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.
