Matsubishi Japanese Restaurant     松菱日本料理  

Matsubishi is a reliable restaurant for teppanyaki. A teppanyaki dinner can cost around $1000 or more per head, but the food is consistently accomplished.

I went there one weekend for lunch and found out that their lunch sets are pretty decent too. There was no wow-factor, just typical, traditional Japanese fare, but everything was tasty.

(1) The Grilled Cod Fish ($180) was well grilled, and was fatty and tender.

Matsubishi - a favourite for years! All these years, I visited and revisited this place repeatedly. When I was studying abroad, Matsubishi had always been on my wish-list/to-do-list every time I returned to Hong Kong for breaks. Good old times.

Nice and comfortable environment. There are a few small rooms - you can book a room if you have sufficient number of people. Apart from the teppanyaki seating, there are also a sushi bar and some normal table seating. Staff and teppanyaki chefs were all courteous and friendly.



Ordered a "Take" set (HK$230). With this set, you would be served with salad, grilled prawn or scallop, grilled salmon, beef (choice of thick or thin sliced), fried vegetable, fried rice or noodle, miso soup, pickles and a dessert! In my opinion, it is quite good value given the quality of the food and the performance of the chef!

Salad Salad - very fresh and crisp, the cherry tomato was sweet. However, there was a bit too little dressing and it tasted uninteresting. The salad could easily be done better.

Grilled King Prawn The Chef was skilful; dissecting the king prawns, piling the skin and removing the intestines. Very nice king prawn. Prawn was of a good size and was fresh. Simple seasoning (salt, pepper, butter, soy sauce, hint of lemon juice) was already enough to amplify the goodness.

Grilled Salmon Nice Salmon. Again, simple seasoning was used; and so the natural and simple fresh salmon taste was not undermined.It was cooked nicely! The salmon skin was super crispy and the salmon was not over-cooked at all. Look at the photo! Divinely raw in the middle. Yum!!

Thin-sliced beef roll with fried garlic and spring onion One of the reasons why I love love love having the teppanyaki set lunch here is the generous amount of beef served. At other restaurants, I often felt very unsatisfied. Never had the problem here!! Superb thin-sliced beef roll wrapped with fried garlic and spring onion. Every time I visited, the Chef would ask how well I would like the beef to be done and the proportion of fried garlic and spring onion wrapped. I enjoyed observing how the Chef did these beef rolls - ever so swiftly and ever so gracefully. For the 'Matsu' set, you would be served with Japanese beef; more expensive. For me, I have always been happy enough with the US beef from the 'Take' set! Good beef flavour, tender, soft and juicy - LOVE!

Fried Rice Good fried rice is not the easiest to make. The fried rice here was GOOD. The Chef started by stir-frying the egg, then he added the rice and topped the rice with a good amount of diced meat and veg! It was then a lot of mixing and stiring, flipping and blending. The fried rice was very very flavourful!

We were also served with pickles and miso soup at the same time.

Fried Vegetable Yes, it did not look the best. The fried vegetable consisted mainly beansprouts~ Not flavourful enough, just a very simple soy-sauce-salty-type taste. This did not really bother me though, I was so full by then.

Dessert
Ended with dessert. They offer different daily dessert or you could choose ice-cream. It was cold, but I stuck with ice-cream. Green tea ice-cream. Very creamy, but the green tea flavour was not strong enough. Just ok.



There are many good reasons why this place has so many loyal customers, like me.

a favourite for years

the best teppanyaki i have ever had!!!

long ago, I have been visiting this place ocaasionally to celebrate different special dates in a year...

after so many years, they are still keeping their best quality of food...

This day my colleagues and i went to have a teppanyaki lunch, although it is known that the food they use for lunch would not be the top quality food, still they are trying their best to make it taste like top quality food...

2 pics i uploaded with this critique are my favorite dish for a teppanyaki set

i especially like their fried rice, it can hardly be described with words....the thin sliced beef rolled with fried garlic and green onion is another dish that i long for...just remember, asking for rare is fine already, dont make it overcooked....

Last night was my sister law's Birthday dinner, and I saw a lot of things I'll only see in second class restaurants happened there last night.

The decor and the environment was great, the greeters sat us down a table close to the window and let us study the meal.
Not long, the Waitress severs us hot tea...she took our order , 2 beef Sirloin "steak" set, and one American beef thin silced with everything ~~well, the 380 and the 400 set.

We also ordered a sashimi superior as an appetizer, and everything were fine even after she took our order, but things started turning to a darker end.

*When the sashimi came.. well, the fishes were basically Bits and Ends of the left overs... It seems the Cut were SQUARE and some fish slices were triangular. ( even the salmon too!) The the textures, needless to say, were disappointing.

second in comes the set appetizer. we had 2 clams and 1 eel.

Now our Sever just put all 2 of our food in the middle of our table without asking who got who ~ or we sharing or not, she just started to jam the food middle during our conversation...
and my eel came 2 mins later because the timing require a longer time. ~very unprofessional, food should be presented at the same thing... But It is the theme of this restaurant for I'm soon discover.

Then comes the Main course.
*All of our main course came in different time...about 2-3 mins apart. (which were WEIRD. Cos the Medium came before the Medium rare.)
The steaks were gray in color. meaning that the PAN was not hot enough ( or was put on a NOT hot enough spot.. or the oil was not really)

In every restaurant I've been to, a Steak means Cubs or strips, cut in a juicy and lovely fashion. I DID NOT KNOW the Word SIRLOIN "STEAK" Means stir fried beef slices you found in beef chow min here~ The Waiter did give us some trouble, but a manager came, and he changed the food.

when we finished our main course, we ask our waitress were there any derrsst.. while she was chanting loudly with her coworker standing right next to me. and she replied " oh yeah, we have...huh... ice creams..." unprofessional.

matsubishi is staffed by local chinese (including waiters, restaurant manager, and chefs). twice a year, the head chefs in japan fly to hong kong to train up local chefs and make sure they are up to standard. most ingredients are imported from japan, but the seafood for teppanyaki is usually frozen food. so if you want the nicer cut, order sashimi instead.

we ordered the US/japan sirloin set (me & J substituted kurobuta pork for beef). our cook was chef wong, one of the most experienced chef at matsubishi who started working here almost when the restaurant opened. chef wong is a very chatty person, which only made our evening more pleasant.

amuse bouche 1 – salad: regular japanese salad with black vinegar and bacon bits. yummy

amuse bouche 2 – dumpling: this dish really begs the question. it was regular dumpling with a soft white wrapping cooked in stock.

scallop: ours were all female scallops with significantly large gonads. fresh scallops around this time should not have gonads because it is now reproduction season, but our scallops were frozen from a month or two ago so their “pods” are still “loaded”… the gills were too chewy, gonads didn’t taste nice, and the adductor part was not tender/juicy…

kurobuta pork: chef wong first grilled some garlic chips and onions for later use. each person also had a slice of heated toast (garden bread) to absorb the oil from teppanyaki meat. my pork was first grilled to nearly fully cooked, then chef wong put the garlic/onion on top, wrapped the meat around it and grilled for 5 more seconds then served. the cooking process was timed to perfection so that all of us could eat our meat within 30 seconds hot off the plate. there was no slightest flaw in cooking technique, however i must admit iroha actually has better kurobuta pork quality…

fried rice: ah, my favorite dish. the fried rice was just about the perfect moisture level, not too wet (the rice would stick together) or too dry (not chewy enough), cooked with chicken bits, garlic, onion, salt, and soy sauce. but chef wong did not add the fried fatty cut-outs from our sirloin into the fried rice, explaining that it would make the rice too oily/sticky. i think it’s probably because the rice was a bit too wet for the night to start with, whereas the fried rice i had in kobe did use the oil and cut-out fat cubes from beef, thus a much stronger aroma and made you crave for more. the fried rice i had tonight was still very good, but paled compared to what i had in memory and in kobe…

overall, it was a very meal. chef wong was very professional and was able to compensate weakness in ingredients with good skills. however, japanese cooking in generally relies heavily on the freshness/quality of ingredients, and there is only so much you can do with skills on a teppanyaki table…

original post with pictures: http://randomnomad.wordpress.com/2009/09/19/matsubishi/