The ABC of good honest cooking!

5 June 2010: We decided to try a new place for dinner with some friends - we picked A Better Cooking (ABC) Kitchen inside the Queen's Street Cooked Food Market (on Des Voeux Road). We all had some difficulty getting there - probably because of miscommunication of the address on my part! It was a classic local gastronomic scene - about 20 food stalls busy serving the dinner crowd on this fluorescent-lit floor at this indoor Cooked Food Market. Each stall offered different cuisine, from Cantonese to Beijing Dumplings, to Vietnamese to Indian and at one corner, complete with the familiar bistro-style checked tablecloths, there was ABC Kitchen. We all took the 4-course set menu, which came with a glass of cava and 2 glasses of red wine, which we didn't try as we brought our own wine. The staff (under Joe Lau's leadership) largely came from M at the Fringe after the latter got evicted from its previous location on Ice House Street. Here amongst the modest settings of the Cooked Food Market, the quality of the food that arrived at our table was on a par with that at the original restaurant. We all thoroughly enjoyed sharing the mushroom risotto and the linguine with clams, followed by really delicious roast suckling pig and rack of lamb. I even ordered some samosas, naan bread, dal and broccoli from the Indian stall next door, which Joe did not seem to mind! The chocolate souffles and sticky toffee puddings were very much welcomed at the end! Great job, Joe and the team!

For this evening, we first had a Jean-Marc Boillot Puligny-Montrachet Les Mouchères 2001, which had lots of mature aromas and a creamy texture. Then we did a tasting of 2005 pinot noirs, including the Hatherleigh Pinot Noir made by our friend Nick Bulleid MW plus 2 French burgundies, a Michel Lafarge Volnay and a Leroy Volnay. The Leroy was corked unfortunately. The Michel Lafarge Volnay was probably not ready yet....it remained very closed and astringent for almost the entirety of the evening. The Hatherleigh showed youthful fruitiness, plenty of red fruit and some sweet spicy complexity, and a very silky texture. A very approachable cool-climate style. Richard said it was "light and pretty".

Our friend Nick (a different Nick) brought two wines for the evening and they certainly helped lift the quality of the selection! 2002 Charmes Chambertin by Bernard Dugat-Py - a beautiful wine with a lot of charme, as suggested by the name, much complexity, subtle richness and a lingering finish, well balanced and structured. An excellent food wine.

The 1970 Léoville Las Cases was a delicate and mature wine, graceful but rather fragile - it needed drinking almost immediately. Very lovely smoky and cedar character at the beginning, but rather low on fruit and acidity. It started to fall apart after an hour of decanting. Perhaps we should have left it in the bottle, and not bothered with decanting.

ABC is highly recommended and worth being promoted! I like to support people who begin small and work hard.....they need our support to carry on and to show to the world that good effort can make a difference, that good honest food can come from the most unexpected surroundings! My ratings: 3.5/5 for food; 5/5 for value; 1/5 for ambiance; 4/5 for service.

By the way, I forgot to mention that the cost for the 4 course set menu is HK$ 368 for two people, i.e. HK$ 184 per head (around US$ 23 or £16 per head at current exchange rates)!