Sun Tung Lok 新同樂

For Dad's bday celebraton #1, we went to Sung Tung Lok 新同樂 in Happy Valley for an extravagant traditional chinese meal. It is not difficult to find a restaurant in Hong Kong that serves those extravagant ingredients such as shark fin, abalone and fish belly, everyone of those says they are the best but obviously not that many can produce decent dishes at reasonable pricing and at the same time satisfy the yang family's exquisite tastebuds.

At first we were concerned about whether the restaurant could accommodate our big group of 15 people + kids. When we arrived, we were guided through a flight of stairs next to the main entrance, and taken to a very big room with private bathroom and a hugh round table. This was indeed a comfortably large room for big group dinner party.

We had some simple dishes to start off our dinner: fried vegetarin bean curd sheet roll, roasted beef, deep fried bak fan yu, deep fried bean curd, scallions and salty fish, beans and minced pork, etc.....

Here comes the main dish - shark fin soup. The soup base had a beautiful golden color and seasoned perfectly. It's amazing that even they used a huge chicken and salty ham to create the soup base, it didn't have a single drop of fat and was as light and clear as vegetable stock. The intense flavor did blow me away, this might be the best shark fin soup that I have ever had. The serving of shark fin was not shabby at all, each of us got a piece of ~3" wide shark fin. Also, instead of vinegar, the server placed a miniature crystal bottle filled with condensed ham stock on the table, is like magic water, to enhance the ham flavor even more.

Another main dish - Abalone and goose feet. What makes a good abalone? Firstly it has to be the dried ones and not from the cans, secondly if the abalone is cooked perfectly it should have what we call "sweet heart 溏心" in the center, thirdly the texture of abalone should be chewy and not too hard or too soft, and also the sauce has to be the thick abalone marinate but not as sugary as oyster sauce. Although the abalones we had were pretty small but they did have the sweet heart in the center and the sauce had slight hint of soy sauce and packed with seafood flavor. Whoever don't eat goose feet would have missed out the most nutritious food of chinese cuisine. Goose feet have more collagen than bird nest but selling as 1/1000 of the price. Along with the abalone sauce, the goose feet were perfect! I felt my skin all rejuvenated again...

Fried scallops stuffed with minced prawns. These are big scallops indeed and the minced prawns gave us the crunchy texture. Although they are deep fried but not oily at all.

No need to explain every single chinese dinner has to involve steamed fish. Of course this is not big enough to feed 15 people.. we had 2 steamed fish.

Smoked chicken. It's difficult to find good lean chicken nowadays, they are usually fat and force fed chicken which are tasteless. This chicken dish again was not fat at all, the skin was crispy and meat was quite juicy.

The longevity noodle for Dad.

Dessert - almond paste soup and sau bao. I needed to note that albeit small in size, the sau bao had an egg yolk inside with lotus paste. Not many places use egg yolk because of cost issue, but this one fully packs with all the neccessary ingredients, and most importantly not too sweet.

What a wonderful meal. Most importantly my dad enjoyed every bit of it albeit his high standard of everything.... good service (we had 3 people dedicated to our table), decent food, generous portion, comfortable setting. We killed 4 bottles of red and white, and a full bottle of wuliangye. We all came out being half drunk and needed a lift back home even it was just a 2 min drive from the restaurant.