HONG KONG: Did you know that 'Nikkei' cuisine is the merging of Peruvian and Japanese dishes? #TOKYOLIMA in Central Hong Kong bridges both cultures and dishes, led by chef Arturo Melendez. Pictured, Ceviche Japones. 🍶🍴🐟 @tokyolimahk full feature on #champ_travel online #champ_hongkong #tokyolimahk (at TokyoLima Hong Kong)
Can you see the smokes?!! The drink presentation is part of the cocktail 😅🥃 . . . #aboutlastnight #sassydrinks #negroni #tokyolima #tokyolimahk #latergram #cocktails #japanese #cocktailshow #hkfoodie (at TokyoLima Hong Kong)
Hong Kong has taught me to have low expectations of Nikkei cuisine (i.e. Japanese cuisine as interpreted by South America): Mercado was disappointing, Djapa was worse, but I had heard actual rave reviews of this latest effort by Pirata group so I was keen to try it out.
Located on Lyndhurst Terrace, TokyoLima does a nice job with the decor. It has a bar when you enter and with no windows, you could be in any hip, happening restaurant anywhere on the globe.
We went the night after the grand opening and it’s almost immediately obvious that the service is not up to scratch. I enter to tell the hostess the booking name and to my confusion, I’m immediately led to a table with two other women, neither of whom I knew. I’m then left to navigate the restaurant on my own to go find my actual friends.
The menu is relatively straight forward, split into small plates, sashimi, sushi and then large plates. The food also arrives very quickly, at first. Three oysters (above) with a creamy ponzu and wasabi dressing on the side is light, fresh and an excellent way to whet the appetite.
Next is a fried dish of chicken thigh karaage (above), which might be my favourite dish of the night. It’s hot, juicy, oily in a good way, and came with a sort of spicy soy sauce mayo.
A beef tataki (above), lightly seared, supposedly comes with a ponzu and uni sauce, but I couldn’t taste the uni at all. It was quite bland and the cucumber in the middle has more taste than the beef.
There is then a wait of about 15 minutes until we ask the manager what happened to the rest of our food. The maki rolls (above), maguro and avocado, eventually arrive and it’s not dissimilar to what you might find at at Yo Sushi in the late 90s.
The ceviche (above) comes at the same time and it again proves to me that I might have to go all the way to South America to try this dish because I’m just not convinced by it. I’ve never tried a version where it’s any better than just plain sashimi. This one comes with some bland seabass, a seared scallop which lacks sweetness, more cucumber, and probably the tastiest part, some deep-fried onion. The dish isn’t acidic enough, and just sort of dully sits there.
Which is what we proceed to do for the next 30 minutes as we wait and wait and wait some more for our dishes to arrive. The poor manager, who we asked 3 times (yes, once every 10 minutes) to check on our food finally tells us that the kitchen is in the weeds, hence the wait. We peek into the open kitchen and don’t see any sign of panic at all, and the tables around us get their orders just fine.
Finally, when we are literally about to give up and leave, our baby back ribs (above) arrive and while I’m not sure they are worth waiting half an hour for, they are delicious. They are tender, fatty, and almost Cantonese in its flavouring.
This however, does not make up for the salad we ordered. On the menu, this HK$60 “simple salad” comes with “kale, avocado, mint, nori, ponzu, heirloom tomatoes”. In reality, it came with iceberg lettuce and some cherry tomatoes (below). It looks exactly like the sort of free salad you get with most set lunches at a cheap Japanese restaurant.
When we send it back because it was missing half the ingredients, the salad returns with the wrinkliest, most dried out and unattractive avocado slices I wouldn’t serve to my dog, plus some nori (below). Still missing was the kale and the mint. We invite the manager to just come and have a look at this mess and even he takes one look and immediately offers to take it off the bill. It was a complete joke.
To make up for this disaster, he insists on sending over two complimentary desserts, even though at this point we really just wanted to leave. One was a cheesecake ice cream which I didn’t taste as I don’t like cheesecake. The second was a matcha panna cotta (below). I’ve heard it said somewhere (it’s either culinary school or on Top Chef) that the perfect panna cotta should have the consistency and wobbliness of a young lady’s breast. This version was closer to what I imagine Tara Reid’s silicon implants to feel like.
To top it all off, at some point during our half-hour wait for our main course, I decide to go stretch my legs and go to the toilet. I ask another manager, who was standing by the reception desk, where that might be. Instead of deigning to tell me himself, he rolls his eyes and barks at a nearby waitress, “Please show the lady where the toilets might be”. I would like to point out that the toilets are located outside of the restaurant, somewhere deep in the maze of the commercial building it’s situated in, and there are zero signs indicating where they might be. It wasn’t like I was standing outside of a signposted door with the toilet sign asking for directions.
Overall, the food was mostly unsatisfying, but it was really the service that was completely galling and ensures that I will never return.
Dinner for three people with 2 glasses of wine and 1 beer came to HK$1,500; far too much to pay for what is definitely the worst dining experience of 2017 so far.
