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2009-07-24
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What happens when the restaurant you plan to revisit after several years of you forgetting its existence, turned into a completely different restaurant with a few familiar dishes and a whole lot of varieties you thought you entered a different restaurant? Well, this is what happened with Satay King here in Causeway Bay. At the top of the arcade the elevator will spit you out after stopping every floor below during lunch hour. When the elevator door opens, hold your breath and open your eyes to a
Don't mind it, once you sit down you'll notice the little machine where the menu sits, It's a cute little device you can just press the button and the waiters will come rushing in. It ensures prompt service and someone to get your attention real fast. We needed a quick bite, and ordering something familiar may have helped. We ordered two lunch sets --
1. Rice noodles with Sliced Pork in Satay Broth + Veggie side-dish, and a Tapioca Milk Tea for drinks.
2. Rice with Porkchop in Satay King's "White Curry" with a Taro-flavored Tapioca Milk Tea and a Pudding for dessert.
The wait for the noodles was short, it came almost right away, thanks to the factory-line production everything's made in advance. When someone orders it, the thick peanut-flavoured broth was ladled into the cooked noodles topped with slices of pork and then, off it go to someone's table ready to be consumed. The noodles have stuck into a tight pile at the bottom. When we tried to pick up a bunch we managed to pick up the whole pile in midair, with some thick broth clinging rather than dripping back into the bowl. The broth was hot enough, with plenty of peanut flavour but minimal heat from chilies. The pork was slightly drier than we thought it might.
The veggie side dish, you can see, confirmed that vegetables should not be left standing around (raw, or cooked) for too long. It's at room temperature and it didn't quite taste like vegetables as pieces of cabbage were cooked until rather soft and lost its quintessential crunch as cabbage, or a vegetable, at all. The Tapioca Milk Tea was the only thing qualified as "satisfactory". It arrived way before the food arrived, and it's served really cold with not too many ice chips.
The Rice with Porkchop in 'White Curry' took another 20 minutes after the noodle soup arrived, but the waiting time felt like it's worth it when a narrow dish was placed in front of me -- pork chop with a good aroma of lemongrass was off to a good start. Then it hit me. There were only three thin slices of pork chop and not nearly enough sauce to be considered 'adequate', let alone being 'enough'. While requesting for extra sauce to be given turned out in vain, I took a bite into the pork chop to realize that the best things about the porkchop well how fitting it looks as "pork chop with lemongrass" and the temperature it's served in. The porkchop itself was soft and didn't quite taste like pork at all, with its degree of softness I'm not sure meat was supposed to taste like that at all. I also had a painful Tofu-rkey flashback moment eating it. (That's another story saved for Thanksgiving talk) The 'White Curry' was a thickened coconut-based sauce that's normally too thick to be considered sauce at all. Its thickness made rice easier to down, but again a little too sweet and not nearly dense enough with coconut flavour. In the end all the last bit of sauce was mopped up with some of the rice.
The Taro-flavoured Tapioca tea -- I have always enjoyed that artificial flavour of it, oh and not to mention that fake-lilac purple that screamed "Heffa-lump" when you see it (Winnie the Pooh fans will know) Its taste reminded me of those Purple Taro Icecream I ate growing up. It's not half bad, it's an alternative choice to the ordinary kind. The Mango Pudding, was best left attended. It tasted neither resembling mango nor was it fruity/creamy at all. It tasted like someone added too much sugar in a milky version of jello, only that it didn't jiggle at all.
You know the instances when you're likely to have bad food in theme parks with roller coaster rides? I felt exactly like that at Satay King. What used to be an OK restaurant has turned into nightmarish attempt to turn into a concept shop selling 'pirates' when other shops which used to "pirate" Satay King has gotten more successful over the years. The menu is nowhere near as daring as before, and certainly when introducing everything from Japanese, Korean, Szechuan, and Shanghainese fare with a Hong Kong twist all in a restaurant once famed for its Southeast Asian fare, it zeroed right in into alienating diners to feel as if they don't belong here at all. The pirates should've been gone quite a long time ago, and so are the round-the-world dishes. Sticking with satay and perfecting it may have been the way out for Satay King.
張貼
