in a Cantonese restaurant, chefs cannot leave well enough alone. These were chunks of eel meat in bite-size balls, all bones removed. They came in a delicate sauce, with masses of cut green and red peppers. We could not resist dipping our rice into the sauce.
Our one regret was that we did not bring along a few friends. It would have been fun to test the Hangzhou beef soup or the ma po beancurd or the intriguing steamed egg with beancurd.
That, though, is only the beginning of an extensive menu, which also goes with the massive dimensions of the restaurant (90-odd tables). Not massive, though, was the bill for $372 for our five dishes, as well as a few beers.
In Sun Sui Wah, the food is the thing, and in that sense, this is truly an imperial choice.
SUN SUI WAH SEAFOOD RESTAURANT Ground floor, Block 5 & 6, City Garden, North Point. Tel: 2566-0633. Open: 10.30am-11.30pm. Overall: ***. Value: ****