During one day in our trip, my friend announced that she wanted to eat Bird Nest Egg Tart. Since I went to Hong Kong with no plans and literally was tagging along, I said sure!
Then she asked me, “do you like tau hway (sweet soya bean curd)?” I nodded. Of course I like tau hway. Tau Hway is like a chinese style dessert that is made from soya beans and serve with sweet syrup. In Taiwan, they have their unique savoury versions as well.
“Okay, we gonna order a bucket.” She added.
” A bucket?” I asked, stunned.
“Yeah, mini bucket. It’s like their unique specialty there.” She added.
So, off we went, a few metro stops, weaving through endless shopping streets and arrived at a restaurant called 糖朝 Sweet Dynasty (they used a word play with ‘Tang Dynasty’ cause the word ‘Sugar/Sweet’ sounds like ‘Tang’) . Interestingly if I were to walk by that street, I would definitely walk by it without a second look. Since my friend knows Hong Kong better than I do (She goes to Hong Kong twice a year as some of her relatives are there), I followed her in and down the stairs.
Once inside, the atmosphere changed, mini buckets with signatures and pictures of celebrities lined the wall.
Woah, must be some famous place.
As we went during non-lunch hours, the amount of people around the restaurants were countable.
Since I’m hungry, we also ordered fried rice on top of my friend’s birdnest egg tart and custard pastry and the bucket of tau hway.
Honestly the birdnest egg tart wasn’t impressive. Normal egg tarts topped with a teaspoon of that “luxury jelly”. Not really what I have expected. I was imagining slivers of birdnest baked into the custard kind of egg tart but I guess I had too high of an expectation.
After that, I kind of lost hope on the custard pastry they served up later.
Still, my curiosity was on the bucket of Tau Hway. Since I have seen the size of the buckets near the entrance, I thought they might be of similar size, but even what looks to be “mini” would still be quite a lot of soya bean curd for two ladies.
The bucket of soya bean curd arrived and it was served with a bowl of sugar syrup to accompany the soya bean curd. For those of us who are legit fan of soya bean drink and soya bean curd, this is kind of the extreme edition.
However, I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of scooping the bean curd out of the bucket as usually when we buy tau hway from stores, it has already been pre-scooped into containers already, and you wouldn’t get the feel of scooping it yourself.
And of course, the endless amount of soya bean curd.
Obviously for the both of us, we were not able to finish all the bean curd till the bottom of the bucket, which was a waste. I would have wanted to eat them all if it’s not because we had ordered a plate of fried rice.
This truffle fried rice was their seasonal menu dish, but the truffle was merely that small scoop of black stuff on top of the rice. I would have preferred if they also added in some truffle infused oil to fry the rice so that it holds the fragrance and flavour, but again, expectation wasn’t in line with what I imagined it to be. Still it was still okay as a Hong Kong style fried rice, although I still thinks that Ding Tai Fung’s fried rice is way more superior.
The subtotals (excluding service charges) was 336HKD, which was about 62SGD / 44USD, which was typical restaurant pricing. However, if you ask me, I would go back JUST for the bucket of Tau Hway again, and nothing else, so that I can eat to my heart’s content and also get that cheap thrill of scooping the tau hway straight from the bucket.
(Visited in Dec 2017)
Sweet Dynasty Restaurant
Hong Kong Pacific Centre
No28, Hankow Road,
Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.
Thanks for reading!
