Let's start with the good parts. The ambience is lovely. Comfy dark wooden furnishings and dim lighting. On one end of a restaurant there is a fresh seafood bar with lots of fruits of the sea waiting to be pointed at "I'll have that thanks". Surprisingly the food is also priced reasonably, with soups around 50-70 HKD, entrees from 100-200 and mains from 150-250. I was wondering how they would pay for the rent in LKF until the bill came later ...
Food: Ordinary. The meal began well, we ordered two large buckets of mussels to share between the group ... we were quickly served with lovely fresh fat mussels in big colourful pots (though given its name - surely fresh seafood must be expected) cooked in provincale sauce - tomato based - and the other in a white wine and herbs cream sauce. Both were delicious. But the french fries which accompanied it were a little tired looking. For entrees, my girl friend and I shared the esgargot - tasty, garlickly, sitting on a potato mash which was surprisingly a good match - and the soup du jour - a pumpkin and crabmeat soup which was a little too sweet for my liking. For the main course I opted for the duck which was served with ... actually the main course wasn't too memorable ... I can't actually remember now what it was served with! That in itself is perhaps not such a good sign.
For desserts, the restaurant helpfully provides a dessert platter option where you can select 4 out of the 5 dessert which included the chocolate mousse (nothing earth shattering), shortcake creamy concoction with avocado and strawberries (fresh, quite interesting), an apple tart and pinenuts slice. None of it was anything to write home about!
Service: Any place which plies unsuspecting guests with endless bottles of sparkling and mineral water ... at $40 per 500 ml bottle surely needs a peg or two taken off the service mark. Especially when some guests specifically asked for tap water at the beginning of the evening. Put it this way, our water bill came up to 2/3 the bill of our wine! More to the point, we could not quite understand how each person had supposedly drunk around 1 litre of water each (roughly 20 bottles x 500 ml), on top of the wine we had consumed. When we questioned the bill - it wasn't until we threatened to write to the management that they agreed to cut the bill down for us to a more reasonable figure.
Despite this, most of the night was very enjoyable, great friends catching up over some lovely wine (Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc) is always a good night out!
Rating: 2.5 stars
Verdict: Average food at average prices
Cost: $450 per head (not including wine)
La Mer Brasserie, Lan Kwai Fong Hotel
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