Hong Kong’s tasting menus highlight best from the chefs

Degustation menus, tasting menus, prix fixe menus: whatever you wish to call them, there seems to be a trend in fine and casual dining restaurants to showcase the chef’s signatures from the à la carte, presenting them in smaller portions on a set menu.

But there is skill in presenting the dishes on a tasting menu, as we found out from three chefs who create very different types of cuisine.

Chef Lee Adams at The Park Lane Hong Kong’s Western fine dining restaurant Skye, says his tasting menu features his favourite dishes as well as ingredients that are popular in Hong Kong.

“I put myself in the position of the customer and not only do I think of what I really want to eat but possibly what a local and expat customer would like to eat if they come to Skye,” Adams says. “So, you have to do some research into what they like to eat when they go to a French or other international restaurant. For example, I know that people go crazy for foie gras, it’s one of the bestselling dishes on our menu, whether it’s a terrine or pan fried.”

Adams also features such favourites as tuna tartare. “We use sashimi grade tuna, we mix it with a little cumin mayonnaise, there’s a cucumber kimchi. We make a puff rice cracker and serve it with lemon gel, honey preserved lemon, coriander and two grams of Beluga caviar in a little tin. We encourage guests to take the caviar, fold it through the tartar, spoon it onto the cracker to eat it. It’s a bit salty from the caviar but fresh because you’ve got the lemon in there that cuts through everything and it really does - the pickled flavours and the vinegary flavours help to open up the palate, getting ready for the next course.”

Another local favourite ingredient is sea urchin, which Adams pairs with a Western favourite, mac and cheese. “We serve the mac and cheese with a sea urchin crumb, and teaspoon of caviar, a nice piece of sea urchin over some seaweed,” says Adams who joined Skye when it opened a year ago. “We make home-made artisanal macaroni, we don’t serve too much but it’s enough to get the flavour, enough to indulge, and onto your next course. We get a lot of people asking [for] more.” For dessert he serves an Autumn Mess, his version of British Eton Mess. “Autumn lends itself to so many nice different fruits and berries. It would be a shame not to embrace that but, we have a couple of twists on it and serve it in a nice glass. So you can see everything. It’s fresh and a nice way to end the meal, plus it looks great.”

Adams says there is an order to a tasting menu. “You don’t want to start with something salty, because that’s going to line your palate, and you carry the saltiness into the next couple of dishes. You don’t want it to be too fatty because the fat can stick around the roof of your mouth and it affects other flavours which you are going to put in your mouth afterwards. So you start with something a little citrusy, light, sour that really opens up your taste buds, and make them alive, so every sense of your body is awakened to what it’s about to eat. So you can start with something fresh and zingy.”

Johnny Chan, executive chef Chinese at W Hong Kong, is known for his innovative dishes. He says, tasting menus for Chinese food usually start with cold meats. “The tradition, especially in Hong Kong, is to have barbecued pork or siu mei to kick off the whole menu. We have char sui and crispy pork belly, but we also match it with cucumber so you can refresh your palate.”

Chan says cold meats are normally followed by soup. “We love soup very much so double-boiled soup is our favourite. It’s nourishing, so diners go from a cold dish to a hot one.”