Mar 19 2009
Restaurant Review: Empress Garden, Herne Bay
It’s been more than a year since me and my family dined at this place - the last time we visited it was apparently under renovation or some reason and had closed down. We’ve visited subsequently but no luck - it was still not open for business. So we were pleasantly surprised when on a spur of the moment, decided to come here for lunch and - found the place open! Yay!
[Peanut sauce & chilli duck’s feet/麻辣鴨掌] ~$7
This is one of my mom’s favorite dishes to order at this restaurant. Unfortunately, they don’t always make it because they say it’s quite time consuming to properly clean the duck feet in the first place, then marinade it and let it cool before serving; but we never fail to ask whether they serve it or not :P And victory is sweet when this dish is available!
I found that although the duck aroma has not been totally eliminated by the sauce, but the meat/tendon is very soft and the sauce has sufficiently penetrated into the duck to create a very appetizing cold dish. The peanut sauce spiced with sesame and chilli integrates well with the duck flavors, and though I’m not really a fan of duck feet myself I do find my chopstick gravitating towards the dish fairly often!
[Chilli leave prawns/川椒蝦球] ~$20
The dish this time round (compared to one year-ish ago) was a little bit salty, but the chilli leaves and caramelized prawn batter made me forget about the salty flavor - all I could think about taking one gulp after another from my bowl of rice! The dish as a whole dances very heavily on the palate, and with the decent sized king prawns that they used in this dish it really is a rice-killer dish. This is one of the dishes that, as far as I know, is cooked by this eatery and nowhere else. Perhaps there is another Chinese restaurant somewhere but I haven’t had the chance to cross paths with that place just yet, and until then to me the chilli leave prawns done by Empress Garden is their signature dish!
[Braised soup in sandpot/砂鍋津白] ~$15
Braised soup in sandpot was the best translation I could come up with for this dish… inside the sandpot there are fatty pieces of pork loin, bok choi, tofu, dried prawns, altogether in a milky soup that reminded me of seafood chowders but in a watered down variant. Still quite flavorful and gentle on the stomach like the chicken soup you drink when down with a flu. The vermicelli included in the soup helps to add substance and WILL fill you up if you’re not careful!
[Chilli sour wontons/酸辣雲吞] $10
It’s the first time I’m trying such a dish because the menu usually offers the plain soup version instead of including wontons. The name is a little deceptive however; I could barely taste the chilli and the sourness was not the aromatic kind. It’s was more of a generic taste than the really bad, canned/powdered chilli sour stuff that I’ve sometimes had from dodgy chinese foodcourt stalls. The wontons were wrapped within a nice pastry skin, but the meat patty enclosed reminded me more of the dumpling kind of meat rather than the wonton kind. It’s hard to describe for me but the distinction lies in the flakiness of the meat patty. Usually the meat inside the dumplings tend to break apart quite easily within the mouth, whereas wonton meat (at least the times I’ve had it when I went back to Taiwan) never part with the pastry skin. The meat scent unique to New Zealand pork, lamb, and beef - some would call it stench and in this case it was a little like that - further crushed any expectation I had of the wonton being of the kind I’d like to eat.
[Sesame pockets w/ stir fried mince] ~$15
Although the mince was slightly on the oily side, it helped to balance the slightly dry sesame pockets that we were supposed to stuff the mince into - creating a snack that is very tasty and slightly filling, too! The heavy flavors of the mince tends to drown out everything else after a few bites so I would definitely recommend tea at the very least, or a lightly flavored soup of some kind to go with this dish.
This has been one of the few consistent restaurants that I’ve been able to discover around Auckland; although there were times when they renovated and had to close for a while, or when the chef changed - but the taste has remained largely the same throughout the past 7 odd years of relationship my family had with this restaurant. Definitely worth a try as parking is ample around the restaurant, and with a location in a quiet neighborhood it’s well suited for a private meal :)
Contact details:
227 Jervois Road
Herne Bay, 1011
(09) 376 5550
Hours:
Lunch: 12pm - 2:30pm
Dinner: 6.00pm - 10.00pm
This restaurant sounds really good….and its not often that you are lucky twice :D
Sometimes,the chilli does compensate the taste which are a bit salty.
It looks quite soft and attractive even in the snap shot :)