Category: March

America’s Culinary Bounty
In the basement of Pacific Place, through April 7, Great is showcasing America’s Bounty as it introduces and features many new American products. From seafood: East Coast Clams and Pacific Northwest Oysters, to fresh produce: meats to superfoods and grains – there’s lots to explore an savour. In Great’s wonderful cheese room there a selection of artisan cheeses from California. A wonderful firm and tasty Fiscalini Bandage Wrapped Cheddar is a delight, while the Cypress Grove Truffle Tremor is truly a gorgeous soft-ripened goat’s cheese. Among the other new products is Tolerant Foods range of bean based pastas which are wheat and gluten free, non-GMO, vegan and organic. For those who love grains and ‘superfoods’ there’s organic grains including quinoa from Arrowhead Mills and chia from Bob’s Red Mill. Many of the products will remain on-sale after the promotion period.

During the promotion Great’s hot food counter is introducing a range of take-away Tex-Mex dishes including nachos, quesadillas, fajitas and tacos

Free Milk @ Circle K
As the price of milk continues to increase, up almost 25% from last year as the regular price of a 946ml carton of milk surges past the $25 mark. It’s not often that you’ll find convenience store prices are lower than supermarkets but currently Circle K is running a long term fresh milk promotion buy 5 cartons of Nestle milk and get the 6^th free. Simply pick up the chop card at any shop and chop away.

Buffet ala Hung Hom
Newly opened in Hung Hom is Sav, one of these new modern hotels looking to be your trendy home from home and full of bubbly friendly staff. Located on the first floor adjacent to reception is Palatte the hotels industrial looking dining space. With raw concrete floors, clear perspex chairs, the look is very modern and bright – but for all the staff buzzing around it’s strangely cold and functional with everyone trying that bit too hard to be nice.

The dinner buffet is prettily displayed, with a table of enticing desserts looking to draw you into the main dining area where cold and hot dishes stretch the length of one wall. Two cooking stations offer fresh pasta and noodles. There’s lots of seafood – lobster, oysters, yabbies, muscles – some sushi and sashimi, various western, Indian and Chinese hot dishes and the obligatory range of salads. Organic greens grown in the New Territories and a cheese board round out the offerings. It’s a reasonable sized dinner buffet, but… at $588 it’s not cheap. The extensive seafood offerings may be a factor in the price – as this was a special media tasting it’s impossible to know if on a regular night when the place is full, it seats 100, these will be constantly replenished.

It’s a very pretty looking spread, sadly though the food is very bland – the hot dishes lacked flavour, the salads identity and the quality of meat wasn’t all that you’d expect. There are a lot of very good buffets available in Hong Kong these days and Palatte’s at the moment isn’t good enough to make it worth the trek to Hung Hom. If you’re in the area though, the high tea sets look good at $288/two people and the lunch offerings of a hot dish, salad buffet and tea/coffee range from $68-$138 are very good value.

In-n-Out Burger
Family owned burger chain In-n-Out returned to Hong Kong for their third pop-up burger event, this time in Causeway Bay. 250 lucky customers got to sample In-n-Out’s burgers – at American prices: a double double ($25) hamburger ($15) and cheeseburger ($20). Cooked either ‘animal’ or ‘protein’ style, the tasty fresh ingredients were a big hit and well worth queuing for. Sadly Brian Nakao the organiser of In-n-Out’s foreign events confirmed that the burger chain has no immediate plans to open a store or three in Hong Kong.