Friend and South China Morning Post journalist Hal Lipper had been invited to the Millennium Hilton's Chinese restaurant, Yuan, to sample their new menu, and was kind enough to take me along. That's him above trying to convince the hotel's PR staff to give us the most expensive bottle on the wine list.
Yuan's chef, Chow Chun Chuen, is a native of Hong Kong and all the dishes we had were vaguely Cantonese in origin. One of the most unusual dishes of the meal was Braised fish maw steak with abalone sauce:
For those of you who don't know, fish maw=fish guts, but surprisingly this was one of the better dishes of the meal, and Hal's personal favourite.
I liked the Stir-fried beef with pineapple and rose apple:
The beef had been marinated beforehand and was very tender, and the rose apple, though unusual, added an interesting sweet flavour.
Another very unusual dish was Stir fried scallop and mango with fresh milk:
Upon reading the name of this dish I was certain I wouldn't like it, but the fresh milk took the form of very soft scrambled eggs or cheese and was actually quite nice.
There was also Baked river prawns in cheese and butter bulk (?) with E-Fu noodle:
which consisted of seemingly homemade but soggy noodles with a rich but nondescript sauce.
And finally, Deep-fried shin of beef with Thai chicken sauce:
The battered and deep-fried shin of beef was nice, in a tamale sort of way, but the "Thai chicken sauce", ostensibly the cheap bottled stuff that people normally serve with fried chicken, made the dish soggy and sweet.
We were also invited to try some of the restaurant's dim sum dishes, which mostly included the old standbys like steamed buns filled with barbecued pork:
the steamed morsels known in Thai as ha kao:
steamed noodle with shrimp:
and khanom jeep:
Bangkok-based dim sum fans should be aware that Yuan offers a dim sum lunch buffet every day for 500 baht.
technorati tags: chinese, food, bangkok, restaurants, hilton, yuan