Restaurant Review: NEIGHBORHOOD
May 31, 2020
You are warmly greeted as you enter Neighborhood, a French restaurant that is nestled on a lovely patch of quietude adjacent bustling Hollywood Road in Central. They lead you past all the tables that are well-illuminated by the front picture window and seat you and your wife in a back room at a table-for-two against the furthest wall. The room is white painted concrete, low-ceilinged, windowless, bunkerlike. You sit facing the wall. It reminds you of the room your mother stored patio furniture in when you were a child which she stocked with cans of condensed milk for the family to last out nuclear winter in the event of war. (Think of it, living for two billion years on condensed milk in a grim room with a difficult lot.) There the two of you sit forlornly when a group with three bouncy tykes is seated nearby and the children begin squealing -- far be it from their parents to stifle their joie. The room becomes intolerable.
So they seat you at the bar, often a convivial spot, but in this case perfect for watching them unload dirty dishes and from which to observe the impatient digs by staff directed at the poor, uncomplaining dishwasher.
The Bar
And so begins your romantic date at the restaurant that is said to be among Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants (19th place to be exact).
The meal starts with a medley of flash-fried peppers, green and red, mainly Padron, handsomely charred, dotted with snips of delicious Chinese ham. They are as good as this dish can be, though you can’t help noting that you are paying 125 HKD for at most 8 HKD worth of peppers and almost zero effort from the chef and you have to ask for salt to sprinkle on them. A middle-school home-economics class could have slung this dish just as well. Still, when you pay for restaurant food in HK, it’s a given that you pay more for the rent component then for the ingredients themselves.
Seared Peppers
Good bread comes. Not house-made. Butter cold. Difficult to spread. Such a little thing to let butter warm to room temperature. Sigh.
Good Bread. Cold Butter.
Next, an entire smoked Gray Mullet, cold, split open, all pin bones meticulously removed, drizzled with olive oil, a wedge of lemon to squeeze over. The meat is firm, flavorful, moist and delightfully redolent of smoke. A memorable dish which you wish more restaurants would emulate.
Smoked Gray Mullet
At this point, if only foreboding music had played, cueing you to leave. But it never does, does it.
Food comes too quickly. You ask them to slow. Your wife orders a glass of La Fouleur, Durouleur Freres for 135 HKD. The bottle the waitress pours from is almost spent, just enough left to fill your wife’s glass with a third less than other pours, and this includes the bottle’s granular dregs. The waitress does not open another bottle to top off her glass. Your wife, accustomed in her marriage to saintly patience, only mentions this toward the end of the meal. Too late to protest, it sticks in your gumline just out of reach. Like a pin bone.
Artichoke Barigoule with Pancetta, an artichoke braise. Real French food at last! Great French food combines ingredients like fissile material to release gargantuan flavor. Typically the broth of a Barigoule is comprised of wine and stock and vinegar, reduced. How can you describe the broth of Neighborhood’s Artichoke Barigoule? Imagine a bag of frozen artichoke hearts. Imagine letting it completely defrost. Imagine cutting a small opening in one corner and pouring out the defrosted juices and warming them. That’s what their broth tastes like: watery, pallid, artichoke’y without intensity of flavor, depth or dimension. Maybe it needed to be reduced more and perhaps a knob of butter would have helped. It is somewhat aversive, in fact. It is the only broth you have ever encountered that made bread taste worse after dipping it in. The artichokes are imperfectly trimmed so there are fibrous leaves on the outside that are inedible (and which have to be carefully separated before they end up in your gullet). The crown of fibers above the choke is not removed, which you find off-putting. There are a few chunks of carrot and onion, a few soggy lardons. After a taste, neither of you can eat it.
Artichoke Barigoule
You love sweetbreads, crisped on the outside, with some kind of spritely sauce showcasing the Saucier’s genius. Perhaps the best you’ve ever had were napped with fresh sorrel molten over gentle heat by your dad, a great reverse engineer of restaurants dishes, served on toast points. Crisping is critical so the dense organ meat has a textural, caramelized foil. Usually they’re dredged in flour, no egg, and sautéed (although you’ve had delicious ones barbecued). Nor should the chunks of sweetbread be too large or the dense richness of the organ meat is overwhelming. Neighborhood’s version is dipped in panko (breadcrumbs for the lazyman) and deep-fried like chicken nuggets. So the sweetbreads aren’t crisp themselves, just the coating. It would be like coating potato slices in panko and frying them to make potato chips. They are sizable and look distressingly like enlarged prostates. There is no sauce of the sort you hoped for but, instead, a Sauce Gribiche which is essentially mayonnaise, probably made up in bulk earlier on, indistinguishable from tartar sauce at a Fish ‘n Chips joint. Perhaps they see this as a smart hack for a difficult dish, but it doesn’t work. It is terrible. Cloying. Slightly horrifying even. The two of you take tentative tastes and can eat no more, the only sweetbreads you have ever shunned.
Sweetbreads the size of enlarged prostates
Buffalo Chicken Wings. What the hell? They don’t crisp the wings. It is implicit, elemental, imperative that the wings be crisped. In the United States children know this. It’s part of the citizenship test. They serve the wrong part of the wing, the outer joint, not the drumette. The sauce on the julienned celeriac beneath the wings is watery.
Buffalo Chicken Wings
Finally, a chance for redemption, Handmade Tagliolini with Pork Jowl and Anchovy. They cook the Tagliolini a dot past al dente. The Pork Jowl, aka Guanciale, is not in crisp ribbons, but one circular piece, mainly fat, not crisp, a floppy splat. You eye it with dismay while your wife inches her chair backward. If they really want to go this route, you think Lardo, which would melt into the pasta, would be a wiser choice. The sauce -- you’re told it’s butter with bits of anchovy -- is inexplicably tasteless. And aren’t anchovy and guanciale redundant anyway, both salty and unctuous? Some parmesan might have rescued this dish. Why is none provided? What could their reasoning be? For 165 HKD, a bit wouldn’t have been out of line, even as an option. You and your wife push the dish away.
Pasta with Anchovies and Pork Jowl
The meal ends with two Caneles, both burnt on the bottom like the heatshield of a returning space capsule.
Bottom of Canele
Service has a tinge of warmth and is reasonably attentive (inquiring often, at least, if we want another drink) though you think it’s unlikely it would win any sartorial prizes. One woman, possibly the manager, wears a blue, denim’like bomber jacket which has the right look for working a ball game concession stand. Though it is early in the evening, many staff look rumpled. Communication is slightly difficult because many servers have limited English skills.
The meal costs 1650 HKD with a bottle of sparkling water and 5 glasses of wine between you including two of champagne at 180 HKD each. Since you know how challenging it is to run a restaurant, what thin profit margins they operate on, and how the coronavirus has severely disrupted business, it truly pains you to say that this is the worst meal you’ve had in Hong Kong and for serious scratch at that. Neighborhood is usually described as a French restaurant online (though some sources say it’s also European and/or Italian), but the food only exhibits trace elements of French. They have taken on mainly unchallenging dishes and improbably flubbed most. The food is poorly conceived, poorly executed and poorly served by a team that doesn’t look sharp. You are skeptical of the process by which it was chosen as the 19th best restaurant in Asia 2019. It’s not within parsecs of that.
To be fair, there is one aspect of this restaurant you admire. The dishwasher. You observed him up close. He did his unglamorous job diligently with grace under gratuitous pressure. Bravo, young man.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 1.5
Ambiance: 1.5
Service: 1.5
Overall Value: 0
NEIGHBORHOOD
61 Hollywood Rd, Central, Hong Kong
+852 2617 0891