Restaurant Review: CAFE GRAY DELUXE
January 11, 2020
You enter the swank Upper House Hotel on whose upper limb Café Gray Deluxe is perched. Up and up, the elevator doors open and simultaneously you are entranced and clobbered. You are entranced by the restaurant’s elegant entryway, a colonnade of large, ivory candles, backdropped by a stunning harbor view. You are clobbered by the music. For such a gem – waiters coiffed, view nonpareil -- the music is a gross non-sequitur, inexplicable. It is the synthesizer music of budget lounge acts across the world, with an insistent, carnal beat, laced by sound effects from a grade B outer-space movie. It is sex music for robots that will play at the robot apocalypse. The volume has been set by a thirteen-year-old who has tied up his parents in the basement. This is music to accompany Nachos with gelatinized cheese sauce. The music of convention groups at hotels with scuffed carpet. This is the music of the wait-line at Space Mountain. How did such a reptile snout its way into this elegant place?
Feeling shaky, you and your wife start in the bar, overlooking the harbor, dark like a bruise, jeweled by red and blue glowing junks,
and sip pre-prandial wine which helps steady your nerves. Yours is a terrific, jammy glass of Uruguayan red, the least expensive on the wine menu, and among the best you’ve had in HK.
Delicious Uruguayan Red. Least expensive choice on wine menu. Highly recommend!
A hostess fetches you to sup within the restaurant proper at a corner table with a stunning view. It’s the early supper special at 395 HKD, three courses, two in each category to choose from. Your wife begins with barbecued duck consommé and you with a sardine escabeche. Sardines are oily and assertive and always a split-second from cat food. This one is pristine and perfectly boned, oil offset by the vinegary carrot and onion slices atop. It is a simple yet bold offering and you love it.
Sardine escabeche
Duck is noble. Your wife’s consommé is ducky indeed with a beguiling hint of star anise. Bobbing within is a perfect won ton filled by a lovely duck forcemeat.
Barbecued Duck Consomme
Both dishes show a refined intelligence that is light years from the puerile music saturating the interior like bargain rack perfume. Who thought this music up? Was it the son of the owner? A grandson with a Star Wars obsession? It must have been. No one else could get away with such a choice.
As a main course, each of you has half a quail, deboned, perfectly lacquered, alongside a berry coulis and an intense jus poured at the last moment from a small carafe. A classy presentation.
Boneless Quail
For dessert each of you has a perfect pavlova with a quenelle of sorbet (perhaps black currant) and berries perched like gems, an exquisite rendition of a classic dessert.
Pavlova
You finish with fresh mint tea served in lovely glass teapots and enough chunks of good chocolate, both dark and milk, to seriously spike your blood sugar. Delicioso.
Milk and Dark chocolates. Notice the orange peel dipped in chocolate. Delicious!
The meal is well paced. Service is mainly cordial and mainly attentive, if ever so slightly rushed. You particularly like the sommelier who discourses thoughtfully on the Uruguayan wine you love.
Though the food is superior, you would never return due to the aural onslaught. Your wife says she’d go back in a heartbeat. Okay, this means you would return. In good spirits with a smile on your face. And no ironic expressions, thank you.
Café Gray Deluxe, your music choice is stunningly poor. For God’s sake, don’t you know that you are a conservator of good taste? Turn it off or change it. Pretty please with Prozac on top. If you can somehow put the music aside, Café Gray Deluxe is a distinguished restaurant of vibrant culinary intelligence that dishes uncommonly pretty (and delicious) food based on strong French technique, with good service, a beautiful interior, and a stunning view. The early supper special with two drinks in the bar, a bottle of red and a bottle of sparkling water came out at $1639 HK for two including service charge. That’s a good deal for HK if the place doesn’t drive you barking mad.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 4
Ambiance: 2 (were it not for the music you’d give it a 5)
Service: 4
Overall Value: With music 2 Without music 4
CAFE GRAY DELUXE
Level 49 The Upper House Pacific Place 88, Queensway, Admiralty, Hong Kong
+852 3968 1106