Boring dishes I sorely need

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My Favorite Cousin's birthday is coming up, and as I'll be home with mom celebrating her birthday falling on the same day, and seeing that Birdbrain's girlfriends have planned an excursion with her for the following weekend, we figured we'd get together tonight and pop open a bottle. The wine snob in me flat-out refused to bring the special bottle to the Chiuchow place requested by the birthday girl, so eventually we settled on trying out LALA, the new restaurant with Chef Franckelie Laloum. I knew the place was new and normally I don't pay much attention to new openings, but we needed a place open on Sundays that doesn't force us to take a multi-course tasting menu, so this seems to fit the bill.

I was chatting about this place a few weeks ago, and someone who I shall not name had dissed the food as "boring" and "stuff you can find at Louise 3 years ago". Well... I don't always need the latest and the most fancy dishes. In fact, what is very much lacking in Hong Kong is a good selection of places serving decent, classic bistro fare that actually tastes good, and where I can bring a bottle or two. Unfortunately the few places fitting that requirement are all closed on Sundays. So I'm grateful that I can come and order just a couple of dishes à la carte.

I know I shouldn't expect every restaurant to have impeccable wine service, but for a place that charges me HKD 500 for corkage, I do have some expectations. Yes, we all know I brought an old bottle of wine, so the person opening it knew he should be careful with the cork. Yes, broken corks happen all the time, but I would expect the restaurant to have the proper tools to extract older, fragile corks from the bottle and not need to run out and borrow it from somewhere else... And I would also expect care to be taken during decanting - especially when you already that the cork is no longer in one piece - so that we don't end up with bits of broken cork in multiple glasses.

So... not off to a good start.

LALA board - three of us shared this charcuterie board, with pâté en croûte, foie gras terrine which still has the strip of yellow fat on the side, and charcuterie selection from Maison Duculty. The first two were pretty tasty, but while I enjoyed the saucisson, and the speck was OK, I didn't care for the ammonia I tasted in the Ovaly. I suppose this could have been neutralized by the acidity of the gherkins, but I left those to the ladies.

Grenouille - it was last year that I enjoyed some frog's legs en persillade, which was actually taken in Bangkok and not Hong Kong, so this was exactly what I wanted. Tender and juicy legs, tasty sauce. I still had some bread leftover to wipe up the sauce.

But service here was, again, a head-scratcher. I was offered a separate bowl so that I could discard the bones from the legs, which was a very nice touch. Now... I have a habit of picking up bones with my fingers and stripping them of any leftover meat, and licking up the sauce at the same time. Since that gets my fingers dirty and I didn't want to get messy with cutlery, I delayed the stripping process and left the bones in the serving bowl, initially... 

Well... someone noticed that I wasn't using the empty bowl, so it was taken away from me while I was busy munching. Now I don't have any place for the bones... and the bonus points I was giving the staff for the nice touch promptly got zeroed out.

Vol au vent ⟪LALA⟫ - the last time I had the pleasure of enjoying a vol au vent in Hong Kong was about 18 months ago, although a couple of months after that, I was lucky enough to take one down at Café des Ministères in Paris. Anyway... I was so happy to dig into this, and I love sweetbreads. The morels were fine, and I found the use of pea shoots interesting. While I fully expected a rich sauce, it did come slightly on the salty side for my Asian palate... and there was just too much of it. We ended up with pastry that was more soggy than what I had hoped for. Nevertheless, I was happy to have my vol au vent.

Pois gourmand - I had clearly forgotten that I was dining in a bistro and not a fine dining establishment, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see the peas still in the pods. Still nice and sweet, though.

Tonight was all about this little bottle of wine...

1976 Beaulieu Vineyard Georges de Latour Private Reserve - started drinking 10 minutes after decanting. Very smooth on the palate 20 minutes in, with smoke and stewed prunes on the nose. With saucisson this brought out the metallic flavors on the palate. Additional woodsy and a little meaty notes showed up, and this was really fragrant after an hour in the decanter, with more toasty notes. Perhaps there was a whiff of brett about 1½ hours in. While this was still drinking well for its age, it's clearly not as "fresh" and lively as the slightly younger bottle tasted just a day before.

I was a little underdressed and needed to escape from the aircon, and since we didn't feel like dessert, anyway, we decided to call it a night. Pretty happy to have this among for options for a casual French meal in town, and hope to come back and check out other dishes on the menu.