Red Rice — Restaurant in Hong Kong

Summary: Don’t get fooled by the good looking restaurant design and good looking menus.

Food quality: 3

Food quality is so-so. You do get a lot of food for the price that you pay. The spicy udon was only HKD 54 – add HKD 20 to make it a meal combo with a regular beverage (HKD 22 to make it a meal combo with a specialty beverage).

The meal combo includes:

• Garlic toast – a thick cut piece of white bread with garlic butter; sadly, it does not have any flavour or aroma you would expect from garlic bread at all.

• Garden salad with Japanese salad dressing – this was the best part of the meal.

• Soup – choice of either Borsch soup or cream soup; Borsch soup was the only option available at the time.

• Regular beverage OR Specialty beverage – I chose a cold milk tea with grass jelly (which is considered a specialty beverage); quite good.

The spicy udon was quite disappointing. As you can see in the attached photo, the thinly sliced pork was over cooked. The soup base was very light coloured and had no flavour at all.

My friend ordered the sizzling steak for his meal. A red flag was raised in my mind when the server did not ask him the standard question for steaks – “How would you like your steak done?”

His steak was completely overcooked and tough like a brick. Huge disappointment.

Basically, you will not leave the restaurant hungry, but the quality of the food does not match the decor of the restaurant.

Service: 1

The worst part of our experience was the service and attitude of the staff.

The restaurant was nearly full when we arrived. We stood there waiting for a couple of minutes and no one bothered to greet us.

When we finally got the attention of one of the servers, she made an exaggerated gesture with her body (sort of falling down forward towards the ground). Basically, she made this gesture to show us her displeasure that we were adding to her workload.

After we sat down and was ready to order, the servers were all trying to avoid looking towards us, as if they did not wish to take on more work.

There was a party of 10 tourists seated at the table next to ours, and it seemed to take them forever to get their food. They were already seated when we arrived at the restaurant, and they didn’t get their food until we were halfway done ours. From the yelling between the servers, we could see that the servers kept on bringing the wrong food order to their table. Judging from the facial expressions of those guests, they were not too pleased either.

Save your money and go to the Pizza Bar or Eat Street at next door Pentahotel instead for a good food and good...

This is one of the nicer 茶餐厅 around in HKG. And strangely in this isolated location. For those that are staying next door, this is a boon. However, they close early so for those looking for a midnight snack they unfortunately will have to venture further.

The decor is very modern and the theme is around their use of tomato rice and hence their name. You can see the red motif throughout the shop. Their serving sizes are bigger comparatively and they do not charge an arm and a leg for it. You know the prices are reasonable when you see factory workers as well as students coming here.

If you don't have high expectations, the experience might...

We were in the neighborhood, so why not try a new place! We were there around 5:00 pm. The restaurant was quite big, and seats were comfortable. Staff were accommodating as we required some translation and recommendation in English. Our server was great, spoke perfect English and very patient with us. Ordered several appetizers, one all day breakfast and one main. Portion was large, and most importantly hot food hot and cold food cold. If a restaurant can't even do that then all battle is lost. Taste was good. We ended up paying less than HK $160 for our dinner....