HK Home Kitchen - El Cerrito

Thank you! I’m cooking it your way now!

We tried this place last night. Perhaps the QC was off or the main chef was not there. But it was shockingly mediocre (based on these reviews), a sloppily executed version of authentic Cantonese cuisine. Overall service seemed aloof and annoyed we were there. Here is what we ate:

Sampan Congee- had tripe, ground pork, calamari rings and shrimp. Dissapointing and bland. Good congee is comforting, this was boring. Usually congee is served with accompaniments like fried bread and peanuts. This was not. We ordered fried bred to have with it.

Lettuce with fermented bean sauce. This one was partially our goof. Sometimes in Chinese restaurants, lettuce means “A” vegetable (achoy). I asked our server, who I think was also the chef that night, if it was Achoy but he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking. It turned out to be iceberg lettuce that had been sautéed till it was wilted served with a mayonnaise like sauce on the side. Overall dreadful.

The egg sauce and shrimp chow fun. What came did not really look like the pictures others have posted here. The noodles were thinner than chow fun and many were still stuck together in layers- a sign of sloppy execution. Overall bland -no flavor, not a hint of wok char, and the shrimp had a heavy iodine taste.

We left dissapointed at how terrible the meal was. Based on this experience we will never return to this place.

What a bummer for you! So sorry to hear this.

Hmmph, I have not received yau ja gwai when I order congee. Some peanuts, maybe. But fried bread costs extra. Are free ones available in some places?

_> That seems to be most places…

I don’t normally associate this place with a congee restaurant so usually my expectations are lower for that. As with sck’s question, I don’t normally see any of the congee places ever serve free fried bread. Peanuts are usually with the sampan congee though. I’ve seen fried wonton skin strips and cilantro/preserved vegetables for free though.

Mmm… looking back, I don’t think that sck’s picture was actually from HK Home Kitchen. The picture you took a picture definitely seems to be how that particular chef makes it (I’ve been to the old Jack’s or whatever that was called prior to their brief move in Sacramento and both times I ordered that dish, it looked like yours, wasn’t a huge fan of that version).

FYI, there should NOT be any wok char for this dish. It’s all about subtlety. If one is accustomed to salt/soya-forward dishes, it does come off as bland. When we visited HK, our shrimp chow fun looked like sck’s photo, less like geo12’s photo where the chow fun is much too dark.

Unlike the stir-fried version w/beansprouts, this version is all about the mild, scrambled egg-white gravy.

DH loves congee and often gets it from various delis/restaurants since I’m not so fond of it. I don’t think it’s ever come automatically with fried bread in the last 30 yrs we’ve lived in the EBay, from any place we’ve visited.

I do recall that in our favorite Shanghai restaurant in SF back in the '80’s, when they offered congee it was listed on the menu as coming with the fried bread; you had to specify if you didn’t want it.

But for years now we’ve only seen the bread offered as a separate side. I’m also curious where it comes standard (DH likes to have it once in a while, altho not always).

I think there can be a little bit of wok char. My picture above is not from HK Home Kitchen but just a picture I found on the web. It has a little bit of browning on the noodles. Not a whole lot, but just a little bit. How did yours look like when you had it at HK Home Kitchen?

But yeah, @geo12the, the one you had was much too dark. It seems like they saute the noodles with a bunch of soy sauce like how they make the dry saute beef hor fun. And the egg sauce was much too white. Almost like their dishes with egg white didn’t sell, and they had too much egg white on hand so they used some of that in the egg sauce. Or, the egg yolk used was so industrial that its pale to start with.

I remember getting Pieces of fried Bread, Peanuts and Zha Cai(?) or Tian jin Cabbage with Jook at Dim Sum Koi Palace or Mayflower on Geary(RIP)
in the past. It has been a while though

As I mentioned in their previous restaurants, I found it salty so I’m thinking its more of soy sauce with those rice noodles.

Mmm… I recall KP offering a small slice of the fried dough, but certainly not a full platter.

Agreed. It was a few slices and a small bowl of Jook. Being Dim Sum and all.

The first time I had the egg and shrimp chow fun here, there was no wok char, but I didn’t miss it. It looked a lot like the one in sck’s photo. The second time, about a week ago, it did have slightly browned noodles, and some of them were stuck together.

When we visited Hong Kong I remember allways getting a little plate with pieces of chopped up fried bread, peanuts and picked vegetables whenever we had congee. They do the same thing at Koi Palace when I’ve had it there. The bigger issue at HK home kitchen was the congee was mediocre. As were the other things we ordered. I suspect maybe the QC is lacking and we hit it on a off night.

I do love Cantonese food and appreciate the subtlety. I was hoping for a good authentic Cantonese place. My impression from the times I have visited Hong Kong is that the standards for food quality are high across the board. That wasn’t the case with our visit to HK Home kitchen.

Ernie- I am curious how the version of chow fun you had last week compared to the previous version you tried? Was it as good?

It was fine, except for the noodles that stuck together. In the previous version the noodles were all separated and nicely coated with the egg sauce. I enjoyed both of them–I took about half of the noodles and sauce home after finishing the shrimp and had them with a nice local salmon steak.

Chinese food has been in an overall funk in the SFBA for decades. The first wave of HK chefs, who came over in the 1980’s due to the imminent takeover by Mainland China, was over by the 2000 dot-com crash. These chefs were The Real Thing but quality ebbed when they sold off/retired.

Because times were hard following the crash, the Chinese restaurants gradually descended into the cheapo doldrums from which they have never really recovered, George Chen’s and Brandon Jew’s recent efforts notwithstanding.

I sympathize with your desire to find Cantonese food of similar quality to HK, but it just is not going to happen. Two generations have grown up judging Chinese food by how cheap it is (as it was before the 1980’s immigration wave, ironically).

Especially in the EBay, no restaurateur is going to stay in business charging for better quality. Diners have not shown they are willing to pay for it.

HK Home Kitchen is absolutely not the best Cantonese, in either quality or technique. For my HK-born DH and myself, it is merely a rare outpost offering at least some of the dishes from this now underrated regional cuisine.

Hope that helps explains my own viewpoint on HK2.

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If history is any guidance, the food at HKHK should be similar to what Mac’s Wok in El Cerrito and Cellar Bistro in Sacramento used to offer.

This place is one of the closes to where we live now. We used to dine there a couple of times, but it wasn’t our best experience.

Welcome! Have you been taking out from them during the lockdown?

As far as I remember, we ate there before the lockdown. During the lockdown, we mostly cooked at home. Honestly, I think, I could cook some meals there way better at home. I’m not the biggest fan of dining out and prefer to cook at home. But sometimes, my family demands to eat out and try something new. When ate there, we were renovating our kitchen, so we had to eat somewhere else and were discovering some restaurants in our area. It took us a while to renovate our kitchen, and we also were ordering new kitchen counters. Thankfully this cost calculator, which we found on https://cabinetselect.com/how-much-do-kitchen-cabinets-cost/ helped us to save a lot of money on kitchen counters, and I cooked almost the whole lockdown at home.