Birthday Dinner at Yee Tung Heen (怡東軒)

It's been over a week since my birthday, and I'm getting used to telling people that I'm 22. I also finally had a slice (read: a quarter) of my birthday cake this evening (which wasn't bad, a kind of tiramisu with a strange banana aftertaste), partly because I'm so busy as described in my previous entry—sleeping has won over blogging many a night—and because I come home so FULL from my grandma's every night. I'm always forced to be the human garbage can and attempt to finish the big plate of vegetables (I like them, but not THAT much) and then fruit is served immediately after supper (and again there's lots of coaxing for me to keep eating). Combine that with not very much exercise (though I do walk a little bit everyday) and I'm worried that I might gain a Senior 15, which is kind of embarrassing.

Fortunately, the dinner happened not long after I arrived in Hong Kong, so I wasn't worried about these things yet. My dad took my grandma and I to Yee Tung Heen, the Chinese restaurant in The Excelsior in Causeway Bay. My dad ordered each of us the Lobster Set Dinner, which meant that we all got to choose what kind of shark fin soup we wanted (plain chicken broth), what kind of lobster (my grandma and I both went for the steamed garlic while my dad ignored his various health issues and went for the cheese), and another dish each that we all ended up sharing.

The dinner started with the soup.

Usually you end up getting a few pathetic strands of shark fin in a big bowl of thickened broth, but here they didn't skimp—there was an impressively large slab of shark fin, big enough that we used chopsticks to eat our soup. Would've liked more other ingredients though, and like most commercial soups, I found it a little salty.

The star of the show was up next. When my dad first ordered the dinners I was afraid that I'd have to eat a whole lobster by myself and was glad that I didn't have to. Still the meat from the claw was a little hard to get at (that's what I hate about eating crustaceans) and I was a little jealous that the wait staff removed all the shell from my grandma's lobster for her. Fortunately, my dad helped me out and I was able to get to the succulent meat. Yum.

Just because I'm a little obsessed with the "plate rule" (½ veg, ¼ starch, ¼ protein) and having bread with lots of fibre, my mom thinks I have orthorexia and called my dad to let him know that I "require" tons and tons of vegetables at supper time. So the other dishes we ordered were quite vegetable-oriented. Clockwise from top: roasted goose (not a vegetable), bok choy with shredded pork (not worms), and sea cucumber with spinach. All were yummy and we forced ourselves to finish everything, which meant we barely had room for dessert, let alone cake.

Dessert was tiny little egg tarts topped with a little bit of bird's nest (which I have affectionately dubbed "swallow spit" because it's made from soaking the nest of swallows (the Wikipedia entry says they're called "swifts" which ruins the fun), which are made out of their spit, which is full of minerals which and other wonderful things that allow it to be structurally sound.

The tarts were a terrible way to cap off the meal. For lunch we'd actually picked up some egg tarts at a bakery in Wan Chai and they were better than these. The filling was overcooked and the pastry just tasted like a moist mass and was not flaky at all. Despite the expensive accessory these egg tarts were a big fail and almost ruined an otherwise good meal.


Yee Tung Heen (怡東軒)
2/F Excelsior Hotel (怡東酒店)
281 Gloucester Rd, Causeway Bay, HK
Tel: +852-2837-6790