Having read about 22 Ships in a magazine a few months ago and found out that it was opened by Jason Atherton who's worked for Gordon Ramsay and completed a stage at El Bulli, I was really anticipating my turn to try this restaurant. As I heard there were no reservations, we headed to the restaurant at around 5:45 p.m. on a Saturday, and joined the back of the already-formed queue. Turns out they don't let anyone in before the restaurant opens at 6 p.m. so we still managed to join the first batch of diners for that evening!

We sat down and ordered 3 sangrias. The sangria looked much darker and thicker than normal sangrias as it seemed that the fruit had been blended in. My impression of the sangria was that it was just so-so, and I would've preferred it being more fruity. You could tell that they tried to make it more special with the foam and these dried berry-like things.

Then we ordered the food (I don't remember the exact names): roasted baby gem lettuce with anchovies, calamari, vietnamese dressing oysters, DIY tuna tartar, pork belly, pork and foie gras burgers, truffled egg, and finished it off with the signature PBJ.

None of the dishes really stood out to me. If I really had to choose a favourite, it would be either the DIY tuna tartar (which was just chopped up tuna with some of the standard ingredients you would mix into a tartar i.e. soy sauce, chives, shallots, olive oil, sesame seeds), but came with a nice piece of toast, or the calamari (just because I like calamari). If I had to wait 2 hours in line for this meal, I would've been sorely disappointed.

Maybe I didn't try some of the other "signature" dishes, like Spanish Breakfast or the bone marrow, but what I did try was
just good (perhaps even average for some of the dishes), but definitely nothing outstanding, and not what I had anticipated!

The other items that I would just mention are the truffled egg, which had a REALLY intense truffle aroma, and the pork belly, which was really soft inside and crispy on the outside (as you would expect a Spanish pork belly to be). The pork and foie gras burger was a bit of a disappointment because the foie gras had actually been combined with the pork patty so the foie gras was not very prominent and the pulled pork at the bottom kind of masked the taste of most of the burger. The PBJ was fine - just a berry ice cream with some peanut parfait kind of thing, nothing amazing.

Service was good - the waitress was helpful and made sure we had everything we wanted and was helpful on recommending dishes.

All in all, it was an okay dining experience and the food was average to good, but not outsanding. Perhaps if it weren't for all the hype surrounding it, I would've been less disappointed!

The first thing that you'll notice at this place is the breathtaking view of Victoria Harbour, the second is the portrait-looking refrigerators in the wall with a huge block of Wagyu beef. As with many teppanyaki restaurants, this is not a cheap place. The cheapest dinner set for 2 is around HK$1330 and that's only if you eat sliced beef. If you want a steak, it jumps to around HK$1880.

I've been here twice and have had the normal scallop/prawn/beef set and the lobster set. I'd say the scallop/prawn/beef set is actually better than the lobster one. The scallops were very fresh and sweet and were made in a Japanese wine sauce, which the chef told us we could drink (tasted a bit salty just drinking it though). The second thing that was very good was the prawn - the chef literally cooked all parts of the prawn and made the shell so crispy that you could eat the shell and all! The chef also reassembled it into a prawn-like thing so that was a nice touch.Both the lobster and beef sets come with foie gras. The foie gras was cooked with a very crispy outer layer and served with pineapple, which was nice to balance off the fattiness.

As for the beef, we tried the beef slices rolled with garlic and spring onion and the US steak. Both were very tender and tasted very good. They also gave us a selection of salts to choose from - sea salt, Japanese plum salt and this other type of blue salt which I forgot what it was.

The fried rice with the beef set was a bit of a let down, but the fried rice with the lobster set was VERY good because it was mixed in with some sakura prawns, which made a huge difference!

We also had a sashimi platter which was very fresh - it came with toro, large botan prawns and some other types of fish. They also cooked the prawn heads in our miso soup afterwards.

The service here is generally good and the chefs do put an effort into making your dining experience enjoyable. Pricey yes, but I guess teppanyaki with a view comes at a price. There's also a VIP room with a teppanyaki table with a harbour view too if you really want to impress your guests.

I bought 3 small cakes to share with a friend: Banana Lust, Memoirs of a Geisha and Better Than Sex.The best one was Banana Lust, which was basically banana bread with a thick layer of cream (there may also have been a bit of caramel in it) and another piece of banana bread on top, garnished with fresh banana slices and crispy banana chip-like things. The best part of the cake was that it was VERY banana-ey. The banana chips on top were also very thin and crispy, not like your average banana chips. The cake was good but come to think of it, banana bread/cake is not hard to make. Therefore, no wow factor.

Things started going downhill after Banana Lust.

We then tried the Memoirs of a Geisha, which I originally thought was a raspberry mousse cake because of the raspberry on top. After a few bites, I realized it was a red bean mousse! The red bean flavor was not very strong and actually bordering on bland. The worst thing about this cake was the sponge outer layer, which was kind of hard and seemed like it was left overnight! They probably wanted a harder type of sponge that was tough enough to hold the mousse in, but it tasted a bit stale to be honest.

At this point, we'd already concluded that these cakes were not worth $50 each.

Last was the supposedly Better Than Sex cake, which I'm sorry to say was a huge disappointment. The chocolate taste in itself wasn't bad but the chocolate cake base was literally like Betty Crocker cake mix... come on Ms B, you can do better than that! Not only that, the cake fell apart way too easily, the only upside being that it was very moist. Must've really been Supermoist cake mix. I tried eating the red lips, which were basically a clump of icing sugar, not nice.

All in all, NOT worth $50 each.

Packaging was very nice (although they should consider giving out forks).

First off, the desserts taste OK. The four of us ordered:

Egg pudding - very creamy and tastes a bit like vanilla flavoured custard;

Apple crumble - this was good, they seem to have added some strawberry jam or something in it and was freshly baked out of the oven;

Mango sago - this was bad, the coconut milk seemed to be diluted; and

Serradura pudding - not bad, was refrigerated long enough to give it a hard texture, which serradura should have.

Now onto the problems. The first problem with this place is that the portions are way too small for the prices they are charging! The egg pudding was $20, apple crumble was something like $38 and I think the other two items were over $30 as well. The portions are barely enough for one person to eat so even though we ordered four desserts for four people to share, we felt like we had hardly eaten anything afterwards. Secondly, this place is extremely hard to find. Its address says it's on Carnarvon Road but the shop itself is actually on the intersection of Prat Avenue and Hart Avenue.

So conclusion, OK dessert place but portions are too small even for Hong Kong standards.

I went to try Green Waffle Diner after reading favourable reviews and I was generally not disappointed in terms of the food. We tried the Sunshine Breakfast and the Fried Chicken Meal. My favourite part of the Sunshine Breakfast was the home fries, which are basically fried potato cubes. The Sunshine Breakfast also came with a waffle and you can choose which flavour of waffle you like i.e. plain or pandan. I tried the pandan one, but I couldn’t really taste the pandan in it. The texture of the waffle was good though – quite soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. There’s also maple syrup or just normal syrup to go with it, but I preferred the maple syrup more.

Now on to the fried chicken. Unfortunately, we were told we would have to wait 40 minutes for the fried chicken but we were determined to try it. Turns out in the end that we waited for an hour before the fried chicken was ready. The waiters did keep updating us on the status of the chicken and seemed apologetic about it. We overheard that it was because they ran out of chicken after lunchtime so had to marinate some more...hmm..not really well prepared enough. Anyhow, the seasoning on the chicken was very tasty and the meat was very moist inside. The seasoning also wasn’t too thick so you won’t feel like eating a mouthful of batter. However, as some of the reviewers have said, the skin comes off quite easily from the chicken, so you might have to take a bite of the skin and then a bite of the meat separately. The Fried Chicken Meal also comes with mashed potatoes and gravy. The gravy had some garlic in it, which gave it a nice taste, but it was way too salty.

One thing really bothered me though - the table by the window smells . I think it’s because there's something like a meat stall on the street so the smell sometimes drifts into the restaurant! I would recommend making a booking before you visit to request the non-window seats.