[Patric]

I have been looking around on the net for some proper unbiased Honk-Kong restaurant reviewes and cannot find any. Most just list what is available and price and say how fabulous it is, what about real rewieves that dare speak the truth? This has cost me some truly bad meals.

Well I have decided as there are none, I would do some of my own. Not that I am a gifted writer far from it, just sometimes I like hearing real reviewes and think others might feel the same. So when ever I eat out I will let everyone here know what it was like. Unfortunately my first here was a terrible experience but so it is, just in the order I have eaten out in.

The Island seafood and oyster bar
2478 G/F Knutsford 10,Knutsford terrace TST Kowloon.

This has been my worst meal ever in Hong-Kong so far. For starters the waitress who did our table last weekend had very limited English and got everything wrong, but if only that had been the only little snag, something we might after all expect in a Chinese city, but oh no worse was to come.

The menu looked good it was vaguely reminiscent of some of the fine seafood restaurants in Brussels where I used to eat, this was intentional. Though it wasn't exactly the menu from the "L 'Escailler du palais royal", the restaurant itself did indeed look like a typical street cafe in the same city, all very promising one might have thought. I decided to start with a drink from their enormous bar glittering with masses of interesting looking bottles.

Immediately after we sat down however the waitress demanded to know what wine we wanted, neither of us felt like alcohol so told her so, and besides we hadn't even looked at the food menu so were in no position to choose a wine of course.
I ordered a fresh 'lime soda" with the syrup on the side to start, hardly a demanding proposition one would have thought in Hong Kong?
A glass of soda water with a saucer of lemon wedges arrived. On complaining she brought a mini jar of "Roses lime" cordial, after complaining again she brought soda water with the lime cordial in it already, after complaining I got a soda with a wedge of lemon in it and syrup on the side. I decided to forget the idea entirely and knocked back the soda water instead. She was however able to bring my companion a diet coke, no problem.

The food. For starters I ordered eight Oysters, when they arrived I asked for white bread and butter with them, she said yes and then stood at the front trying to entice new customers inside instead. I asked again and the same happened, she had no idea what I was asking for. I had to get another waiter who could understand, unfortunately he seemd to have anther job that didnt involve staying in the restaurnat for longer than the five minutes it took for my bread to arrive.

The oysters themselves when they arrived were inedible , they had been rinsed in water and yes indeed tasted like tap water, I pushed those aside and ate the stale white bread roll instead.
My companion had the grilled crumbed Camembert on lettuce salad to start, they were also inedible. Not freshly prepared or crumbed and hard as bullets. They were cheap pre-crumbed frozen ones, the cheese was factory processed and had no flavour and the whole dish tasted like frying oil without seasoning. We pushed both aside and hoped for better with the main. By this time we were getting just a bit grumpy, but you know what its like when you have made a special date you put on a smile and plough on through.

We were disappointed again, this time our eyebrows had begun to twitch. We both ordered the Dover sole in lemon butter and wished we hadn't.
It again tasted like unseasoned cheap vegetable oil, no flavour at all, and it too was a frozen product and slightly under cooked at that. The flesh was watery pasty cold and bland. The lemon butter sauce tasted like water and lemon, no doubt from the partially thawing frozen fish stew lying on our plate.

With that we abruptly threw in the towel, standing up together we decided to go around the corner and have fish balls on a stick instead.
General thoughts. An incredibly badly cooked meal using incredibly bad ingredients served in an incredibly bad way, and worst of all also incredibly expensive.

This restaurant sets itself up to be a fine dinning experience, but is indeed no more than a tourist trap. This whole disgusting meal cost 1600 HK$ without any alcohol, just a diet coke and small soda water. A scandal on an unprecedented scale, even for Hong Kong standards.

Avoid like the plague. They own another restaurant in the same sorry street, but you guessed it, I wont be trying that one out anytime soon.
If you know what real food is all about keep well away, you will be very disappointed otherwise, and you will waste a lot of money in the process.

[KnowItAll]

Now how about a positive review of some other establishments?

The problem with posts like this is, you have no credibility / posting history on this site -- which basically makes this sort of post a drive by review.

[Patric]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

Now how about a positive review of some other establishments?

The problem with posts like this is, you have no credibility / posting history on this site -- which basically makes this sort of post a drive by review.

Hardly,you will just have to have patience, however after living and working in Hong kong for nine years I would say it was well considered review.
I will do another as you ask. I happened to eat out with some friends last Friday evening after tennis, it was an excellent experience. See next post. But as I say I will only write about restaurants I have just eaten at, as should everyone, things can always change in a few months, so it would be not possible to recommend or otherwise places from experiences that happened months ago.

Besides this is exactly what I as a consumer am looking for, restaurants to avoid as well as those to get to in a hurry,proper reviews, not just more dull listings, that leave diners vulnerable to some truly and spectacularly bad food, besides posters are abel to disagree should their experiences have been any different?

[Krad]

Reason being is that this site gets a lot of people who will just sign up, trash a restaurant or a company, and then are never seen again. It kind of makes things tough for people who want to know *why* a restaurant is bad, and want to figure out if it really was, or was an isolated thing.

If you want to do this on a regular basis, why not start up a blog? Puts everything on one page or site, and makes things easier.

[KnowItAll]

>> was an isolated thing

Or even worse, a competitor or disgruntled employee -- also majority of the times, we can track super-positive reviews back to the establishment themselves.

[Patric]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

>> was an isolated thing

Or even worse, a competitor or disgruntled employee -- also majority of the times, we can track super-positive reviews back to the establishment themselves.

Yes I understand the concerns, but as a forum like this one it should never present a problem, a balanced representation is far more important. On a public forum, unless it is a dead duck, there will always be someone either agreeing or disagreeing with any individuals opinion, so there should be no real problem with a fly or drive by anything.

It gets a bit tricky though when forums are after sponsorship and revenue streams from local business, because then of course there is the possibility they then loose the objectivity and usefulness that the punters thought they were getting in the first place. That is us, the expats reading and contributing to the site end up being basically a worthless part of a site that is supposedly there for our very benefit.

[Patric]

Double entry.

[Patric]

Originally Posted by KnowItAll

>> was an isolated thing

Or even worse, a competitor or disgruntled employee -- also majority of the times, we can track super-positive reviews back to the establishment themselves.

I can understand the concerns, but as a forum like this one they should never present any problem, a balanced representation is far more important. On a public forum, unless it is a dead duck, there will always be someone either agreeing or disagreeing with any individuals opinion, so there should be no real problem with a fly or drive by anything.

It gets a bit tricky though when forums are after sponsorship and revenue streams from local business, because then of course there is the possibility they then loose the objectivity and usefulness that the punters thought they were getting in the first place. That is us, the expats reading and contributing to the site end up being basically a worthless part of a site that is supposedly there for our very benefit.

This seems to be an issue with any number of restaurant sites with review forums, they simply edit out all bad reviews and you end with no real information at all, just a list of restaurants, and most of the reviews to me, as KnowItAll was saying, seem to be written by the restaurants themselves.

It makes far more sense to me to just let things take their course, let people write what ever they experienced and for others to then do the same, its the only way consensus can in fact be reached. So to me it seems there is no real reason on the planet why a poster shouldn't only post just once about something they feel very strongly about, whatever their motive might or might not be. That is what a forum is all about.