We were looking at the restaurants in the WTC building and spotted Crystal Jade La Mian Xiao Long Bao advertised in the restaurant list in the foyer. It looked rather nice and the blurb mentioned dim sum and so we were sold!
The WTC is a big shopping centre, with restaurants at either end on each floor, so we wandered up through the shops and found the Crystal Jade. It looked lovely.
We were sat by the greeter in this busy restaurant on a table which faced onto the harbour at the other side of the WTC building, and we proceeded to order the dim sum.
The service was super quick, and you could watch the chefs making the food in an open kitchen off to one side.
The various dishes came out one at a time...
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| Steamed pork buns (like a charsu bun) |
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| Vegetables (spot the lovely greens) and weirdo mushooms (delicious!) |
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| Some nice steamed pork dumplings |
They were amazing. As you can probably tell by the colour of the sauce, they were massively hot. I took one bite and nearly choked! My eyes were watering so much, I cried off my mascara!!! It was wonderful!
Needless to say, a couple of days later, we were back there for more of the chilli dumplings.
This time we decided to have a chilli noodle soup as well. It was described on the menu as SZECHUAN style soup. It was thick, nutty, and hot. Magnificent!!!
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| killer chilli Szechuan soup |
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| More dumplings, and in the background, salt and pepper ribs! |
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| Just delicious and really tasty spring rolls. Not overfilled but super tasty. |
After perusing the menu, we went for some doughnutty things which were described as having some sweet bean paste inside.
Hmmmm, interesting, we thought.
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| Note my prowess with the chopsticks! |
They looked lovely! All sweet and sugary.
So then we bit into them and there was the most bizarre moment. The doughnuts were filled with sweetened kidney bean paste - really! It was still very pleasant. Just odd!!!
I looked up the restaurant on t'interwebz and found that actually it's a chain of franchises. I'm not normally a fan of the chain restaurant, but actually this was very very nice and the chilli noodles and the Szechuan soup was outstanding!!
Here are all the other posts on our Hong Kong trip
I love Chinese food so much and am really enjoying reading your posts and seeing all your pics. I love that you include links to the places you have been. The sweetened bean paste cuaght me by surprise in Japan too. They have a special day called Girls' day in Japan where girls are celebrated, (They have a boys' day too) and it's tradition to eat treats with sweetened bean paste on that day. Japanese friends would offer me the prettiest looking "cakes" and I had a very Western idea of how they would taste, and then when I bit into them would get a completely different experience. They were gorgeous, just totally different to how I expected!
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