Monday, October 26, 2009

Grand Harbour Cafe, Grand Harbour Plaza Hotel, Fortress Hill, Hong Kong

Got a tea buffet at Grand Harbour Plaza Hotel's coffee shop Grand Harbour Cafe. Actually the original plan was to visit MO HK's Clipper Lounge for their Chocolate tea buffet but it's full house. Tips - before going there for any of their restaurants, go to their website and download their meal discount coupon for the use by 31st Oct., 09. You can get 30% discount from their tea buffet and 20% for lunch/dinner buffet, and 10% for their 188 degree restaurant on the top floor, and 10-20% for their Chinese restaurant and lounges...etc. So the tea buffet is at HK$188+, after 30% off, it is around HK$151 net. In general, it's good for anyone who wake up late but not yet for a lunch buffet. Tea buffet would be a good choice and you can save your dinner too. So 1 meal for 3, you would save more than $100.

1/2. the retaurant inside and it's on 3rd next to the swimming pool.

3/4. the food were presented quite well on a table of 30 meter long.
5. selection of bread and pastry. 6. noodle station - you can choose your combination for a bowl of noodle soup.
7. salad green section. 8. muffin/scone and a wide selection of Movenpick's ice cream. I prefer someone helping you to get the ice cream instead of everyone touching the ice cream helplessly.

9. In general, the food quality is pretty good. At least most of them are quite fresh. The squid salad and Greek salad and sandwiches are all quite nice. 10. When I noticed the dim sum were just delivered to the table, I immediately tried each one of them. It turned out it's pretty good. However, the stir fried flat rice noodle may be some left-over from the lunch buffet. Not sure if they will be further served in the dinner buffet.

11. the hot food is so so but this is the common thing of buffet which I don't prefer hot food as they are kept at a temperature of around 60 to 80 degree celsius. At this temperature, the food would be either dried out or too softened. 12. OK, more greek salad and sandwiches and they appealed more than the hot food to me.

13. Japanese cold soba and squid/seaweed salad. Both are not bad. 14. noodle soup - the soup base is a bit salty but if you don't drink it and just get the noodle, it's still ok. Remember to put 1-2 little chili to make it taste better. The bread is pretty good but the pastry is a bit too moist.

15. Mango pomelo sweet - it's quite beyond my expectation. the Japanese mochi is quite chewy but not too hard, pretty good. 16. the raspberry mouse is very nice - very strong aroma of berry and it's not too sweet nor too sour. The mini-cakes are nice too but a bit sweet.

17. more sweet. Tiramisu is pretty good and among all these, the cookies are very nice. 18. Lemon and Lime on the left, Espresso choco on the bottom and Chocolate on the right. The lemon and lime is too sour and yet too sweet. Movenpick may need to just concentrate on its European flavour rather than catering for the Oriental. Movenpick's ice cream is still too creamy for me.

19. green bean with seaweed and "smelly" grass - a bit disappointing as they blended this sweet to make it like it's in pasty texture. This is an inappropriate step for quite many restaurants trying to boil red bean or green bean in a fast way. They forgot even after the beans getting blended, those blended tiny blended beans are still quite hard to chew. If they wanna save time, they should boil this kind of bean sweet in a vacumn cooker. Such cooker would cook at a temperature of 90 to 98 degree celsius whereas this temperature would soften the beans faster. 20. Lychee jello - though it's a canned one, it is still pretty good in a nice lychee aroma.

21. Iced tea to freshen up your taste buds. 22. the restaurant has a moveable partition for a small group of party.

23. the hotel facing the harbour front. 24. the westward direction of Eastern corridor.
25. the hotel is quite smart in taking part of the outside front yard as it's property so that there won't be any further building to be built up and block the view. Eastward of Eastern corridor.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

iced tea in HK, no matter hotel kind or tea room type, r always refreshing and excellent

however, if iced tea with milk, now i am addict to the Thai one (that orange color one)

Stella said...

This tea buffet is really for me as I can get $20 US for this 3-in-1 meal.
On weekend, I can wake up at 12 noon and then "hea" a bit till tea time, then I can eat like a pig and skip dinner.
So the $20 US for 3 meals is really a big bargain. I like this kind of bargain.
By the way, the food items shown here are gorgeous and are worth more than the cost(for big eater).

Anonymous said...

quite a lot of buffet talked about here but good to know that because buffet can give you many choices. the tea buffet here look like they are a full buffet. Also it look like there are no people. maybe it's a very new hotel. ok, will try the tea buffet in this saturday and download the coupon. Thank you for the tips.

in the sea said...

I think the only difference, is that they don't have Alaskan frozen crab legs, sashimi and oyster.. So if you don't wanna get that, tea buffet is good enough.

Stella said...

Good enough to skip king crab leg, sashimi and oyster for this good price($20 US).