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
Address: Shop B, G/F, 12-13 Shepherd Street
thanks for this post! I've been meaning to go....
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