We were at a cocktail event at the Cat Club (the 20th anniversary for Tales From the Kitty, the group we use for cat-sitting) and wanted to grab dinner. Fortunately, the HK Lounge Bistro was just a block away. We first ate here last October for Sunday brunch with our neighbors Michael and Elizabeth. It was a very good meal, primarily dim sum, but dinner was a much better experience. For one, it’s not as busy (weekend dim sum is very busy) and it looked like you could just walk in (I made our reservation earlier in the day and it was wide open) and we were ordering more substantial dishes than dim sum.
For starters, we went with the soft shell crab, but had it prepared salt and pepper as recommended by our waitperson. We also went with the soup dumpling/XLB of course. The XLB was solid, (although I think the pork in the XLB at Dumpling Kitchen is more flavorful). The softshell crab was delicious as salt and pepper preparation is and very soft (sometimes you get softshell crab when they’re a bit further along and the shell is starting to harden a bit).
For the mains, we decided to do a sort of surf and turf with some fish and some duck. We went with the steamed chilean seabass (always one of my favorites) and tofu and the classic duck since both of those were the recommended preparations from our waitperson. We also ordered the stir fried water spinich in cast iron pot, which was on their specials.
The seabass was atop the tofu and all of it was topped with a black bean sauce. No gimmicks here, just decent ingredients, prepared well. The roast duck was also as tasty as expected…glistening skin, savory unctuousness…so yum.
The spinach greens were good, but nothing special. We normally would have ordered the pea shoots, but we wanted to try something different for variety’s sake.
We were pretty full (and had some leftovers to take home), but I couldn’t resist ordering something for dessert. The black sesame balls looked interesting (i always get regular sesame balls, so this was a little different. I was also tempted by the durian pastry, but Andrea declined), but the waitperson recommended the egg custard buns which I always like also. It took a little while for the buns to come out after placing our order. The buns had a very good filling-to-bun ratio (it’s not about the bun for me…it’s all about the filling) and the filling was surprisingly not very eggy or very sweet. I didn’t mind it not being sweet, but would have liked it to be a bit more eggy (Andrea was fine with it that way).
Overall, it was a delicious meal and we look forward to coming back again to try more dishes.
Leave a Reply