The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: BLACK SALT
Okrahoma?
November 11, 2017
Okrahoma?
As a fine character in a novel must have just the right name, a fine restaurant must have just the right location. Elegant hotels can imbue this quality. Malls rarely if ever. Fuk Sau Lane in Sai Ying Pun, a cul de sac cozy as Sunday morning in bed, is bespoke for Black Salt. Across is a lovely open wall restaurant. Dogs and cats loll between. Black Salt itself is open-walled and so its interior and exterior, the street, the dogs and cats, and the other restaurant seem to merge as one. Street party perfect.
It’s your birthday, so your wife goes belt and suspenders, brunch and dinner reservations at Black Salt. In deference to sanity, she schedules them a week apart.
Black Salt Lentil Amuse Bouche
Brunch. You eye your neighbors’ frothy pints of hazel beer, but order instead a bottle of Rosé because you see other bottles in champagne buckets which are your particular weakness. Hong Kong has only the thinnest veneer of wine culture. You have not yet met any local wine servers, except in very high end places, who know anything about wine except the need for a reverent look and the false panache of holding the bottle from the base in order to pour (as though holding a dog’s snout front-on to block its sneeze). You speculate that it will take at least a generation and a fair amount of liver disease for local Chinese to get their bearings. Your charming waiter puts your expensive bottle into a bucket of tepid water. Ugh.
Black Salt may have fallen in the scrum, but with your orders of BS Fry Up and Kata Murga Benedict it is up and kicking. The BS Fry Up contains a one-inch thick slice of bacon which is, of course, cured pork belly. Wagyu beef is flavorful because of its marbled fat, and pork belly, luscious with fat, is the wagyu of Pigdom. Instead of being frizzled like ordinary bacon, clearly this was cooked in a slow oven until most of the fat melted into the meat intensifying its flavor. This is bacon to make atheists talk in tongues. It’s conjoined to eggs with jaunty orange yolks. There are tandoori’d sausages with a needless topping of some sort that you scrape off. Beans. Busy food, maybe too busy. But you and your wife manage the torque.
English muffins, honeycombed and toasted, are Eggs Benedict’s keel. Black Salt’s bread is soft and absorbent, structurally unsuited to its duty, heretical truth be told. You admire innovation, but there’s value in tradition, and here it belongs. Homemade English Muffins are a snap to make. Black Salt, do so. That aside, it’s a tasty glop, layered with anodyne chicken tikka.
Oddly, though Black Salt’s lineage is Indian, there is only a mild hint of Indian flavoring to the food itself. You yearn for a condiment of lime-pickle or such.
Dinner. The night is a dusky plum. Candles glow. Your wife brilliantly reserves an outside table. You order a hoppy micro (chilled). Your wife a white (chilled).
Pop. What is it? Pop Pop. It’s the Okra Fries. So good, so crisp in their garbanzo batter, so hot, so flavorful. It’s your serotonin popping. If only the mayo had more zest. Lime-pickle would do it. Pop. Like sharing the blanket, these are fries to test a marriage.
Okra Fries to make you crazy with pleasure
The Rhapsody of Lamb is rush-hour busy, four renditions of lamb and a mess of stuff between. Depleted by earlier superlatives, you can’t adequately describe just how superb the ribs are. These are the ribs you want to eat for the rest of your life. You speculate they were roasted a long time at low heat, then broiled crisp and glazed. There are slices of lamb, an ideal medium-rare. This, more than anything else, shows the chefs’ technical command. Then there is lamb in some kind of cylindrical wrapper. The problem here is that lamb’s delicacy easily is lost. Wrappered, you can’t tell if the meat is lamb or Heffalump. Finally, shreds of lamb shank are tasty enough, but you would have preferred the shank whole. Or, even better, you would have preferred it if you could have chosen the iteration of lamb you wanted. It’s clear the chef likes these agglomerations, no doubt deprived of food-play as a child, but it goes overboard here like an ice-cream sundae with too many sauces. If the ribs were available for take-out though and you lived on the moon, you’d get a fishing rod with an extremely long line and…
Black Salt Rhapsody of Lamb
The garlic-truffle flatbread has the same texture as the Eggs Benedict rolls. It is good in that it comes fresh from the oven. How could it not be? But, it’s the renaissance age of bread, and this bread’s crumb is supermarket level. Hire a serious baker and dial it up. And truffle oil, oy. Every arm-tattooed chef on the planet tries to glam their food with the stuff (almost always synthetic). It’s the new MSG. Skip this tiring hack; it’s hackneyed. Next thing you know there will be truffled bumfodder. Truffled condoms. Truffled underarm deodorant. You’ll be able to inoculate yourself with truffle spores and grow your own like a Chia Pet, harvesting them by trained Iberico pig. Black Salt, be the firewall to this insanity. Instead, make killer Naan like they still do in India in clay ovens, wonderfully charred, blistered. Garlic Naan undergirding Eggs Benedict might be transformational. How about Naan with zaatar. Or Naan with flashed lamb and dan dan sauce. Or Naan with smoked salmon and the works. Or Naan with lime-pickle cream and lobster. Or Naan Banh Mi. There’s possibility here…
At this point you and your wife are tiring. This meal is torquey alright. The chef must have been a busy child. But it’s your birthday and you’re required to eat dessert. The banana fritters are the mad cousin of Bananas Foster, a marshland of banana fritters, caramel, dried banana shards, so on. It’s delicious. A small glass of Tokay, were it available, would go famously with it.
The chef is brilliantly and imperfectly forming his oeuvre. He takes large risks synthesizing from many cuisines, sometimes with missteps, but they’re inevitable and well worth it. His culinary destiny is big.
The two of you ascend Fuk Sau Lane past the Buddhistic dogs and cats. You turn to your wife and utter one word, “Okrahoma.”
Okrahoma? You look into her Danish eyes. She twigs! Okrahoma is a state, of course. The state of loving okra fries and a willingness to share 50-50.”
Pop.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 3.5
Ambiance: 3
Service: 3
Overall Value: 3.5
BLACK SALT
14 Fuk Sau Ln, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong