HONG KONG SPOTLIGHT: Manor Seafood Restaurant: The Young Pig and The Sea

This month we are taking a look at the wealth of culinary delights in Hong Kong. We have asked local bloggers to tell us where they would recommend foodies should check out when they visit this diverse culinary hot spot. E_Ting has written about Manor Seafood Restaurant, you can keep up with e_ting at http://www.e-tingfood.com/.

Manor Seafood Restaurant: The Young Pig and The Sea

G/F, 440 Jaffe Road, Causeway Bay, HK. Tel: 2836 9999

$400 per person

Cantonese restaurants often call themselves “seafood” restaurants, and with the tanks of live fish splashing out front, you can’t be blamed for believing them. It’s not that the fish aren’t real, but seafood is not the only thing the restaurant serves, and it’s often not even their speciality.

Case in point – Manor Seafood Restaurant. Tucked in a back street on the border of bustling Causeway Bay and Wanchai districts, this looks like your typical Cantonese restaurant – dark red velvet chairs, white tablecloths on round tables and fish tanks, but you’re here for more than marine life.

The main event is their roasted suckling pig. You need to order it a day in advance, so the chefs can procure your piggy. When you arrive and give the waiter a nod, s/he’ll scoot into the kitchen, and the roasting will begin. In a mere 20 minutes, a deep red, lightly charred, glistening swine is presented whole, with a large grid scored on the surface. The grid is in fact the super crispy skin that’s been cut into squares, ready to be placed atop a pancake spread with hoisin sauce. But that’s not all. Once the cracking has been served, the rest of the piglet is efficiently chopped up so you can have the juicy, pink flesh and gnaw at the deliciously roasted bones. I personally like the ribs for fuller flavour (thin flesh, same marinating time – you do the science – plus bones that have been licked by the flames). Unlike the standard roast pig, which is cooked and reheated, and usually fattier to keep it from drying up in the reheating process, roasting to order means a leaner, meatier pig that is kept moist simply by the shorter fire-to-table time.

Besides swine, Manor also excells in a few hard-to-find traditional dishes, such as gum chin gai, or ‘gold coin chicken’. There’s no chicken, rather, it’s a medallion of char siu (Cantonese-style barbecued pork) paired with a slightly thinner slice of pig’s liver, sandwiched in a pancake (like the one that’s served with the crackling mentioned above).

The steamed fish simply served with soy sauce, julienned ginger and spring onion is not so simple when you consider the calculations the chef needs to make according to the size and variety of fish and water temperature, and the picky-ness of Cantonese diners (one poke of a chopstick, and we’ll know). The claypot oysters also take molluscs to a new level. Oysters are often eaten raw, or grilled lightly in the shell, but these are shucked and tossed into a scorching claypot along with copious large shards of ginger and spring onions (so copious that it hides the oysters in my photo). The pot arrives sizzling and oh-so fragrant, with oysters cooked to perfection – taut skin on the outside, seductive creaminess within.

For a restaurant with dishes this good, it’s always curiously empty (unlike its bustling sister restaurant, West Villa, which has branches all over town and is a favourite of well-to-do families), but don’t be put off when you find the restaurant all to yourself, it just means more oysters for you.

Oh all right, it can be a “seafood” restaurant too…

Tags: e_ting, hong kong restaurants, hong kong tourism, Manor Seafood Restaurant

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 9:42 am and is filed under Food, Opinion, Recommendations, Restaurant Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.