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Your table is ready… in 1.5 years
2015-12-20 3490 views
I joined this dinner knowing only 1 person on a random weekday. Most of the group was from overseas. A sister of a person there, who couldn’t make it, reserved the table originally but instead of canceling, she said gather a bunch of random people even if you had to but JUST GO.This private kitchen only serves in portions for 12-15 people and we only had 7 tonight. More food for ME!My family’s designated restaurant for years for Shunde cuisine (a district under the Guangdong province and it’s 1
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I joined this dinner knowing only 1 person on a random weekday. Most of the group was from overseas. A sister of a person there, who couldn’t make it, reserved the table originally but instead of canceling, she said gather a bunch of random people even if you had to but JUST GO.

This private kitchen only serves in portions for 12-15 people and we only had 7 tonight. More food for ME!

My family’s designated restaurant for years for Shunde cuisine (a district under the Guangdong province and it’s 1 of the 4 Cantonese culinary traditions) was the Shun Tak Fraternal Association so I was excited on being introduced to a new place. 90% of the dishes met my expectation and more. We had plenty to drink also because it was bring your own bottles.

The chef/owner, Ngo Jie (it meant “big sister Ngo” in Cantonese), is quite legendary among the older generations of HK foodies, and her dishes time machine you back to the 50s/60s Hong Kong. She serves up to 2 private rooms per night (max. 15pax/room). A gentleman treated us all tonight and I assumed it was approximately HK$500/person.

Prawn Crackers to start off with a couple glasses of champagne. Appetizers were Deep-fried Shrimp Toast (fresh and toothsome shrimp paste, great flavor but could be less oily) and Honey-glazed Duck Breast Salad (nothing special). These were the only 2 dishes I thought we could skip next time.
Shrimp Toast
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Smoked Duck Breast Salad
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 Scrambled Eggs with Vegetarian “Shark” Fin was stir-fried with just the right amount of oil and heat, which gave the dish the unique aroma of “wok hei” (breath of the wok). The benchmark was to make the overall dish dry, without overcooking the eggs, and the ingredients would stick together when you pick them up. With some bean sprouts to enrich the texture, I was very tempted to order some white rice and stay with this dish for the rest of the night; and it was only the beginning.
Scrambled Eggs with Vegetarian “Shark” Fin
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 The most memorable dish was the mountain of Abalone & Dried Oyster Lettuce Wrap. Lettuce wraps were usually with boring minced pork/duck. Dried oysters had an intense and aromatic sweet-ocean taste, which made them almost like a seasoning or a truffle equivalent purpose in Chinese stews and soups. The chopped abalone also gave a bouncy bite to contrast with the crispy lettuce. I was enslaved.
Abalone & Dried Oyster Lettuce Wrap
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 The soy sauce was slightly sweeter than necessary for the Tea Leaf Smoked Chicken but the smoky tea flavor made up for it. The chicken was immensely juicy and tender. The smokiness also penetrated thoroughly to the chicken kidneys and livers, if you are into the rich taste of these parts, they paired nicely with red wine.
Tea Leaf Smoked Chicken
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 Salted Egg Yolk with Crab used meaty flower crabs and it took very little effort to crack open the shells.
Salted Egg Yolk with Flower Crab
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 Steamed Herbal Eel was very tasty if you were into omega-3 rich fish. The herbal goodness includes goji berry, black fungus, Chinese wine marinated green onions and a light soy sauce with a touch of ginseng-medicinal aftertaste. The eel was how Chinese people liked it - fatty and soft. It was a warming “yang-reinforcing” delicacy.
Steamed Herbal Eel
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 Thinking that was it? Nono. Here came a super big bowl of Lotus Seed and Jinhua Dry-cured Ham Soup. So many lotus seeds that we could have extinct the specie! The soup was incredibly rich and the seeds melted right in the mouth.
Lotus Seed and Jinhua Dry-cured Ham Soup
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 By the time the Steamed Rice with Lotus Leaf and the dessert, Apple, Hawberry & Sea Coconut Soup were here, it was just too much food to handle but we stuffed our faces anyways. The whole meal was truly too good to miss. We doggy bagged quite a bit home.

Ngo Jie came out to greet us afterwards with a calendar and asked when we would like to have our next reservation; the “snake soup season” was coming up. We were like, great! When was the next availability? Ngo Jie smiled sweetly, “Oh dear, the booking is up to September next year.”
Other Info. : Ngo Jie changes/rotates her menus according to the 4 seasons. Call in to work with her on the menu before the dining date.
(The above review is the personal opinion of a user which does not represent OpenRice's point of view.)
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DETAILED RATING
Taste
Decor
Service
Hygiene
Value
Date of Visit
2015-07-02
Dining Method
Dine In
Spending Per Head
$500 (Dinner)
Recommended Dishes
Scrambled Eggs with Vegetarian “Shark” Fin
Abalone & Dried Oyster Lettuce Wrap
Tea Leaf Smoked Chicken
Steamed Herbal Eel
Lotus Seed and Jinhua Dry-cured Ham Soup