Bedu
The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: BEDU
September 15, 2019
Sultry: (of a person, especially a woman) attractive in a way that suggests a passionate nature.
It is a warm, humid evening, but not uncomfortably so. The streets are eerily empty due no doubt to the protests happening nearby. And, like a lantern, there is Bedu, aglow. The entire front is opened up to a small elegant bar where your friends await, pearled drinks in hand.
You are graciously led to the furthermost table within the dim, cool interior, seated far enough from the adjoining table that their raucous laughter is not intrusive. You order a sparkling, purplish house cocktail containing Elderflower liqueur. It comes in a sugared glass, a pixie-perfect periwinkle blossom afloat. Many such house concoctions amount to liquid lollipops. Not this one. It’s elegant like cool silk across your skin. In front of you is an open kitchen. Already you sense the spirit of this restaurant and you begin to unwind within its embrace.
The servers are attentive and warm, without the polish of some restaurants and you like this just fine. You’re being served by human beings, not butlers.
Strong appetites aroused, you begin by ordering all the starters: Smoky hummus, beetroot and mint labneh, za’atar and olive oil, homemade pickles, homemade flatbread. The hummus is superb in texture and flavor, fetchingly slicked with olive oil, though you’re not certain if you catch the flavor of smoke. You particularly like its tartness. The labneh tastes as good as it looks, beguiling creamy purple, thick, wonderfully lactic with bass notes of beet.
Beet Labneh
The house made sweet-pickles (beet, cauliflower, cucumbers, and mild hot peppers) are delightfully flavorful, both soft and crisp at the same time.
Perfect pickled vegs
Some whole pickled garlic cloves, okra, and fennel would not be unwelcome. You particularly like the peppers and most of all the cauliflower which is flavored with turmeric. The flatbread is piping hot and almost perfect, needing a sprinkle of sea salt you think.
Piping hot flatbread
A cacophony of hands, like animated pick-up sticks, pull from one plate and another, sopping up the goodness. The za’atar is mainly lost in the olive oil. And you only wish it had been served dry. Were this so, you could have dipped your bread in olive oil and then into the za’atar, encrusting it and extracting much more flavor and texture.
The next dishes come somewhat more randomly then you like. For instance, you order rice pilaf (an outstanding version of this dish with a dusky note of saffron, each grain of basmati rice perfectly cooked, distinct from the next, with pistachio crumbs) but it comes at the very end when really it should have come at the beginning as an accompaniment to the mains. You end up tasting it and taking it home with you.
Rice pilaf tinted with saffron
The Fattoush salad, with a brash citrus dressing over pristine vegetables, comes mid meal when you think it would have done better at the start as well.
Fattoush
Sweet spiced tuna is four thin slices of tuna that are charred and sweet without, raw within, artfully adorned with preserved lime aioli and black sesame seeds. Pink, green, black, such a pretty palette, like a Tahitian Gaugin. Had they brought you a bowl of the aioli, you would have spooned it up by itself. It has just the tartness, creaminess, garlic’iness that the outstanding tuna requires, and the black sesame seeds give textural lift. Brilliant. Is it ungrateful to have wished for several more slices of tuna though?
Tuna with preserved lime aioli
Baked feta with smoked lemon and thyme honey comes to the table sizzling. You are startled by just how delicious it is, carnal almost. Though once again you don’t taste smoke, you love the contrast of salty, lactic, sweet, herbal. However, it needs bread to sop it (and its sauce) up and, in your lust, your group has consumed all of it by then and it is too late to order more. You ran into exactly this same problem at the restaurant Francis with a similar dish based on halloumi. In your view, bread should come with such dishes. At the prices charged you think this would be reasonable.
Baked feta with thyme honey. Sizzling hot!
Honey brined brisket, with pomegranate dressing, and hazelnut dukkah (a middle-eastern spice blend) works in all respects, but the brisket is undercooked. It’s tough and rubbery. Obviously, any restaurant can make mistakes, but this one surprises you since brisket is so easy to cook well and forgiving of mistakes. Oh well, even imperfect brisket is pretty good. Given the chefy powers here, no doubt this is an anomaly.
Should you risk it and order the brisket? Possibly not.
The rack of lamb (four chops), with garlic labneh, and za’atar oil has the opposite problem from the brisket. The chops have a perfect char, but are overcooked, almost well done, alas, alas. They may have been perfect when they came off the heat, but then they kept cooking in the time it took to serve them. Putting that aside, you adore the flavor profiles and just how pretty this dish is. This dish almost like almost all the dishes pulses with contrasting colors.
Chamb lops
You would not order the roasted baby carrots or the falafel again. Each has too much tahini in the saucing which is almost gummy, flavor dull. Each would benefit from a less dense, sharper sauce, something based on labneh perhaps. You wonder if a Greek skordalia sauce, or something like it, might not fit the bill here (or elsewhere). It’s in the Mediterranean fold. The falafels aren’t crisp and are denser than you like.
Carrots
Falafel
Your very favorite dish, trophy level, is the harissa grilled peaches with thyme labneh and honey. The peaches are achingly perfect, meaty, juicy, sweet, tart, peachy, the peaches eaten by Zeus and Athena on Olympus as they bemusedly watch us below (throwing the pits at our heads). The spicy, sweet, lactic, herbal sauce is fabulous. Who (other than a great chef) would have thought that spicy harissa would do so well against sweet peaches? By an obscure associative process having to do with love and desire, they conjure the scent of your wife’s perfume at the nape of her neck.
Peaches with harissa and labneh. Unbelievably delicious!!!!!
In for a penny, in for a pound (in both senses of the word…. you’re being witty,…can’t you tell?), your group orders all three desserts: 1/ Yogurt, honeycomb and orange blossom, 2/ Milk chocolate clafoutis, rosewater whipped yogurt, 3/ Drunken berry millefeuille, watermelon granita.
Somehow the honeycomb is crisped in the first dessert which is a satisfying textural contrast with the sweet, sharp yogurt. This is your wife’s favorite.
Yogurt with crisped honeycomb
The clafoutis is hot and a little more cake-like than you feel right. You like the sour cherries within and would not have objected to more. The yogurt topping provides a lovely flavor and temperature contrast.
Clafouti
It is the drunken berry millefeuille that coruscates the night though. The fresh berries zing with flavor. The pastry is perfect, breaking off in crisp, delicious shards beneath your spoons. The watermelon granita is a truly inspired touch and you only wish there were three times as much. The dish surely could have handled it. You love the temperature contrast. This is the one dessert you would order again. And again.
Drunken Berry Millefeuille. Superb!
Bedu brilliantly juxtaposes elemental flavors and textures and temperatures and colors and scents, creating food that is delicious and beautiful. Many of its dishes are appropriate for nabbing and dipping with fingers or cutting into portions on the serving plate and divvying. And it is perhaps for this reason – the shared, tactile quality of the ravishing food within this restaurant’s warm embrace – that this restaurant feels amorous. Being gluttonous in this regard, the four of you ordered twice as much as you needed. And, having ordered twice as much as you needed (if not more) your bill is much higher than it should have been, about 2900 HKD for four with tip. Your bad. And yet, as you waddle out the door, you’re good.
You’ll return, not only for lunch or dinner, but having temporarily quelled your lusts, for simple snacks at the bar. It is luscious to be caressed by this sultry restaurant, Bedu.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 4
Ambiance: 4
Service: 3.5
Overall Value: 3.5
BEDU
40 Gough Street Central, Hong Kong