Spoil Cafe - spoil yourself with no guilt feelings

Star Street Precinct in Wan Chai is famed for restaurants and gourmet. Going further into the neighborhood, you could find even friendlier eateries - Spoil Cafe is one of them. Situated at a little lovely corner on Sun Street, diners could have themselves spoiled by some seriously tasty food.

The ambiance
Spoil is a small restaurant with no more than 20 seats. Despite the small seating area, the high ceiling and full height glass walls create space and make the room look and feel relaxing.

Tiger prawn pasta with Thai style cream sauce
I highly recommend this personally, the sauce resembles the texture of carbonara but with an overwhelming taste of shrimp instead of bacon..absolutely delicious!

 Grilled spring chicken with orange citrus seasoning
The spring chicken was juicy and scrumptious, marinated with an appetizing citrus mix with lemon peel and orange juice.

Their bread loafs were homemade too! Like ciabatta bread but more moist and cake-like, not bad!

Desserts!! Spoil is famous for its crunch cake, but it's so popular that advance reservation is a MUST in order to get a piece...obviously my friend and I didn't due to our impromptu visit >< anyway, the desserts we ordered were delicious too :)

Signature rich chocolate cake & New York cheese cake
New York cheese cake was good, not disappointing, we know it's easier to make tasty NY cheese cakes than awful ones ;) In contrast, the 75% chocolate cake was extraordinary - very rich (didn't get to ask which chocolate they used, Valrhona?), not too sweet and has a lovely texture.

Spoil Cafe, like some of its counterparts in the Star Street Precinct, is good for diners with a quest for good taste, and for those who'd appreciate a relatively quiet neighborhood to take a stroll after dinner.

Spoil Cafe
Address: Shop A, G/F, Shun Ho Building, 1 Sun Street
Tel: 3589 5678

Lab Made Nitrogen Ice-cream - The Art and Science of Forming Ice Crystals

Science is gradually making its way into the world of gourmet, giving rise to molecular cuisines and the fancy terminology called mixology, even to "molecular ice-creams". A year ago, Ronnie and his girlfriend, two UK-graduated pharmacists, gave up their well-paid jobs to open the first nitrogen ice-cream shop in Hong Kong - something thy felt very impressive and passionate for. And the formula justified too, the combination of pharmacists with good understanding of science + experimental spirits + passion for good tastes = Lab Made Nitrogen Ice-cream.

The secret of the smoothness and creaminess of Lab Made's ice-cream is the freezing time. The longer it takes to to freeze ice-cream, the bigger the ice crystals, so the more grainy and icy the texture. Using extremely cold liquid nitrogen at -196℃ to rapidly freeze the ice-creams within only 60 seconds, much smaller ice crystals are resulted, and hence a smoother texture. The vaporization of "boiling" nitrogen at room temperature during the ice-cream production also creates cool visual effects at the open kitchen/ lab.

Not only the texture, the flavors at Lab Made also never fail to impress. Their menu changes every two weeks, creative ice-cream flavors are replaced by even more creative ones, some previous wins include HK Custard Bun (流沙奶皇包!!), purple rice sweet soup (紫米露), super lemon meringue pie, The Big Daddy - whisky chocolate, sea salt caramel...so what's on right now?

9/7 – 21/7 flavors
A – Birthday Cake
B – HK Custard Bun
C – Banocolate Rice Crispies
D – Blueberry Breakfast

Another thing that impresses me is that, Lab Made's scientists don't hide in a lab inventing new flavors, they are indeed aggressive in marketing and bringing out their inventions to the public outside Tai Han. They have extended their reach, and made themselves available for private or company parties' catering! Here's a recent adidas event featuring Lab Made - reeeeally CooL!

 This is ice cream re-invented. Happy 1-year Birthday to Lab Made Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream!

Lab Made Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Laboratory
Address: G/F, 6 Brown Street
Tel: 2670 0071

Contemporary Japanese Cuisine at 0.5°

When the city's Japanese restaurants are close to coming to an excessive level, and the food are more or less the same everywhere, people would start looking for restaurants where something different, or something a little more special, could be experienced.

Tai Han is always a neighborhood for experiencing. As suggested by its name, 0.5°Japanese Contemporary Cuisine + Bar is an izakaya restaurant that serves contemporary Japanese cuisines.

It has awing interior designs, thick hemp ropes, instead of paint or wallpapers, were hung to decorate the ceiling and walls, oval stones were placed in the hand wash basin where I felt guilty running water through (don't ask me why :P), and the dim lighting all came together to create the ambiance of its own. I believe its Japanese yen priced menu (1HKD=10¥) was intented to part of the design too!

 

 

Naming itself "contemporary", it sets certain expectations for customers to anticipate special details in each dish regardless of the seemingly ordinary names. Here are some which really did impress me and my friend :)

Sweet shrimp tartar 甜蝦他他

The presentation looked fun! - a bamboo steam basket arrived at our table, the server opened it to reveal some purple chips (purple sweet potato chips) and a glass egg, I am sure at that moment we looked so confused you would laugh at our faces :D when we saw the shrimp tartar inside the eggshell, we were even more confused, how were we supposed to eat? I guess the server was used to being asked this question a thousand times and must have been cursing the creator silently haha - but easy on this, here is the demonstration-

The shrimp tartar with fish roes mixed in was seasoned right to bring out the natural fresh taste of the seafood. Despite the cotton-like texture of the tartar, chunks of shrimp meat could still be enjoyed accompanied by crispy salted sweet potato chips in beautiful purple color.

Wagyu Konbu maki 炭燒布包和牛

I'd rather say it's a painting than a dish. The stone slate was layered with black squid ink bread crumbs resembling soil, and flower petals were pitifully scattered around rolls of mundane wagyu flesh...I am not an art person but I had a feeling this dish was inspired by art pieces of Vincent van Gogh's or some other impressionist masters'. The slow cooked wagyu beef tasted very nice in terms of the meat itself, the balanced taste of the fat which seemed to be totally absorbed back by the meat and the seasoning. The 'konbu' rice paper wrapping the wagyu was just right in thickness that managed to balance the overwhelming taste of the meat.

Deep fries lotus root slices and minced chicken 炸蓮藕片免治雞肉

This supposedly simple snack was surprisingly successful in winning my heart. Maybe it's the creative combination of these two matching ingredients that impressed, lovely!

0.5° Style paella

The contemporary touch of this dish was a Spanish seafood paella served in a hot stone bowl, fair enough? But that wasn't the point, haha! The highlight of this paella was the rice, which was cooked with lobster broth and it was super yummy. My friend and I were full but we insisted in finishing it till the bottom.

There are so many more items on the menu we wanted to try, yes next time. To enjoy the most out of trying new restaurants with special concepts, there is a golden rule I'd suggest following -Don't walk in with too high expectations, let the surprises surprise you - it's sometimes better to just be happy fools than serious nerds :) cheers

0.5°Japanese Contemporary Cuisine + Bar

Address: Shop B, G/F, 12-13 Shepherd Street

Tel: 2504 2777