11/11/2010
Piel De Toro
灣仔駱克道62號地下
G/F, 62 Lockhart Road, Wan Chai
https://www.openrice.com/zh/hongkong/review/wheres-the-menu-e2129595
This restaurant used to be a Western/Thai restaurant, serving lunches during the day and serving drinks at night.
Now it is a Spanish restaurant owned by UnoMas.
The set lunches are written on the board outside, as I was walking past, I took a quick glance, and decided to go there for lunch.
There was practically no one in the restaurant, yet it was lunchtime, the restaurants beside it are full or at least half full.
After sitting down, I was expecting a printed menu or some sort of menu, but there wasn’t, the waitress had to list out the set lunches, luckily to her, there was only two set lunches on the menu for her remember!!!
I felt that this was a major letdown, not everyone has a good memory when looking at the menu board.
Without the menu, there is no pricing, or details of what is included, eg drinks, salad, soup.
Since we were the first customers, she was a bit brief with the lunch description, she said “Chicken and Fish” for the set lunch. The brief description the waitress gave was very unhelpful, chicken can be roasted, steamed, same as the fish, is it fried, seared or poached???
In the end ordered the fried chicken with mashed potatos and salmon tataki with parmentier potatoes.
For starters, she said there was soup or salad. I had to ask what soup and salad it was.
Interestingly she said the salad was cabbage but it’s usually lettuce for salads.
During that time, there were two more single patrons that came in and sat on different tables.
The waitress had to verbally tell them what was on the Lunch set, she finally said the full name of the set lunch as written on the menu, although there was a slight improvement, it was still meaningless as the patrons had to ask if the salmon was in batter or just pan-fried.
Wouldn’t it have made life easier if they had a printed set lunch menu, the waitress would have saved her breath, and customers expect to see a menu when they sit down, most people are undecided or have not bothered to look at the board before going in.
Also if you don’t speak English, it could be quite a problem too, firstly the staff are not native westerners so they are not really familiar with the menu, secondly, the non English speaking customers have nothing to point to on the menu order!!
Apart from that the service was OK, they serve all the items at the same time, so everyone at the table can eat at the same time.
The drinks were slightly weird, tea and coffee was included but they didn’t supply cups, it was only GLASS!
The purpose of using cups is that they have a handle because the drinks are hot!!
In this case, I was able to gulp down my tea very fast, because it was warm.
While she was getting the drinks, she had an issue with the coffee machine, she just couldn’t get it working, hence the tea that was poured had to wait.
FOOD!
Sweetcorn soup:
This tasted very milky, and there was lots of sweetcorn in the soup, but it wasn’t sweetcorn, it was grounded corncob.
Salad:
This was lettuce salad, not cabbage as the waitress said, it was drizzled with sauce, tasted how it should.
Fried chicken with mashed potato:
The coating on the chicken was sweet, which is weird, but otherwise the chicken was ok, not too dry.
The mashed potato tasted how it should.
Salmon Tataki with permentier potatoes:
The appearance of this looked more appetising, the salmon was fully covered in grounded black pepper and served on a bed of sliced potatoes.
The salmon was tender and seared, with lovely peppery coating.
The sliced potatoes were done just right too, not too hard or soft.
Overall, I didn’t feel the food was truly Spanish, I think it just serves as a place for casual lunch without any expectations.
The tissue napkin on the table was interesting too, it was RIGID like hard cardboard, that it can stand upright.
