Saying sayonara with flowers

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Every year around this time, I try to book myself 2 or 3 meals at Godenya (ごでんや) to make sure I get to taste a couple of my favorite seasonal ingredients. Not only is spring the season for firefly squid (蛍烏賊), but there are tiny little flowers whose season only lasts a few short weeks. Timing the reservation - which is usually made months in advance - wrong by a few days would mean missing out on that incredible fragrance. As I would find out from Goshima-san, the all-important shipment only came in hours before we arrived, and The Great One actually missed out on tasting it a few days ago by mere hours.

Today Sankala and I are bidding farewell to a few friends who are leaving town for a while. After months of social distancing, dining bans, and travel restrictions, more and more of my friends have decided to escape so that they can roam around the rest of the world. DaRC will fly off to Silicon Valley for some work before doing some traveling, and Fat Donkey will visit family Down Under. This would be the last chance for us to meet up for the next 3 months at least... so I was pretty happy that we could come here for a nice meal.

Sakura-trout, torigai, sansho-leaf, bracken (桜鱒  鳥貝  山椒の葉  蕨) - the cherry salmon from Aomori Prefecture (青森県) was slow-cooked and smoked, and came with tender cockle (鳥貝) from Osaka (大阪), along with a miso made with sansho (山椒), topped with sansho leaves (木の芽), sansho flowers (花山椒), and fern. Love the fragrance of the sansho, which was of course why we are here!

Yakifrenchy with hairy Frenchy

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Hairy Legs and I have been meaning to get together for some wine, and since it was his birthday recently, I had been saving up a couple of bottles for this occasion. I was a little surprised, though, when he suggested that we meet at Clarence.

With the current ban on dinner service, I hadn't paid much attention to new openings in town, so I was surprised to find that O Chef is behind this new "casual" establishment. A quick look online and the word "Yakifrenchy" popped up. Huh? I guess it's kinda like yakitori (焼き鳥), where things are skewered on sticks and then grilled over charcoal. Most curious.

The boss introduced the concept and the menu briefly, and said he was gonna organize a few things for us. That's always a good idea since you know you'll be getting the signature dishes that the kitchen feels most confident about.

These cheese crackers with the dip were pretty good.

We also had these breakfast radishes, which I remember O Chef liked to serve at Seasons by Olivier E. and also at L'Envol.

We started with a couple of cold dishes:

Indian snacks at home

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DaRC and Ro Ro are flying off in a few days, getting out of this city prison for a few months. We wanted to catch up before they left town, and after having Chef DaRC cook us dinner the last couple of times, Sankala and I decided to play host this time. Not wanting to embarrass herself in front of Chef DaRC, Sankala announced that she would not be working the kitchen today. So that meant figuring out where to get takeout from... something that we do seldom.

I threw out a few options, and much to my surprise Ro Ro chose Chaat. I was a little hesitant at first, because I'd have to traverse the harbor for it - and the extended travel time would definitely impact how the food tastes. But I agreed to the suggestion and looked for the takeout options... and only found 3 dishes listed on the "Rosewood at Home" page.

So I pinged PR8, who very kindly offered to help me order from the restaurant's regular menu. I was thinking about asking him to make sure that we didn't get any extra items this time, but stopped myself. After all, who the fuck do I think I am? Why should any restaurant give me free food?!

Well... Turns out the kitchen did pack a few extras, including 2 orders of naan... which kinda ruined my plans of not having any leftovers - not to mention my hope of minimizing the use of disposable containers.

Tandoori beef cheek: hung yoghurt, Kashmiri chilli, cinnamon - these were tender for sure, but not quite moist enough. Nice and flavorful with a little bit of heat.

Earth Hour 2022

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Tonight was my 14th year commemorating Earth Hour, and my plans changed at the last minute as I scrambled to get into position.  It had drizzled earlier this evening so I had planned to stay at home with the lights and aircon off, just setting my camera up on our balcony. But as I thought the rain had stopped, I quickly grabbed my gear and rushed over to East Coast Park Precint, which is thankfully around 10 minutes away on foot.

I set up the camera on the waterfront at the near corner, trying to capture sweeping views of both sides of Victoria Harbour from Wanchai to Tsim Sha Tsui East. My tripod would stay in this spot for the next hour and a half.

My quarterly fix

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Three months ago I made a couple of reservations for my next meals at Sushi Saito (鮨 さいとう), splitting them between lunch and dinner. Of course, we haven't had any dinner service in town for 2½ months now, so naturally I've had to reschedule the dinner bookings. After shuffling a couple of times, I finally settled on an early dinner at 4 p.m. today. When it came time to figure out who should join us for this outing, I didn't think much before inviting the couple in the Tiny Urban Kitchen.

The restaurant no longer has a second chef other than Kubota-san, so for the first time in my experience, the two halves merged into one single space. They still limited themselves to 50% capacity, though...

Hokkai shrimp and glass shrimp (縞海老 白海老) - with oboro (朧) and perilla flowers on top. Always tasty to start with some raw shrimp.