I have no idea why the owner of this restaurant named it "Sportful Garden Restaurant". Maybe it was supposed to be "thoughtful"? I don't know, but this Chinese restaurant, even with a strange name, is quite famous in the town.
Having 8 branches all over the island and Kowloon sides, the restaurant is famous for some high-quality cuisines, which are mainly Guangdong food. There are some fusion dishes as well, but that is not surprising since Hong Kong is an international city with so many cultures mixed together like a dish of fried rice. Anyway, tonight we went there to celebrate my mum's birthday, and it was a pretty nice dinner set. Let's zoom in!
The dinner started with the shark fin soup with crab meat and fish maw slices (花膠). Unlike those in other restaurants, this soup was filled with shark fins and was actually a bit "fishy". I guess that proved it was real shark fins, right?
Then it was a combo set, with abalone and duck foot (鴨掌; shouldn't be duck web 蹼, which refers to the membrane not the whole foot).
Then we had some vegetable. What do you think it is? It is called "tung hau" (茼蒿). It has no English name but a Latin name called Chrysanthemum coronarium. It tastes like amaranth (or pigweed 莧菜) with a strong and strange smell. Yes, from the name you can see that it is a kind of chrysanthemum and you cannot imagine that it tastes like this.
Following the green dish we had the Swiss wing with glutinous rice filling. Of course, as you know that Swiss wings have nothing to do with Switzerland. This dish looks very delicious, and it was actually quite filling. The BBQ eel slices also came. They were very crispy and the taste was very good, but I think they were a bit overcooked.
The final dish in our main course was the tiger pawn. It was quite big and very juicy.
There was no rice for me this time, and I thought I would get hungry soon since I am the kind of people who need to have rice for every meal. But it looked like I didn't need more since the meal was pretty rich in flavour and that made you stop eating anything more. However, despite the fullness ,the dessert was a nice finale for the meal. It was the coconut cake with bird nest.
It was a great dinner but to me everything is a bit too rich for me. It seems to be a kind of once-in-a-while thing instead of an every-day meal. Anyway, if anyone wants to have some nice and decent Guangdong food, this will be one of your options.
chinese restaurant sportful