Let’s say you’re in Hong Kong and you’re a vegetarian or traveling with one and you or he wants dim sum. No problem! There’s a fully vegetarian restaurant at Admiralty, on a hill near the tea pot museum. It’s mostly a “drink expensive tea and eat snacks” place but it may be worth a visit for vegetarians.
The restaurant has a veggie version of no mai gai, which is sticky rice, mushroom and vegetable filling, all wrapped in a leaf. Kind of like a Chinese tamale, but more delicious. It’s comparable to the meat version, so if you like that, you might like this.
A must-order dish at dim sum is turnip cake and this restaurant has the vegetarians covered. Each piece is crispy on the outside with a soft, tender interior. The weird thing about it was a sour taste, which I think may come from the pickled vegetables sprinkled throughout the batter. It threw me off, but my dining companion seemed to like it.
We also ordered some “soldiers hat” dumplings, which were mediocre at best. For the prices this restaurant charges for food, I would have expected a higher quality dish. The dumpling filling itself was decent, but the skin hadn’t been steamed through, so it was dry and hard at the top.
After the dumplings, Will was still hungry, so he ordered the Shanghai style fried noodles. They came in a small bowl, perfect for a serving for one.
The novelty of an all-vegetarian restaurant serving dim sum items is worth the visit, but other than that, the food is okay at best and the prices are high. What really annoys me about the place is if you order tea, they insist that each person in your party orders their own tea set. We both wanted the same type of tea and wanted to share a pot, but nope, against store policy. It’s silly because it goes against Chinese tea culture in general. When people get together, they don’t all brew their own tea out of their own teapot.