Jaspas

13 Sha Tsui Path, Sai Kung
Visited 8th July 2008

The options of what you can do on a Hong Kong public holiday are pretty limited. Masses of liberated punters make any remotely popular spot a no go zone; Causeway Bay, Mong Kok, TST and any shopping mall are definitely too crowded to be considered. HKSAR Establishment Day is such a renowned public holiday we thought lunch at Sai Kung with a few mates might be a workable solution to escape the hoards of rampaging merrymakers. Jaspas was pretty busy but we'd booked and got a nice table outside facing the busy square. There are also branches of this ever popular restaurant at Happy Valley and Soho.

The menu is usual assortment of western dishes - a mix of salads, pasta, pizza, grills with a couple of Mexican and Indian options thrown in. We began by sharing a serve of Quesadillas; the crispy little pockets filled with chicken and cheese were a tasty start. For my main I went old school and ordered surf 'n' turf. The steak came topped with a single giant prawn, chips, three chunks of grilled vegetable and a little gravy boat filled with 'mushroom'; my sauce selection. The steak was well cooked and flavoursome, the prawn lovely though lonely and the sauce a gluggy goop that reminded me of packet gravy. While the chips were good I was disappointed by the lack of decent salad or vegetables. Naomi's beef fajitas consisted of a hotplate of beef, capsicum and undercooked onion, flour tortilla, and bowls of guacamole, salsa and sour cream. While the serve was generous, she also lamented the lack of salad and would have liked at least a little lettuce or tomato to accompany the pile of meat. There was nothing to fault about Jaspas, but nothing really excited me either. It's the sort of place that reminds me of numerous other restaurants around Hong Kong; the foods decent, the service professional, but the menu uninspiring. My meal was tasty enough, not really exceptional value at $175, the bottles of cold Sol we were drinking clocked in at reasonable $35 each and the whole bill was wrapped up in usual 10% service charge. Oh, one more thing. Jaspas is a restaurant, it's for people. A dog is a dog, not a person. A dog should not wear clothes. A dog should certainly not sit at a table in a restaurant, wearing clothes and eating from a plate. Sure it's OK to leave out a bowl of water, but a restaurant that allows dogs eat off the same crockery as guests while sitting in seat is the sort of restaurant I won't visit again. Jaspas get rid of the dogs.

Ali Oli

11 Sha Tsui Path, Sai Kung
Visited 9th March
The tourists are in town and we're seeing the sites; Stanley one day, Sai Kong the next - both I might add as about as far as you can get from 'good old Yuen Long'. Sai Kung's expat population means that there are plenty of alternate dinning options when you've got people too fussy for the seafood places lining the waterfront. Keeping things simple we again went for the bakery option; Ali Oli and after a drawn out battle managed to snatch an outdoor table.

Ali Oli sells all the tasty goodies that it should including: fresh bread, cakes, biscuits, slices, pies, pastries and sandwiches, plus coffee and an assortment of deli items like dips, salads and homemade jam. I'm an Australian and it's something of a patriotic duty to eat pies, so for the second day running I had a meat pie for lunch; life was good. This seems to becoming something of a pie blog; but the offending item did look pretty impressive. It was filled with tasty, chunky meat, but unfortunately was ruined by sickly sweet pastry. It looked like I was sitting in a western style bakery, it looked like I was eating a western style meat pie, but oh no what I was eating was disappointment. To be fair to Ali Oli my coffee was good and the others were happy with their lunches, I was just burdened with a pie that should have been savoury and wasn't.

Ali Oli does a lot of things right; it serves a big range of tasty looking produce, the coffee's good, the prices fair and it offers a refreshingly casual environment that is not seen often enough in Hong Kong's western restaurants. OK my pie was ruined by revoltingly sweet pastry, yet there are a couple of things that could have been better. Sundays are busy in Sai Kung, yet Ali Oli was a little too disorderly; getting a table was a battle of push and shove, while service at the counter was confusing and disorganised. Oh and another thing that really annoys me is allowing dogs at a restaurant table; keep the mutts and their stupid bandannas outside!


Visit bakery website.