We last ate at a Hakkasan in San Francisco when my parents were visiting. I remember it being elevated Chinese food and I remember the prime location it had and the interior, but I don’t really remember too much more than that. That location closed, but i did know there were many other Hakkasans still including in our hotel, the MGM Grand. I had scheduled our reservation for after the Chiefs-Bills playoff game and the restaurant was mostly empty.
We ordered a la carte since it didn’t make sense to do a tasting menu since my parents wouldn’t eat that much. So to start with, we ordered the Crab Sweet Corn Soup, Oysters, 2 orders of the Hakka Basket dim sum, and the Golden “Yuan Bao” from the Chinese New Year menu. The soup had a good crab and sweet corn flavor which I enjoyed. The oysters came with a black vinegar mignonette. I enjoyed these, although Andrea not so much. The Hakka Basket came with a variety of dim sum – royal jade king crab, langoustine har gau, shumai, wild mushroom and truffle – two pieces of each which is why we ordered two of baskets so we could each try every one. These were all very good, some of the best prepared dim sum I’ve had. Each one was very flavorful and with a bit of sesame. I especially enjoyed the king crab and the langoustine pieces for their rich seafood flavors. Unfortunately, they had forgotten or didn’t place the order for the second basket which I mentioned to our waitperson, so she remedied that, but this ended up causing quite a delay in the meal.
We also received the Golden “Yuan Bao” which our waitperson had warned/notified us was not a traditional bao with the soft dough, but almost a pastry type dough. This was very much what it was like. The golden bao was filled with king crab and the bao topped with caviar and was a unique bao presentation. These were all set atop a small bed of toasted rice. I can’t say we really liked this bao. I’d rather have the soft dough and the pastry like dough really overpowered the crab. We also tried the toasted rice which actually was quite nice and I think we ate all of that up.
For our mains, we ordered the Hong Kong Fried Rice, Roasted Chilean Seabass, and Jasmine Smoked Prime Short Rib. The fried rice had shrimp, pork and asparagus and was topped with a fried egg. This was a pretty nice fried rice. The seabass had a little of a honey glaze and came with some broccolini (our only real vegetable) which was nicely cooked and browned. I love Chilean Sea Bass and this version was excellent. The short rib came with a full rib bone with all of the meat cut off of it and topped with a bit of pickled lotus root as well as just a bit of gold leaf (interesting…don’t see gold leaf so often on savory courses). The meat was tender, juicy, and flavorful.
We were pretty full from all of this and were looking at dessert choices (as we do even when we are full) and our waitperson mentioned that they had the Hakka Platter which had 5 mini versions of their most popular desserts. There was also a bit of delay for dessert to arrive which likely was because the dessert platter also included a chocolate souffle (prep time for that) which our waitperson told us was not normally available outside of the tasting menus. Win for us!
The presentation of the dessert was quite impressive. The desserts were arrayed on a slender bar/box which was lit from inside with the Hakkasan logo. The center dessert, the souffle, was picked up and water was poured into the box where there was dry ice. This all created a large amount of fog to be released which made for a beautiful display. Going from right to left, first was the Chocolate Peanut Dumplings. The dumplings sat in a bit of vanilla syrup and small peanut nougatine pieces. They were topped with asingle peanut adorned with a bit of gold leaf.
Next came the Spikey Lemon which was made with shell with yuzu curd and vanilla cake on the inside. The spikes were meringue tipped with gold leaf and held some little pearls of kalamansi gel. It was a nice bright citrusy dessert. We did quickly get to the souffle since we didn’t want it to deflate too much. This was delicious, chocolatey, warm, and rich.
The last two desserts were the Hazelnut Milk Chocolate Parfait and the Sweet Caviar. The parfait is a round ball of hazelnut milk chocolate coated in crumbs of sea salt caramel, semifreddo, and chocolate. The “caviar” was of course was a play on caviar made of chocolate gelatin pearls and was even served in a caviar tin.
Aside from the goof in service for the Hakka basket which also contributed to making the meal a bit too long, it was a delicious meal and we were all impressed by the interesting variety of dishes.
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