Disappointment in the valley

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I find it hard to believe that it's been half a year since I last saw Ms. Hurricane, but such is her busy schedule traversing the globe. We managed to set up dinner for tonight, and she suggested we give Hong Kong Cuisine 1983 (壹玖捌叁) a try. I've tried the cuisine here a few times, but it's been quite a few years... and Chef Silas Li has since taken over the kitchen. I was very curious, then, to see what updates he would bring.

Ms. Hurricane suggested that we take the restaurant's tasting menu, and we thought it made sense to follow the recommendations of the person who knows the restaurant best. The staff then recommended we add the optional fish course, which we readily agreed to. My focus tonight was on the wines, so I was happy to just follow lah...

Right off the bat, we are getting some tableside service. It's been a few years since I last saw a restaurant dip stuff into liquid nitrogen in front of the diner, so this would be interesting...

Frozen salted kumquat parfait with sweet dried tangerine powder (冷凍鹹柑桔芭菲配香甜陳皮粉) - MEH. I was a big fan of molecular gastronomy, and still love it when it's done properly. This was not it.

Salmon roe celeriac purée tart with pickled Buddha's hand (三文魚子西芹頭蓉撻配老香櫞) - this was more interesting because, in the middle of all the cured salmon eggs that I love, we've got a few chunks of pickled Buddha's hand rind adding some sweetness. Quelle surprise!

Crispy runny quail egg injected with smoked chicken soy sauce, caviar (流心煙燻雞豉油脆皮鵪鶉蛋魚子醬) - this was definitely very smoky, which was not a surprise... Neither was the addition of a few eggs of caviar on top of the quail egg for that "egg on egg" thing. Biting down on the egg released a gush of liquid, which I assumed to be a mix of egg yolk and the "smoked chicken soy sauce". This was decent.

Beef cheek tofu mixed vegetable beef broth, crispy beef tendon and braised beef cheek spring roll pastry (牛面頰豆腐蔬菜牛肉清湯，紅燒牛筋及牛面頰脆皮雲吞) - this is a dish with two parts, and we received conflicting instructions on how to enjoy them. While we were initially told to drink the soup first, I felt it made more sense to eat the deep-fried wonton first while it was still hot. This was kinda OK but I wasn't sure about the Japanese sweet potato purée on top of the wonton. The beef consommé, on the other hand, was very delicious with nice, clean flavors. The chunk of beef cheek was really tasty and tender with that collagen.

Layers of steamed egg white fresh crab meat with Hua-diao wine sauce, lily flower root foam, served in egg shell (花雕蒸蛋白配百合泡) - once again the instruction on how to enjoy the dish did not make sense to me. Why were we asked to eat the tiny Japanese river crab (沢蟹) first?! It's basically decorative, barely qualifies as garnish, and a novelty that is never, ever actually tasty... because it's mostly crab shell and one can hardly taste any meat at all.

Digging deep into the egg, one finds layers of crab meat and steamed egg white, flavored with very fragrant Huadiao wine (花雕酒) and some foam made with lily bulbs. This was nice.

Stir fried mini geoduck with pickled sweet ginger apple purée, Longjing tea sauce (油泡迷你象拔蚌配醃製甜薑蘋果蓉及龍井茶汁) - the geoduck came with ginger, spring onions, yellowed chives, and carrots. All this would have been fine but we've also got some sweet apple purée, which was really weird when tasted in the mouth together with the aforementioned ingredients. I could have understood having apple with the geoduck if they were just served like that, but throwing in the chopped greens and stuff just threw all the flavors out of balance.

At this point we have gone through half the menu in the space of about an hour, AFTER we had asked them to slow things down.

Pan fried fresh South African abalone with seaweed butter sauce, flame grilled Japanese sweet shrimp with crispy Yunnan ham, Chinese mushroom crème fraîche sauce, crispy Japanese sweet shrimp head (香煎海苔牛油鮮南非鮑魚，輕烤日本甜蝦配雲南火腿，冬菇法式酸忌廉汁，脆炸日本甜蝦頭) - the name of this dish is a real mouthful... I haven't seen dish names this long in a loooooooong time. Honestly, though, I'm not getting the combination of the shrimp and the abalone. I would have been happy just having the abalone on its own.

I normally am a big fan of seaweed butter sauce, but this one didn't do it for me despite the abundance of what tasted like aonori (青海苔). The Alaskan pink shrimp (甘海老) was OK, but the best part of the dish was actually those deep-fried shrimp heads that came with crushed deep-fried Yunnan ham. As for that mushroom crème fraìche on the side... What the actual fuck?! This dish left me with so many questions.

Steamed black cod and fish maw with premium dried seafood sauce en papillote (紙包蒸海味醬花膠黑鱈魚) - so this was the optional extra that we were asked to add on. I like cod a lot, and the presence of the "premium dried seafood sauce" added their strong flavors to the dish - even if it was basically XO sauce. The strips of crunchy fish maw were completely superfluous, and did not contribute to making the dish tastier. Sadly it was just the opposite.

In fact, it almost felt like the fish maw was the excuse to charge more for this dish, which cost a whopping HKD 580. Absolutely not worth adding on top of a menu whose total cost is just HKD 1,600 for 8 courses.

The first half of the menu seemed fairly light, and when those dishes didn't turn out to my liking, I decided to browse the main menu. The reality was that the dishes on the carte sounded more traditional and interesting, so I decided to order one extra dish:

Braised boneless goose web stuffed in chicken wings (雞同鴨講) - I was more intrigued by the punny Chinese name of the dish than anything else, and figured that our downside to adding this would be limited both by the small size of the dish as well as the relatively low cost.

So they de-boned a goose web, diced it up, and stuffed the bits inside a de-boned chicken wing along with some shiitake mushrooms. Bouncy collagen city. Both ingredients were well-marinated for flavor. Pretty nice.

We were next given a show of having the top of the salt crust being removed, revealing the chicken drumsticks that had been baked inside.

Salt baked chicken leg stuffed with foie gras, red vinegar chicken broth jelly sand ginger chicken terrine, green pea purée (鵝肝釀鹽焗雞腿，浙醋雞清湯啫哩沙薑雞凍及青豆蓉) - the chicken drumstick looked plump and juicy. The pile of green poo with some gold foil on top didn't look particularly appetizing...

We've got some juicy foie gras and diced mushrooms stuffed inside. Pretty sinful and tasty.

This terrine, however, didn't work for me. The green pea purée was bitter and I hated it.

Conpoy rice, morel mushroom stuffed with sweet corn Japanese scallop mousse, egg white conpoy sauce, drops of conpoy oil (乾瑤柱飯配粟米日本帶子幕絲釀羊肚菌，蛋白乾瑤柱汁，乾瑤柱油) - it's easy to love fried rice like this, and I did.

The morel was stuffed with scallop mousse. Tasty.

Cold tofu soufflé with osmanthus honey (凍豆腐梳乎厘配桂花蜜糖) - the cold soufflé was fine... at least the texture was interesting and fun to eat. The osmanthus honey was savory, the way it's traditionally made.

Tofu ice cream (豆腐雪糕) - the ice cream was not sweet at all, and in fact was kinda bland. This really needed the crumble underneath to have any sort of flavor.

Petit four - the meringue snail had a very tart and acidic lemon filling. The chocolate truffle had bits of pecan inside.

We had settled on Californian as the wine theme of the night, and I was really looking forward to some tasty bottles. But it was not to be...

2022 Sine Qua Non Distenta IV White - 32.0% Roussanne, 30.0% Gelber Muskateller, 15.0% Chardonnay, 13.0% Petit Manseng and 10.0% Viognier. The nose was really ripe and sweet, with tons of lychees and very floral. Also really ripe on the palate, too. Showed some acetone notes, and about an hour after opening the nose also brought some vanilla and almond notes. Incredibly aromatic wine, but I wasn't expecting this level of ripeness so young.

2004 Kistler Pinot Noir Bodega Headlands Vineyard Cuvée Elizabeth - incredibly disappointing bottle. First problem was that the restaurant staff poured the entire bottle into the decanter - including all the sediment. Well... that pretty much fucking defeats the whole point of decanting a 20-year-old bottle! The wine also was pretty muted on the nose. Yes, there were notes of plum and leather, but it was not singing as I expected it would. There was a little more wood coming out after about an hour, but the wine remained disappointing.

1993 Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard - decanted about 2 hours after opening, and started drinking after 1½ hours in the decanter. Nose was showing mint, some smoke, and some black fruits. Pretty smooth on palate after more than 30 years, with a good acidity balance. After half an hour this was showing more fragrant, woodsy notes, then the nose turned a little savory and started to veer off course with a hint of brett. Nice, but I had hoped for better.

1998 Dominus - started drinking after 2 hours in the decanter. There was a hint of dust to start, with a bit of smoke, and pencil lead. Yes, there were still cassis and plum on the nose, but the style is surely not the typical Napa cab... but showing cooler fruit instead.

Wonderful company aside, this evening was disappointing on multiple fronts. The chef was clearly trying too hard with the "tasting menu"... and pretty much hit a bunch of my pet peeves - too complicated; too many ingredients; ingredients that don't jive together; adding fancy ingredients for the sake of making things look more "luxe", without improving the flavors; dishes made for instagram and not for the palate... Honestly, I think my experience would have been much better had we ordered à la carte.

Of course, the disappointing showing of the wines was like the upper cut that came after the initial jab in the 1-2 combo. The wine were all supposed to be top-notch, but tonight just wasn't meant to be...