Geruhage HK tour day 5: same same but different

We're counting down to the end of Geruhage's tour as we are now on the final day, and it's yet another all-Chinese day. For lunch, though, it would not be Cantonese cuisine... I have chosen to take him to the Hong Kong outpost of Xin Rong Ji (新榮記), the formidable restaurant group from Taizhou (台州) in Zhejiang Province (浙江省) which now boasts six restaurants in China with Michelin stars, including one with three stars in Beijing. Taizhou is less than 150 km from Ningbo, and while it's still broadly speaking Zhejiang cuisine, in recent years more people have been referring to this specifically as Taizhou cuisine (台州菜) - separately from other sub-categories.

I'm not exactly sure why a restaurant serving Zhejiang cuisine became famous for their Peking duck, but apparently everyone raves about it. I myself have never had the pleasure, as there are only a very limited number of ducks served per day so it must be reserved far in advance. Alas, even though I had booked this table quite a few weeks ago, the allotted number of ducks for the day have already been reserved by others. So... no cigar.

I don't know anyone at the restaurant and didn't pre-book any dishes, so I thought I'd just see what's on the menu today and pick out a few items. With just the three of us at the table, ordering at a Chinese restaurant is always a challenge.

A meal here often starts with some almond cookies (杏仁餅)...

... along with some fruit, and today we had pear.

Sugar snap pea stewed with gordon euryale seed (雞頭米拌小蜜豆) - I dunno who this Gordon Euryale guy is, but the waterlily is named after Euryale, a Gorgon in Greek mythology. We had the fox nuts at dinner last night, so I thought we could have it again... especially since they came with tiny sugar snap peas.

Steamed "Wen Zhou" fish cake (溫州魚餅) - I do enjoy starting with these fish cakes, and they're a little different from the ones yesterday.

Cuttlefish sausage (墨魚香腸) - I have always liked these, so I was pretty happy to have them again.

Signature yellow croaker thick soup with fish maw (花膠黃魚羹) - well... ordering a signature dish seems to be the right thing to do, and more often than not, I end up having this soup on my very occasional visits. I do love yellow croaker, and somehow this soup thickened with collagen from the fish maw as well as starch just does it for me. I also like the use of pickled leafy mustard stem (酸菜).

Steamed sea cucumber bun (海參包子) - the steamed dumpling with very thin wrapper came with diced sea cucumber as well as diced sections of glass noodles made with sweet potatoes.

I love these tiny little webfoot octopi (望潮), and I thought it would be interesting for my friends to try them.

Boiled baby octopus with pickled Chinese cabbage (酸菜煮望潮) - the soup was made with pickled leafy mustard (酸菜), and I love the acidity that brings. I also love it when the ink sac bursts and the ink gets mixed in with the soup, as it changes the flavor profile and there is more umami.

I didn't order a lot of food, and Geruhage was feeling a little unsatiated. I decided to order up a fried rice that is done "table side". We are first presented with the ingredients for the dish.

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Our server then retreats to the side of the room, where she starts to heat up a clay pot and carefully add the ingredients one by one.

Fried rice with lobster and eggs (龍蝦崧席前炒飯) - it's too bad that the rice has already been cooked beforehand, as I have had fried rice done here where the rice really was cooked in the pot "tableside" starting from scratch. 生炒 is so much better and delivers wonderful chewy texture. Well, this was pretty decent, but it did come somewhat underseasoned... so Tomo-chan needed some sauce or vinegar to try to liven it up. In reality I think one is meant to ensure that the small cubes of ham - which are reasonably salty - is taken with the rice.

We now have waaay too much food, so half of the flied lice was packed away and I took it home for Foursheets. No dessert for us today.

I decided to switch it up in terms of wine, and brought something else that Foursheets doesn't normally drink...

2015 Penfolds Yattarna - very ripe, very toasty on the nose. Still got enough acidity on the back end, and it was actually pretty high.

We were physically kinda close to a couple of shops selling Chinese tea, so I took Geruhage to buy something simple. This is not really my department as I don't know much about tea, but I didn't think he could get ripped off too badly. We ended up at Ki Chan Tea Co. (棋棧茶行)