Cafe d’ Orient 新香港茶餐厅

4 May 2008

Fai’s birthday … didn’t get him anything
He didn’t want to go anywhere far or something as he had to go back to take care of Breanna …
So he suggested going to Sunset Way…
I’ve heard of the place being spiced up with lots of pubs and restaurants for the last couple of years.
I haven’t been there since going to Lavinia’s place for some gathering way back during secondary school days

Anyway when I arrived there, Fai and Kelly were already seated at Sunset Tavern.
We took some time to go through their menu (food menu wasn’t too difficult to look at)
We managed to decide on what to eat before the waitress informed us (after us being seated at the table for 10mins and the waitress herself asking to take our order twice) that the fish and chips and the burger we had wanted to order was not available…. duh…
Surely she could’ve told us earlier???
Even the buffalo wings were out … the only things left for us was chicken done in 2 styles and a steak item on the menu (and some other stuff…. okay… it’s a more of a bar I guess… but … )

What did we do? We left… and headed to the Hong Kong cafe thingy just round the corner…

Cafe d’ Orient … serving Hong Kong cuisine as claimed…

We were seated at one of the inner corners of the place…
The chairs were really awkward … like some old Qing Dynasty Emperor chair… which was too high for the low table … Fai complained he had nowhere to put his legs

The table was also still dirty (despite the guy wiping it when we got there … )

Air conditioning was moderate … could’ve been better for such a small place…

Bird cage display was out of place (with some fake birds and butterflies in it) … totally weird

Aly ordered Iced Lemon Tea ($2.50)… she didn’t think it looked or tasted much like Iced lemon tea

My drink … Lychee with Aloe vera ($3.90) …. SWEET …. I drink bit by bit and kept adding water from the additional glass of iced water served to us. By the end of the meal, I realised that I had added the entire glass of iced water into this

Kelly’s Longan Rambutan Fizzy Drink thingy ($3.90)… she said that it was very sweet as well….

Fried trio mushroom ($10.90) … not too bad… but eleven bucks for this tiny bit?! Man… daylight robbery

Soya Milk Beancurd ($7.90)…. pieces of beancurd dipped in some batter and then deep fried I reckon… so so …

Garlic Fish fingers something thingy ($8.90) …. they mentioned garlic… what garlic? Fish… what fish? More batter than anything else

Could the garlic be in the dip that was served with the fish fingers?

Aly’s baked rice… she chose the combination of scallops and prawns with Portuguese sauce ($10.90)
Okay… maybe we haven’t been eating out much But we certainly didn’t know that Portuguese sauce tasted and looked exactly like curry
Luckily for Aly it wasn’t spicy … so she could finish off the meal …
At the end… she left lots of rice uneaten …. why? Read on…

My order of baked rice with chicken cutlet with tomato sauce ($8.90)

Chicken cutlet was okay I guess…
However…. the tomato sauce was … erm… crappy…
Tasted like they added cheap sugar into the sauce. Either that, the tomato sauce was some low grade thingy out from some bottle or something.
Rice… was hard… and dry … the whole thing didn’t seem baked… but then again, to have this meal baked from scratch would’ve taken much much longer … the least they could’ve done was to serve it with better rice or something…. this is the first baked rice which I’ve ever had which had rice this dry … it ain’t fried rice dudes

Fai and Kelly ordered some chicken bamboo rice thingy… ($6.90)
Fai said it was so so only … normal… nothing fantastic …

The both of them also ordered a small steamboat set C ($8.80)

The soup base was suppose to be chicken stock. They complained that the soup was tasteless (even after adding all the ingredients in)
I asked them how were the ingredients…fresh? So so was the answer

We got 2 servings of this for dessert … mango pomelo sago thingy ($3.90each)
SWEET!!!! No wonder the chinese call this 甜品 plus I couldn’t add water to this one

The total bill amounted to $82… that’s about twenty bucks each for the four of us… sheesh …
I could’ve had a much better meal elsewhere (don’t ask where ) for that kind of money …

Kelly says “There are other better places serving steamboat and hk cafe styled food, not likely to go back there again”

Fai said “Think dinner so so nia”

Tough luck Fai… we go out and re-celebrate your birthday dinner somewhere else with some REAL food in the next couple of weeks okay?