At this year’s British Embassy Christmas Bazaar, Scott and I had the luck to win a dim sum lunch at the Kerry Centre’s Horizon restaurant. As I have been wanting to introduce Scott to a proper Cantonese dim sum meal, this was a great opportunity. In northern China, Cantonese food and dim sum are considered to be pretty posh and quite pricey–the voice of a student echoes in my head: I don’t like Cantonese food because it’s expensive.
After an abortive attempt two weeks ago, when the restaurant was having another banquet function instead, we managed to make it to Horizon. We had a bit of a snafu because the reception staff told us that we would be unable to do the buffet, I think because it was a holiday weekend, and recommended that we come back next week. But we were dying to have dim sum, and so after a bit of back-and-forth, we were seated and told that we could order from the regular dim sum menu.
Horizon is a beautiful restaurant, certainly what you would expect of a five-star hotel, and the staff and service were wonderful. The dim sum was truly superb. We ordered about ten dishes, and below I have pictures of all of them, except the shrimp dumplings, because we stuffed them into our mouths before I remembered to take the picture.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
The entrance into the restaurant:
The interior:
We started with fried turnip cakes in XO sauce. They were SO. GOOD. Apologies for the blurry pics, they didn’t look so blurry on my LCD screen!
Taro spring rolls with Worcestershire sauce:
Then a lot of things came at once. Jielan steamed to perfection, delicious spareribs in black bean sauce and siew mai. The last is the only dim sum that I didn’t particularly care for; it didn’t have a shrimp inside and I enjoy it more with shrimp!
Finally, fried dumplings (guotie), shrimp rolls in soy sauce, and egg tarts.
The dim sum was all utterly delicious and although I miss the presence of the carts*, it was a great experience despite the fact that we didn’t get a chance to sample the buffet. However, we’re definitely going to go again and we can give a full report on all the goods!
*From my last visit to Hong Kong a few months ago, the restaurants have mostly phased out the carts there too. Sadness. What is this world coming to? Bad enough that we’ll all be buried under a mountain of trash beneath the rising seas, but now no carts in dim sum restaurants? What is a Cantonese restaurant without a bunch of ladies yelling out the dim sum dishes in their carts?
15/01/2008 at 2:28 am Permalink
Your camera is really good Fi! Which one is it?