I had visited this restaurant few times a year ago and it was called "King Heung Restaurant", love the dumplings, I also recommend to my colleagues but it's quite far from queen's Road Central and there are thousands of steps, they are tired. Because of the movie of "Echoes of the Rainbow", they are interested to see Wing Lee Street, and it's on the way to Home Town Dumpling. Therefore, I came to Home Town Dumpling twice in a week.
We have ordered different dumplings, juicy, good flavor, the "shandong big bun" is delicious and pricings are valuable. However, the soy milk, neither hot or cold, is not good at all, we better drink tea instead.

There are a few places dotted around Hong Kong Island doing good homemade noodles and dumplings, particularly Wang Fu in Soho, the two different Dumpling Yuan’s in Soho and Sheung Wan, and a place in Sai Ying Pun near the Chong Yip shopping centre.

You see them with all with trays laid out in the evening, rapidly stuffing filling into neat dumpling and lining them up row after row. All of these places are good basic fare rather than anything fancy, with prices to match.

Hometown has a better range of dumplings than most , with a lot of steamed buns and xiao lung bao on offer too. Unlike Dumpling Yuan or Wang Fu, its menu is fairly limited to dumpling and a few different types of noodles though. If you’re not looking for either of these then you should probably go elsewhere.

Based on quality of dumplings alone, I’d say Hometown places near the top of the list. The Beijing lamb dumplings I had melted in my mouth with wrappers that were wonderfully buttery. The lamb stuffing had a really distinctive earthy flavour, and oozed succulent juice.

The whole package tasted really freshly made, and massively better than the defrosted dumplings you get in so many places now.

I visit this place today with a friend and confirm two things:-

1) The food is decently priced and the taste OK, though the waitresses seem too absorbed in their personal conversation and appear oblivious of customers' orders.
2) The hygiene in this place is questionable, at best. I see that the women responsible for stuffing the dumplings are alos the ones that entertain customers. They are seen wiping out tables at one time, collecting money the other time and finally back to warpping dumplings - with the same pair of hands and without any washing or cleaning in between (that's because I sit right next to the area where dumplings are made.

We came across this restaurant on Caine Road and saw Mr. Choi Lan's (蔡瀾) photo at the entrance and thought that we should give it a try.

We ordered the mutton soup noodles (羊肉搶湯麺) and the sweet and sour fish rice (糖醋魚片飯). The noodles were bland and the soup was tasteless. To be fair, there was a lot of noodles. The sweet and sour fish rice tasted ok but there was a mysterious curly hair in the rice that was not long enough to be from the head or short enough to be from the nose, eyebrows, eye lashes or limbs. It was a mystery why it was there and we do not even want to imagine how it got there. It ruined our appetite instantaneously when it peeked out of the rice.

One of the employees collected money and went straight back to removing cooked buns with her bare unwashed hands. While another employee who was making dumplings took a break to 'mine' her nose in clear view of the customers. And yet another employee dropped a tray of marinated chicken drumsticks. One drumstick flew onto the kitchen floor and was quickly thrown back into the tray filled with other chicken pieces.

We were once told that Mr. Choi Lan remarked that his photos are placed in many restaurants but the only ones that he recommends are the ones with him smiling in the photos. We vaguely remembered that he was not smiling in the photo shown in this restaurant...