Review | New Hong Kong restaurant review: Benkei – Japanese pancakes and grilled food, and everything was faultless
- This small Japanese restaurant specialises in two main dishes: savoury Japanese pancakes with various toppings, and grilled dishes
- Everything we tried was cooked to perfection; our favourite dish was the spring onion okonomiyaki with pork belly
For quite a while now, Instagram has been my go-to source for finding out about the latest restaurants. Friends – usually chef friends – post about the restaurants even before a press release is sent out, or before someone can write about it on openrice.com.
In this case, it led me to book counter seats at Benkei, an okonomiyaki (savoury filled pancakes) and teppanyaki (grilled food) restaurant that opened in early February. It has 12 seats around the teppan (flat-top iron grill), and several small tables.
The lunch menu offers eight sets that include salad, soup and pickles, while the one-page à la carte selection has okonomiyaki and several other dishes cooked on the teppan, plus oden (stew).
First up was the eel omelette (HK$88), whch the chef made free-form on the teppan before folding it into an even shape. It was excellent: tender, moist eggs rolled around fatty, substantial chunks of eel.
Prawns (HK$168 for two) came dissected into three “parts”: the prawn meat itself, the inner head, which the chef flattened under a weight so it was completely seared and entirely edible, and the outer head. The prawn meat was firm and sweet, and the outer head had soft, gooey innards.
The okonomiyaki can be ordered with one (HK$78), two (HK$90) or three (HK$99) fillings, from a selection of nine. Our first held tender pieces of shrimp and squid, and an absolute pile of sweet spring onions. Our second was more pungent, with thin pieces of fatty pork and plenty of kimchi.
I worried that the spring onion okonomiyaki (HK$78), listed separately, would be too much like the seafood and spring onion version we’d already had, but it was different enough, and turned out to be our favourite.
This one had just a thin bottom layer of plain okonomiyaki batter (no cabbage) topped with lots of spring onions, some tenkasu (crisp bits of fried tempura batter), thin slices of pork belly, and a fried, scrambled egg. Absolutely delicious.
Our waiter recommended a dish from the set lunch: the Japanese beef soup (HK$108). The large bowl had a generous amount of tender beef slices and a light and fragrant clear broth, and was served with good quality rice.
Benkei Okonomiyaki Teppanyaki, 6/F Stanley 11, 11 Stanley Street, Central, tel: 2890 2800. About HK$240 per person without drinks or the service charge.
