Gin Sai - tempura does not get better

http://www.ginsai.com.hk/en

What's with the obsession with Japanese food in Hong Kong?

With a plethora of amazing Japanese restaurants opening across Hong Kong, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was the predominant Asian cuisine.

One of my all time favourite meals in Hong Kong comes from Wagyu Takumi (see post here), the two Michelin Starred restaurant located on the fringes of Wan Chai.  So when the girl suggested we do a double date with some mates at Gin Sai, it was easy to say yes.  After all Gin Sai is the sister restaurant to Wagyu Takumi and is located right next door.

A late bout of food poisoning (not related) to one of our dining companions meant that instead of a double date, it was just the two of us for our Gin Sai experience.  Which was amusing since we'd been booked into a private dining room by the girl's mate, whom just happened to be cousins with one of the head chefs, Chef Eric!

So we arrived for our dinner and were taken to an amazing looking private dining area that could easily have taken twelve.  It was one of the more spacious table settings we'd had!

Yardbird - the bits of a chicken you'd normally not eat

http://yardbirdrestaurant.com

What are the chances, I mean seriously!  We're living in a city with over seven million inhabitants and more than 79,000 restaurants. So what were the chances of inadvertently sitting next to our dining companions from the previous week's dinner catch up? (see post here) 

Well, if you're talking about one of the hottest restaurants around, one so desirable, that it's almost impossible to get a table, I'd have thought pretty non existent.  Apparently not!

Yardbird is a tiny little yakitori place that SC had visited a few weeks back, while I'd been travelling OS for work.  She'd been so impressed with the place, she'd pretty much not stopped talking about it, so of course we needed to get along so I could write about it.  With a no reservations policy, you need to take your chances with Yardbird, and we'd had a couple of false starts before we eventually scored a table.

If you've not been to a yakitori restaurant before, they pretty much only serve the many different parts of a chicken, including the heart, liver, oyster, neck, skin etc.  Usually cooked over a traditional binchotan charcoal grill, Yardbird is perhaps the best example of the modern izikaya-style restaurant I'd come across.  Not surprising though, given that Yardbird is from the crew that run funky little Sunday's Grocery (see post here) and uber cool bar/restaurant Ronin.