Hong Kong-Loshan Snow Garden Restaurant

As I've mentioned in the last post, we actually finished celebrating my mom's dinner before heading off to Macau. There is always a "Restaurant List for Celebration" in our family, Snow Garden is one of them; we will have dinner here at least once every year for birthdays, festivals, etc. So, here's my last post on my Hong Kong trip this summer. Enjoy! :)

(photo taken by my sister)

雪園飯店Loshan Snow Garden Restaurant
2/F Man An Plaza, 8 Sunning Road, Causeway Bay
銅鑼灣新寧道8號民安廣場2/F
Tel: (852) 2881-6837/(852) 2881-6335

Ratings
1:Yucks! 2:Improvement needed 3:So-So~ 4:Good 5:Very good 6:Heavenly

Food: 6
Price: 5.5
Service: 6
Ambiance: 5.5
Overall: 6

• Mon-Sun 11am-3pm 6pm-11:30pm
• Shanghainese cuisine
• Valet parking availble, or you can park in Times Square/Lee Garden
• Signature dish is Stewed Shark's Fins in Chicken Soup (for more information, see below)

鎮江肴肉Zhenjiang Meat Dish-4/6

• This is one of the appetizers you always see in Shanghainese restaurants.
• I read somewhere from the web before, saying this is actually made from pig trotters. I'm not sure whether this is true or not though. (I've tried to find more information about this dish, but there really isn't much. So, sorry about that!)
• It looked a little bit dry but actually it's already flavoured. Maybe they have marinated the meat before...I'm not sure :/

• See the transparent layer on one of the ends of the meat? Some restaurants will give you more of that, but I never eat them! NEVER! Mainly because I consider that layer as f-a-t.
• Overall, the flavour of this dish tasted similar to the ones I had in other restaurants. But there's one thing they did better here: their meat is less fatty compare to the others.

Vegetarian Dumplings-3/6

• This was the first time I had this. It was basically some finely diced vegetables wrapped in fresh beancurd sheet.
• They probably added a little bit of wine into the sauce, which was quite common in Shanghainese cuisine. (Think: Drunken Chicken)

• Anything that is made of tofu/beans, is my favourite! However, while I enjoyed the drunken sauce, I did not like the beancurd sheets to be very soggy.

馬蘭頭Finely Chopped Kalimeris with Beancurd-6/6

• Another popular appetizer in Shanghainese cuisines. This is my favorite dish of all time! I can have more than 10 of these, really! :P
• Some restaurants call it as "chopped spinach", but by translating the Chinese name to English, this is actually (or should be) made of kalimeris indica, a very common edible plant that is used in different Asian cuisines.

• This was supposed to be a dry, yet a little bit moist appetizer. It is normally flavoured with a bit of sesame oil, that's why it always smells soo good!
• Normally, restaurants will mix in some beancurd for extra colour/texture, but Snow Garden also adds some carrots for extra colour.

脆鱔Crispy Eel-4/6

• I know it looks and sounds disgusting, but the flavour was actually quite good. There wasn't any fishiness I'm sure. (I remembered my dad had quite a lot of these...)
• Tasted like barbeque with a hint of sweetness. It looks like a good wine-food to me.

• It was very crunchy, but overall, I didn't find this impressive. After having a few of them, their flavour would gradually taste like burnt :

Here comes the biggie! :D

火瞳雞燉翅Stewed Shark's Fins in Chicken Soup-6/6

• Snow Garden's signature dish (It's best to order it when you make your reservation)
• (Sorry for the blurry photos above!) I couldn't describe how big the pot was! It was so huge and, you could already see the shark's fins once the cover was removed.

• It was 100% LOADED with shark's fins. The proportion of the soup and shark's fins is definitely 50:50! :P
• The first time I had their signature shark's fins soup, I was amazed by how flavourful the soup was. It was very rich in flavour because they made the soup with one whole chicken.

• The shark's fins were crunchy and they really did come in chunks! I tried to use my spoon to take a picture of the amount of shark's fins I got, but they were too big that I could not lift everything up!
• For the price, I forgot to take a look at the menu. But I think it's probably about $1050 (about $139CAD) for 4 people.

• This is the chicken they used to make the soup. There really was not much flavour in the chicken now since all the "chicken extract" had already gone to the soup.

金華火腿Chinese Jinhua Ham

• Another a-must for the shark's fins soup.
• Jinhua ham is supposed to be really tasty, or I should say, it is very salty. Since it's very salty, so it is good for making Chinese soups/stews.
• Also, Jinhua ham is supposed to be blood-red in colour. However, the one above looks very pinkish because all its salted flavour had already gone to the soup (again).

清蒸時魚Steamed Fish-4.5/6

• This tasted average, but the thing that I still remember was how fishy it was ;D
• I love fishy fish, that's why I can still take fishy sashimi (like the one I had in Guu Garden). The fish here were not as extreme as sashimi but it still tasted fishy and the meat was very fresh.

• Topped with some green onions, Jinhua ham, and mushroom.
• FYI: I think we ordered two servings that day, so there were two fish on a plate. I saw some pictures on the web with only 1 serving costs about $680 (about $90CAD).

豆瓣浸莧菜Amaranth with Broad Bean-5/6

• Another one of my favourite dishes :P
• The amaranth absorbed the broth and was already very tender and tasty.
• Don't expect any crunchy beans from this dish. The broad beans already became very soft after cooking.

Fish Maw and Bamboo Fungus in Broth-4/6

• I actually can't remember what this is. I can only recall it had fish maw, bamboo fungus, bok choy, mushrooms, and some Jinhua ham.
• Tastewise. I didn't get too try much; it was finished quite fast for some reason. Maybe it was so good?

炸子雞Fried Chicken-4.5/6

• Average fried chicken. I didn't find this surprisingly good but I heard a lot of positive comments on this.

How can we miss out the birthday buns?

壽包Birthday Buns-6/6

• Pre-order is needed. Order the amount you want when you are making a table reservation :)
• The bun was soft and fluffy. They were even softer than the ones in Yung Kee. However, the steamer was not that crazy big. Yung Kee's steamer was epic.

• This might probably be one of the reasons why I love Shanghai food so much. I simply knew it that Shanghainese restaurants use red bean paste instead of egg yolk/lotus seed paste as the filling! Correct me if I'm wrong. Do Shanghainese restaurants really tend to use red bean paste as birthday buns' fillings? Or is Snow Garden the exception? :O
  Anyway, Snow Garden is always one of my fav restaurants in HK.

Fresh Fruits

• Other than birthday buns, we still got some fresh-cut fruits, which we all really needed after such fulling feast!

So, here are all my posts in Hong Kong. Hope you all enjoy them! Next time if you're on a (long) vacation, try to put Hong Kong as one of your consideration :D Heheehe
I will go back to normal now and will post some Vancouver posts from time to time :)