The Square Hong Kong
This is also post #43, part of my #50PostsIn50Days personal challenge to document my first 100 days in Hong Kong. Other posts in this series may be found at the bottom of the original post.
It’s funny. When Bryan and I were living in Cambridge, the same city as our alma mater MIT, we never attended any MIT alumni events. I’m not sure if it’s because we had no need, or we were just too busy with lives, or what, but it was just something we never did.
Perhaps there’s something about being really, really far away from the familiar world that we know, but we found ourselves at an event sponsored by the MIT Club of Hong Kong. Here we were, halfway across the globe from our alma mater, networking with other MIT graduates.
I really didn’t expect anything of the food, but I was pleasantly surprised when I walked up to the location. Really? A high end Cantonese restaurant that had been awarded a Michelin star from 2009 to 2015? I looked, and this restaurant from the Maxim Group, called The Square, is currently still recommended in the Michelin Guide as having “a good standard.”
Located inside Exchange Square, the restaurant offers both lunch and dinner, including a nice list of dim sum items. The focuses is on fresh ingredients “cooked a healthy way.” Our meal was located inside a private room (since it was a private event which included a speaker), and we enjoyed a tasting menu. I don’t know how much it would cost to cater this event, but I do know that our cost for attending the event was only USD $70, which is quite reasonable considering how many courses we got!
We started with a jumbo shrimp, pork, chicken, and asparagus spring roll and two slices of honey glazed BBQ pork, which were tender and delicious.
Next we tasted prawns cooked two ways: sautéed & deep fried prawn with some poached Chinese broccoli. The shrimp was juicy and plump, and the flavors were quite nice.
The wok seared prime Angus beef was tender and flavorful. The onion ring was typical and standard. I probably could have done without it, but it was OK.
For our soup we enjoyed a double boiled soup with whole conpoy (a type of dried scallop), mushroom, and chicken. The soup was very flavorful and felt very nutritious.
I really enjoyed the grilled cod, which was topped with sweet and spicy glaze. You would often expect this dish to be deep fried, but I appreciate how they grilled the meat here instead. The broccoli was pretty standard, but it was nice to hacve vegetables to go with the fish.
Our final meat course was the crispy fried chicken, which had a very well-executed crispy skin!
The next course was technically steamed fried rice with assorted meat wrapped in lotus leaf, but most guests just received a bowl of rice. It’s quite possible it did come out of a lotus leaf, but I couldn’t really tell. I think I did notice some of the VIP guests had the lotus wrapped version brought to their table.
Dessert was a classic Cantonese dish that I love – chilled sago cream with mango puree and pomelo. The pomelo “pods” resember the sago “pearls” so they work nicely together in this dish. The mango flavor was great, and I really enjoyed this one.
The fruit place was impressive, full of freshly cut watermelon, dragon fruit, strawberries, cantaloupe, grapes, honeydew. I was so full at this point, but I did taste a bit of some of the fruit, which were good.
We walked away from the event sort of amazed at the quality of the food as well as how well the event was organized. It’s obviously not a high-end tasting (we had less seafood and mostly meats). However, the quality of everything we had was good, and space was great for the nature of the event.
We still have never eaten here normally, but this event at least shows me that the restaurant is perfectly capable of executing high quality food at very large quantities (there must have been around 50 people at the event). I’ll have to keep this place in mind if I’m ever in the Exchange Place area and want to have some Michelin recommended Cantonese food.
The Square 翠玉軒 {The Square Hong Kong}
Shop 410, 4/F Exchange Square Podium,
Central, HONG KONG
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