One Thirtyone — THE ARDENT GOURMET: RESTAURANT, HOTEL, AND TRAVEL REVIEWS

September 26, 2020

Dusk in Sai Kung is like the fur beneath a horse’s nose when it nudges you with affection: warm, moist, velvet, scented by grass. One Thirtyone is lit like a chandelier. Looking in, it sparks with fine crystal on white tablecloths. The napkins are crisply folded to look like Bishops’ mitres (you know, those tall, pointy hats you yearn to wear, don’t deny) and, entering, you suppress the impulse to put one on your head.

Your wife lashed you into nice clothes and now you understand why. A server spares you the trouble of putting your napkin in your lap by doing it for you as though you’re a nursing-home patient dribbling soup. Your friend also receives this perk, but neither of your wives. Could this be a subtle message?

The kitchen launches two amuse bouche, a marble-size sphere studded with sesames and a small pastry cup with micro-diced tomato (no easy thing to make) with what looks like an olive on top though (after querying two waiters) you discover it’s actually duck liver mousse. There’s a teensy scarlet blossom perched atop perfect as a Haiku. The ball, coated in sesame seeds, has a satisfying texture and sesame flavor. The flavor of the duck-liver dish, though your wife likes it, is scant for you, the exquisitely diced tomato flavorless. And you question whether a duck liver-tomato marriage is quite the thing.

There’s hardly a better bellwether of a restaurant than the bread they bake. A server comes by with a basket of warm miniature baguettes, pretzel rolls and raisin rolls. Served in the French manner with two spoons formed into tongs, all have a delightful crumb and crust. You especially like the raisin. Butter is cold which you don’t prefer but your wife does. Unfortunately, you’ve learned in the process of writing this review that One Thirtyone gets their bread “from a supplier.” This doesn’t disqualify a restaurant by any means. But a restaurant that successfully takes on this daunting task – such as pipsqueak Brut! – gets major bonus points.

The restaurant fills, buzz begins, wine is poured. Your first course is a piece of beautiful abstract art, Red Crab, Dashi jelly, Salmon roe, Avocado: crab meat in an endive leaf, nestled with salmon roe, micro greens, dots of something yellow, dots of something green, a crown of something shredded (you’re clueless what it is), piped green dots of two different hues surrounding. You taste one of the green dots (probably the avocado) and there’s no flavor whatsoever. If it is avocado, a dot is not enough to transmit texture and mouth feel, intrinsic to flavor. Same for the yellow dot (possibly the dashi jelly). It would be like trying to transmit color through a few colored-pencil dots. You need more to activate the sensors. The crab is delightfully sweet and pristine. You like the salmon eggs. The bitterness of the endive does not enhance either. You would have preferred shiso. Had they just served the crab alone, the dish would have been ideal.

Your wife is allergic to crab, so they thoughtfully make her a replacement dish of small tomatoes, a microgreen or two, a few dots of what is probably avocado (again flavorless), and miniature spheres of balsamic vinegar held together by molecular magic. They must have known that your wife swigs balsamic vinegar as pirates do rum. She loves this. You taste it and it’s as good as its major ingredients: flavorful tomatoes and balsamic. There’s a granular heap at either side of the dish that’s neither aversive nor delicious. You have no clue what it is.

Next, a dish that seems structurally redundant with the first, Scallop, Shellfish Orange Sabayon, Sakura Shrimp, Seaweed powder. You could interchange the scallop and crab and neither dish would suffer. The chubby scallop is wonderfully caramelized and overcooked. If there is shrimp, you can’t find it. The shellfish of the sauce comes through nicely but no orange. A dusting of orange zest at the moment of serving (perhaps tableside) would have been lovely though. The seaweed powder is saline and otherwise devoid of flavor as neutrons are devoid of mass.

Your wife, with a shellfish allergy (which makes sense because she is not a shellfish person, but generous), is served a substitute dish of deep-fried lotus root slices and cold-cured salmon. Not generally a fan of cold-cured salmon, she loves it. You nibble a lotus chip which salted would be an ideal morsel itself. There are some particularly pretty greens which you think may be seaweed. And there’s a mound of white granules which baffle you.

This establishes the pattern of the food to follow: complex, labor-intensive, Instagrammably exquisite, comprised of beautiful, pristine ingredients, many you can’t identify, a number with little or no flavor. Enchanted patrons lift their phones as often as their forks.

Beef Consommé with Autumn Truffle and Red Radish. The beef consommé is perfectly clarified, not so easy to do, but not as strong as you’d like. The radish, sliced prematurely, is wilted. The Autumn truffle hasn’t a muon of scent or flavor. Restaurants commonly woo with truffles that turn out to be flavorless. You’re surprised though that here at such an expensive one this is the case. Flavorful truffles do exist, though dear. You might as well be eating postage stamps.

Pickled Sanma, Zucchini, Beer Bread, Fennel Cream. This is a kitchen that does love piping dots, a trick that wears. Piped dots and stripes for some chefs are like glitter for children “doing art” who mistake the glitter for the art itself. For the first time you catch flavor from the piped sauce: fennel. However, the flavor of the fish is muffled by the strong bread and the zucchini. It’s quite pretty, but like the crab, had the pickled (and delicious) Sanma just been served alone with perhaps a blob of fennel aioli alongside, it would have been ideal.

Showing the compassion you’re due after so many complex courses, comes an intermezzo of winter melon ice over cookie crumbs with shards of particularly fine brittle on top. Beautiful again! Exotic ice creams can be great. Marron glacé ice cream is your very favorite in the world. You still pine for the horseradish ice cream and the parsnip ice cream you had at Restaurant Floreyn in Amsterdam years back. Winter melon sorbet is not of this exalted class, nor close. It is almost without flavor, a nullity. Possibly there’s hint of something squashy but it’s certainly not beguiling. It’s almost as though this restaurant, noting that other fine restaurants use unusual ingredients in novel ways, is determined to join the club without grasping the imperative to put flavor first.

Australian Lamb Chops, Stuffed Spring Roll, Beet Root, Lamb Jus. Tasty enough but demure. The perfectly done chops lack that luscious char or caramelization you hanker for. And it’s fatty. The Stuffed Spring Roll is in fact stuffed with fresh mint. You could put almost anything in a spring roll and it would be tasty. Eggrolls stuffed with corned beef are amazing. Mint is fashion model pretty. But it would have been far more impressive if they’d taken the unglamorous time to reduce their lamb jus to a demi-glace and flavored it with fresh mint. It wouldn’t have had that slick food mag look, but would have been far more delish.

Staggering under the onslaught of food, a delicious cheese course follows. Is cheese in a fancy restaurant de rigueur? Frankly, at this stage of the meal it’s more likely to trigger a cerebral hemorrhage than enhance. Manfully you eat it though and quite like it.

Like a mountaineer on their last rope pitch to summit, you muster final strength for dessert: Steamed Tofu Cake, Roasted Rice Sorbet, Black Sesame Soil, Miso Caramel Gel. This course has the look of what’s commonly called “deconstructed,” though if it is, you have no idea what they were deconstructing. Maybe a parts bin. It doesn’t hold a candle to the blue-cheese cheesecake with whiskey ice cream you recently had at Rubia or the lemon grass panna cotta you recently had at Brut! or countless versions of mango sticky rice you’ve inhaled at far less expensive restaurants. The Roasted Rice sorbet -- like the winter melon sorbet, like the micro-diced tomato, like the dots of avocado, like the seaweed powder, like the truffle, like the unidentifiable granular heaps -- is flavorless. It could as well have been water sorbet. The tofu with dabs of caramel tastes like tofu with dabs of caramel. Pillowcases taste good with dabs of caramel, but the tofu and caramel would have been better utilized in altogether different concoctions, not mated. Perhaps you’re old school, but tofu just isn’t the stuff of desserts. What was the kitchen thinking? You suspect they were thinking to wow with novelty and beauty, without expending the resource exquisite desserts require. Such as an in-house pâtissier (who could also make bread).

A chocolate and a pate de fruit made from a fruit you can’t distinguish is served just in case you’re not quite dead. Both are good. Then coffee to revive you.

Service is very attentive but language difficulties, compounded by masks, sometimes make it hard to communicate. Some of the servers seem to have only a superficial understanding of the food and even less of the wines. Hard workers, they’re more efficient than they are warm. This contrasts with other restaurants like Jean May or Brut! or Rubia you’ve eaten at recently (or the Black Sheep restaurants) where servers are not only efficient but personable and enthusiastic about the food. This makes the meal so much more enjoyable. You’re connected to people reveling in their team effort, not merely the recipient at the outlet of a machine.

Taken by itself, the interior of the elegant and spacious restaurant fans romance.

The food is served on some of the loveliest tableware you’ve ever seen, much of it handcrafted. The stemware is so delicate to make you nervous.

Dish after dish, each one another crank of the kaleidoscope, blur together. All are Instagrammably awesome. One Thirtyone uses unlikely ingredients in novel ways – though so often you can’t decipher what they are and no one can tell you. Often they have little or no flavor. You’re staggered at the amount of work that goes in. You grasp the technical-artistic ability to pull this off and the organizational genius to serve it.

Is it scrumptious? This is the nub. Does the food at One Thirtyone spike your serotonin like the seaweed brioche at Amber or the duck fritters at Brut! or the tandoori lamb chops at New Punjab Club or the baby cucumbers in meat sauce at Liao Za Lie or the okra at Lao Zhang Gui Dongbei or the pork belly with wide mung bean noodles at Wing Lai Yuen or the Char Siu at Go Go Goose or the pork neck at Chua Lam’s Pho or the lamb ribs at 121BC or the chicken wings at Chom Chom or the dan dan noodles at Ho Lee Fook or the Dried Turnip Fried Marinated Meat at Hu Nan Heen or the sous-vide smoked duck at Sichuan Club or the blue-cheese cheesecake at Rubia or the country terrine at Jean May?

One Thirtyone’s food is for the most part tasty. It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s nice enough. Not too bad. It has bright spots such as the clever balsamic balls. However, for all its beauty, it does not slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God. Shorn of its frou frou, it’s top level mediocre. You feel like you’ve eaten more fuss than food. If only photons were delicious then it would be amazing. And it comes at such a cost. Lord.

6644 HKD for four with two bottles of wine and a brace of bottled waters. (There was no corkage for a red your friends kindly brought.) Add in a tip of 400 HKD and 800 HKD for round-trip uber and the total cost really was 7844 HKD (or $1012.00 USD). By your lights this is clown-crazy, particularly for what was essentially unexceptional food. The four of you could have flown roundtrip to Vietnam and had a great dinner there for this. You could have gone to five or more excellent, though modest, restaurants for this. It definitely causes you to look at this restaurant with a sharp eye. Flaws you’d overlook at other restaurants are unacceptable here.

The meal, starting at 7 PM, took over four hours. You won’t deny that by the end your boilers were losing steam. Had you been five years old you might have put your head on the table and zzz’d off mid-bite. Is a four-hour meal twice as good as one lasting two?

You believe that Instagram and such has inverted this restaurant’s thinking in three ways.

1/ An axiom of architecture is Form follows Function. An axiom of cuisine should be Form follows Flavor. One Thirtyone gets this backward.

2/ An axiom of life is Less is More. One Thirtyone gets this backward.

3/ You can make sock sorbet, but should you? Should you? must precede Can you? One Thirtyone gets this backward.

Missing these three switch tracks, One Thirtyone hits the curve full throttle and, money flying from passengers’ pockets, plunges off the trestle.

Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)

Food: 2.5 (this seems harsh but factors in the gargantuan cost)

Ambiance: 4

Service: 3

Overall Value: 2

One Thirtyone

131 Tseung Tau Village, Shap Sze Heung, Sai Kung, Hong Kong

+852 2791 2684