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Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day came to Hong Kong

22 May

It’s a sad, sad fact that, although we live our lives paranoid about murder, war and other forms of violence, in reality it is diet-related diseases that are today’s biggest killers. In America, which is known to be one of the unhealthiest countries in the world, kids in today’s generation have a lifespan that is ten-years shorter than the previous generation, and two out of three people are statistically overweight or obese. With so much poverty across the globe, you’d think that more people are dying from being underweight, right? Wrong. Today, for the first time in history, more people are dying from being overweight than they are from being underweight. Shocking.

Jamie Oliver, one of the world’s most beloved chefs, and certainly one of my faves, set up a worldwide campaign called ‘Food Revolution Day‘, in order to, in his words, “help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

In a world where fast food dominates and kids are growing up unaware of what a vegetable actually is, what Jamie is trying to do is teach people what ‘real food’ is; teach people to get back to basics and think about where the food that they eat is actually coming from.

Food Revolution Day on Saturday 19th May saw people all over the world coming together to hold their own Jamie Oliver-inspired events to teach people to think about food and learn to cook from scratch at home and make better food choices.

In Hong Kong it’s often so easy to avoid cooking and eating at home. When supermarkets are so expensive and the selection of restaurants on offer is so vast, why not eat out, right? Or, if we want to eat in, why not pick something up on the way home and save ourselves the bother of having to cook? But it needn’t be a hassle. And it needn’t be expensive. We can make the time to cook and make the time to enjoy ‘real food’. I love cooking and used to cook almost every day when I was at university. Fair enough supermarkets in England don’t seem as expensive as they do here, but I was unemployed back then – so is that really an excuse? And why has cooking become more of a chore than something I really enjoy doing? Probably because Hong Kong has made me, like a lot of other people I know, lazy.

On Food Revolution Day here in Hong Kong, Janice Leung of excellent food blog e-ting organised a cooking class at a new private kitchen called The Studio by Culinart so that we foodies could also be a part of the revolution.

Hong Kong’s own celebrity chef Stanley Wong of Culinart gave us an impressive demonstration of two delicious dishes that he whipped up in absolutely no time at all, making cooking real, delicious food look completely painless and easy, just as it should be. Of course, watching this demonstration inevitably made us hungry, so we fortunately got to sit down and enjoy these dishes for lunch afterwards!

Using fresh organic vegetables from Au Law Organic Farm in the New Territories, organic pasta and farro from Bon Vivant Organics and incredible natural beef from Angliss Hong Kong Food Service, Stanley put together a beautiful Warmed castelluccio lentil and farro pasta salad with goat’s cheese and Parma ham as well as a Melon farrotto with grilled Cedar River Farms natural beef. 

I’m not much of a salad person, as I’m sure by now you are aware, so for me, a salad needs to have a lot going on in order to excite me. This salad was not short of exciting, with its mélange of textures and gorgeous summer flavours. Add goat’s cheese and Parma ham to any dish and it’ll usually win me over.

The farrotto, similar to a risotto but made with farro in place of rice, was also divine and again the perfect summer dish. Farro is considered to be one of the healthiest grains there is, due to it being low in calories and fat, yet high in fibre, protein and magnesium. It has a nutty flavour which, unlike risotto, it maintains when cooked, giving it more of a bite to complement the soft, sweet chunks of melon.

Alongside these dishes we also enjoyed some tasty black garlic rolls, fresh out of Stanley’s oven. Of course, eating healthily does not necessarily mean we can’t enjoy our little vices every so often; our Food Revolution Day meal was paired with some of La Truffière par Robert Comte’s beautiful white Burgundy made with organic grapes. Everything in moderation…or something like that.

From reading my blog, you can tell that I’m certainly not one to hold back on food, and I can hardly preach about not eating out when you can clearly see that I spend most of my evenings tasting new restaurants…but I can also assure you that, although I both live and work above a McDonalds, I never venture inside the ‘golden arches’. I do like to eat, but I particularly love eating real food, where I can taste individual ingredients and I know exactly where they’ve come from before landing on my plate. I have recently made an effort to make sure I do cook at home more, stopping en route at the wet markets to buy fresh produce, and I definitely plan to continue to try. Will you try too? If we can’t manage it then I guess it’s the thought that counts, right? Let’s see what we can do to save our generation and the generations that follow from being part of the horrible statistics I mentioned earlier.

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The Dim Sum Diaries now rates restaurants!

30 Apr

Ladies and gentlemen, loyal readers both old and new, the moment you have all been waiting for is here: The Dim Sum Diaries now has a rating system! It is not just any old rating system, however, with stars or thumbs up/down. My rating system comes directly from my personality.

Sometimes the quality of food that I taste leaves me speechless, whether it be because it is utterly delicious or utterly disgusting. For these times, ‘ooooh’ comes into play. I have devised a rating system based on my favourite word to describe food (if it can even be classed as a word), ‘ooooh’. Depending on the number of ‘O’s in my ooh, it can mean so many different things. Here is the breakdown:

I don’t plan on backtracking (unless there’s a huge demand for it), but from now on, at the top of every review, expect to see one of these little images to give you an idea of exactly what I thought about the restaurant.

Thanks for reading and happy eating to you all!

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Spring Moon

9 Mar

When I think of The Peninsula, I think of elegance. I think of class. I think of all the things we are often too busy to care about in Hong Kong’s fast-paced lifestyle. Spring Moon, The Peninsula’s Cantonese restaurant, echoes this to the letter. It is designed to be reminiscent of a 1920s-style Shanghainese mansion with dark wood and oriental rugs. Little touches like the silver bowls and trays used for things as commonplace as nuts or warm hand towels were enough to make me know, right from the onset, that this was going to be a very special meal indeed.

We tried the wine-pairing menu at Spring Moon, which is available until the 14th March. This 8-course feast offered very traditional Cantonese dishes (dishes which one would perhaps not usually order, but which nevertheless tasted divine) with six carefully selected wines to complement them.

Deep fried American oyster

The first dish of Deep-fried American oyster set the bar pretty high. The huge, fresh oyster was wrapped in a crisp, delicate batter. Whilst it had a strong flavour, it was not over-powering like some oysters can be and, paired with a beautiful New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc from Hawkes Bay, was the perfect start to a perfect meal.

Double-boiled sea conch with cordyceps flowers

To follow, we were served a beautifully presented soup: Double-boiled sea conch with cordyceps flowers. Certainly not for the un-adventurous, this soup featured chunks of salty and slightly chewy sea conch and a perhaps-somewhat-unnecessary chicken’s foot. Although the foot didn’t particularly excite me, the soup as a whole was unexpectedly tasty and comforting. The sort of dish I would imagine to be perfect for when you’re feeling under the weather.

Sauteed prawns with spicy-sour black pepper sauce

The Sautéed prawns with spicy-sour black pepper sauce, topped with crispy noodles, were divine. The sauce had a subtle kick hidden behind the sweet flavour. A little insulted, we declined the offer of a knife and fork, but in hindsight perhaps we should have accepted as it was not the easiest dish to eat due to the size of the succulent prawns. A 2008 Riesling from Alsace, France, which was lighter than your average Riesling, was the ideal match for these prawns.

Braised goose web and pomelo peel in abalone sauce

An interesting looking Braised goose web and pomelo peel in abalone sauce followed. The pomelo peel had been boiled for five hours in fish stock, giving it a wonderful melt-in-the-mouth texture and a salty-sweet taste. The braised goose web (literally a goose foot!) had more meat on it than the chicken’s foot and was surprisingly tasty. A full-bodied 2008 Pinot Noir from Santa Maria Valley, USA went down a treat; I think this was my favourite wine of the night.

Wagyu beef with morels

The Wagyu beef with morels, another beautifully presented dish, was a real winner. Though the beef may have been slightly chewy, the flavour shone through and I was surprised to find that the morels were even more delicious. Served in a cute little bird’s nest and accompanied by a wonderfully oaky South African Constantia Glen Three, this may well have been my favourite dish.

Coddled young spinach in rice broth

Compared to the rest of the dishes, the Coddled young spinach in rice broth seemed rather bland. However, this was actually not a problem and in fact I even think it needed to be bland in order to balance the richness of the other dishes. Again, I can only describe this as a comforting dish.

Fried rice is one of my favourite dishes of all time. Back when I was a really fussy eater (can you believe it?!), I would eat little else. The Fried rice with barbecued pork and preserved vegetables did not disappoint. In fact it was so good that as soon as it was presented before me, I pounced and forgot to capture it on camera! Oh well, we all know what chow fan looks like. Succulent char siu and preserved vegetables, the latter a traditional ingredient used less and less nowadays, will always win my heart.

Spring Moon dessert - Orange pudding

To end our feast, a Spring Moon dessert was served. This was a delicious orange pudding, similar to the traditional mango variety. However, where a mango pudding is perpetually sweet, this orange pudding maintained a refreshing sharpness to it. For me, this was ideal as I adore sour things and found the 2007 Chateau Belingard Monbazillac from Bordeaux already far too sweet for my liking.

Service at Spring Moon also reflects the elegance and class I alluded to at the beginning of this review. Although service between courses may have been slow, the waiters were more than attentive and made us feel relaxed and very well looked after.

The ‘wine pairing promotion’ costs $1,388 per person. They change the promotion with frequency; sometimes it might be a tea pairing promotion or a focus on one aspect of Cantonese cuisine. Frankly I’m glad we booked our table when we did as I love a good wine-pairing!

Spring Moon

1/F The Peninsula
Salisbury Road
Tsim Sha Tsui
Kowloon
Hong Kong

Tel: +852 2315 3160

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Madam Sixty Ate

9 Nov

Madam Sixty Ate has received a lot of hype since its opening in the summer and I have been desperate to see what all the fuss is about. The answer is that it is a different species of restaurant to what we are used to seeing in Hong Kong, where the two Australian chefs, Chris Woodyard, formerly culinary director at W Hotel, and Andrew Braham, formerly Tom Aiken’s sous chef in London, carefully present European-inspired cuisine with that all important ‘twist’.

Knowing that everyone has been going crazy about this place, I expected it to be heaving and difficult to obtain a reservation, particularly given its ideal location in J Senses, just next to the Pawn; it was however not even a quarter full. Perhaps this is because it was a Monday night, or perhaps the buzz has died down and Hong Kongers have moved on to pastures new. I wouldn’t say this hugely affected our experience of the restaurant, as Madam Sixty Ate offers enough of its own quirky character to fill the space. For example, surreal paintings abound, offering images of things like a huge woolly pig or a lady holding what should be a bunch of flowers but happens to be a fish… Strange to say the least.

Being three indecisive food-lovers who were intrigued by almost every item on the menu, I would say it took us a good twenty minutes of reading and re-reading the menu before coming to a final decision. It isn’t a complicated menu per se (you can select a seven- or eight-course tasting menu or choose a la carte) but we had to pick carefully to make sure Food Envy didn’t turn up and ruin our meal.

'Paella for Pedro'

For starters, Madam’s ‘Paella for Pedro’ is an interesting take on the traditional Spanish paella, and in fact not a paella at all. A trail of puffed rice, popcorn, cubes of chorizo, squid, rabbit and scampi was beautifully presented across the plate, adorned with edible flowers and squid ink wafers, offering an incredible explosion of different textures all at once.

'Joseph the Duck'

‘Joseph the duck’, which consists of cured duck ham similar to Parma ham, thin slices of juicy melon and quail’s eggs, at first sight seemed the least exciting dish on the table, but at first bite proved otherwise.

Scallop Bourguignon

The Scallop Bourguignon, delicious seared scallops with mushrooms and a bone marrow dumpling, was also a highlight, although a little heavy on the seasoning.

'For Stanley'

Moving on to the mains, surprisingly each of them arrived verging on cold, which for a near-empty restaurant was just a little disenchanting. Thankfully, for the most part, the taste made up for this. My ‘For Stanley’, which was poached halibut on a bed of cauliflower, smoked bacon and squid ink was both delicious and aesthetically pleasing given the beautiful contrast between the whiter-than-white fish and the black squid ink.

Twice cooked lamb loin

The twice-cooked lamb loin was succulent and tasty, although it would definitely have benefitted from being a touch warmer.

Wagyu short rib steak

The first of the disappointing dishes was the Wagyu short rib steak with spinach and horseradish foam. Visually it was perfect: amazing colour contrasts between the pink meat and the rich green spinach puree. However, the steak was chewy and there just wasn’t nearly enough flavour. After adding some seasoning and a scoop of truffle from the yummy Kipfler potatoes with melted parmesan and truffle oil it was better, but this shouldn’t have been necessary.

The second disappointment was the second side dish: young carrots, sauternes vinaigrette and sorrel leaves, which was more of a far-too-overly-dressed carrot salad and completely not what we were expecting.

Gingerbread and apples

The desserts were most certainly the stars of the show. We ordered two to share between us, one Gingerbread and apples and one Honey parfait. The gingerbread and apples consisted of a comforting cinnamon parfait, made the more exciting by a sharp green apple sorbet which I could have happily eaten a whole tub of. The honey parfait was served with salted caramel honeycomb, a creamy chocolate mousse and, rather strangely, popcorn. The combination of textures was once again amazing.

Honey parfait

The service was notable; the waiters at Madam Sixty Ate actually know what they are talking about and aren’t afraid to offer advice, which is quite often a rarity in Hong Kong.

Apart from a few hiccups, it was a very enjoyable meal, paired with beautiful wine – although this certainly does not come cheap. In fact not a lot does come cheap at Madam Sixty Ate. It is, however, a unique experience and one I would most likely consider trying again, as I’d quite like to try some of Joseph, Stanley and Pedro’s friends. Hopefully by the next time, the hiccups will have gone.

Madam Sixty Ate

Shop 8, 1/F The Podium, J Senses
60 Johnston Road
Wan Chai
Hong Kong

Tel: +852 2527 2558

Date visited: Monday 7th November 2011

Food Glorious Food

20 Apr

I’ve never really been certain of exactly what I want to do with my life. This is probably the reason I went for the first job that happened to fall in my lap. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great job! But let’s just say it was never really my preferred choice of career path. But what actually is the job for me? What really makes me happy? I can safely say that, although, of course, friendships and running and family and sunny days do make me smile, what really makes me happy, what I get up for in the morning and what really gets me through the day has got to be…FOOD! Have you heard people talk about whether they eat to live or live to eat? I am most definitely, 101% the latter. Food makes the world go round. Or my world at least. I feel somewhat selfish and thoughtless saying this when evidently there are people across the globe dying of starvation. I’m sure food doesn’t make their world go round. Suffice to say I have had a very fortunate upbringing and am luckily not in that disgustingly high percentage of people who do not have the luxury to admit that they simply live to eat.

What gets me through any day is the knowledge that, however slowly the morning passes, it will eventually be 1 o clock: lunchtime, when I basically peg it out the door and into the lift as fast as my little legs can take me. If I take less than an hour for lunch, I actually want to cry, so definitely none of this quick-stop-to-711-to-get-some-pot-noodles-and-eat-them-at-my-desk malarkey for me! Whether my stomach is screaming at me with hunger or not (the latter is rarely the case), I absolutely HAVE to go and have a proper lunch which keeps me busy for least an hour, before I can drag myself away to count down the hours until dinner time. Let’s not forget that 4 o clock is what I like to call chocolate o clock. Everyone knows about my emergency chocolate drawer and believe me, these emergencies do happen. With frequency.

I once did a detox trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, which pretty much involved NOT eating for 3 whole days. These were not pretty days. I even cried one day when forced to drink a ‘liver flush drink’. I won’t give you details on what exactly this consisted of but I will tell you one ingredient – 4 cloves of raw garlic. Under normal circumstances, I absolutely love garlic. I actually put it in most dishes I cook (obviously not sweet dishes, don’t be ridiculous) but having that much garlic – RAW garlic – in my drink? No thank you. Never again. Did I feel any different after my 3 day fast? Umm.. no, not really. Perhaps this was because I was invited to lunch at the Mandarin Oriental for a work meeting – tough job! – and couldn’t really say no, so I think I may have ‘masticated’ a few bits of raw vegetables which is apparently completely against detox rules. Whatevs. Or perhaps it had something to do with having to delve into the emergency bag one night at the market when too much shopping brought me close to fainting. Sadly said emergency bag didn’t contain chocolate this time as thought that would be bending the rules ever so slightly too much, so instead I opted for 2 pieces – 2 measly pieces! – of dried mango to bring me back to life.

I am not the kind of person that will listen to anyone telling me what I can and can’t eat. It simply makes me crave that food even more. Diets are ridiculous in my opinion. If you can’t eat what makes you really happy then seriously, what is the point in living? Eat what you like (within reason, let’s not get carried away now) and up the exercise – that’s my mantra. On a freezing cold day, do you really want to be eating a salad? Definitely not going to warm you right down to the bones, is it?  And is it going to fill you with that warm fuzzy energy that’ll keep you going through the day? Rather unlikely. What you need is some Vietnamese Pho noodles – full of goodness and will reach even the deepest coldest pit of your stomach.

Along with walking behind infuriatingly slow people, and trying to walk against the flow of people who refuse to veer even slightly to the side to let you pass, one of the things that annoys me most about living in Hong Kong is that a great number of restaurants simply don’t have their own website. When you Google them, all you get is pretty awful websites with hideous pictures of dishes and terrible reviews with an abundance of grammatical errors that make any perfectionist like myself cringe. I can’t stand it. Did I mention I love food? So when someone invites me to a restaurant, naturally the first thing I do is Google it, look for the menu and scope out what I am most likely to order. When a place offers a huge menu, being as indecisive as I am, this always makes life a little bit difficult for me. I’m not saying I don’t like big menus. But it’s always rather embarrassing when it comes to ordering and there are just so many amazing dishes to choose from that I don’t know where to begin. Then I start to get nervous and either ask the waiter for their opinion (said waiter, more often than not, has never actually tried any of the dishes himself and therefore cannot provide me with any valuable advice. For example a waiter at a lovely restaurant in London claimed he could not tell me if the chicken pie was good as he was intolerant to chicken. Really?!) or  I panic order and go for something I really should not have ordered. Hence the need to see the menu beforehand. Definitely a sensible request methinks. But alas, not every restaurant offers such luxuries here, and as I mentioned, the reviews just aren’t up to scratch. I read a review about a very good dim sum restaurant where the review’s author had given it the complete thumbs down because her elderly mother had not been escorted to her seat. What did it say about the food? Zilch. Really helpful when all you want to know is if it’s going to make your taste buds tingle.

Therefore I am proposing to check out these places with my own taste buds and let you know my verdict. It’s always so easy to find a place you like and trust and keep going back there. But Hong Kong has so many restaurants to offer and new ones opening up what seems like every day, so why keep trying the same place? I am setting myself the oh-so-difficult challenge of trying out a new (if only new to me) restaurant at least once a week and writing about it. Let’s see if I can help some of you fellow foodies out there. I unfortunately won’t be able to provide you with an up to date menu, but I can (hopefully) at the very least, provide you with a (nicely written) critique that will still make your mouth water (or not, as the case may be). Watch this space…

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Hello lovely people!

19 Apr

Dim Sum Diaries is undergoing a much needed re-vamp! Fear not, you will still be able to see all the same restaurant reviews – plus many more exciting ones to come – just in a nicer looking format!

Please bear with me whilst I get to grips with this new site and transfer all your old favourites onto here. There might be a very slight pause before I upload any newbies, but don’t fret as there are two new delicious restaurant reviews on their way to a computer screen near you very shortly!

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