The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: LE BISTRO WINEBEAST
Acceptable country club fare.
October 6, 2017
Having been raised by dogs, naturally you like to please. This is burdensome for a restaurant reviewer when they encounter a place that they feel falls short.
Nowhere is the burden clearer than at Le Bistro Winebeast which basks in accolades, even listed as a ten best pick for Hong Kong in 2015 by Eat and Travel Weekly. If everyone else likes it, you want to join the pack.
Plastic grapes festoon the railing as you ascend to the vinous sanctum sanctorum. You start with a fig-walnut bread which your waitress assures you was made in-house. This is one of the best breads, if not the best, you’ve ever eaten, sour and chewy, nubbed with satisfying sweetness and crunch. It is remarkable that a small restaurant could produce such a masterpiece. Kudos!!! Served with an elegant cone of salted butter and a mound of extraordinarily flavorful pork rillettes, you know great things are to come.
Winebeast, bread, butter, and delicious pork rillettes (the bread here is not the fig walnut)
In wolfish anticipation, you and your wife order a Kir and a Kir Royale. A Kir needs a flinty wine to offset the sweetness of Cassis. A Kir Royale should be served in a champagne flute. Both drinks require a twist of lemon for fission. These points are as absolute as exact change to a bank. But at Winebeast, heir to Bacchus: wrong wine, wrong glass, no twists. Your canine nature intrudes. You want to like Winebeast, to write them a great review, to join the club of admirers. You loved the bread. It’s only the start. It’s trivial. The other reviews were so positive. You sputter excuses. Still, you have the feeling that this is an intimation.
Your wife, raised by cats, arches an eyebrow.
A handsome platter of appetizers appears. A croquette of duck confit is tasty, though the underlying sweet potato puree is an indifferent foil. The next dish, a scrumptious soup of beetroot and apple, could sidekick the confit perfectly were it reduced. (Are there cranberries in it your allergic wife asks. The waitress doesn’t know and has to consult the kitchen). The Jambon is so fatty it’s inedible (though you take it home, fry it for brek next day with an egg on top, delish). A crostini with French beef sausage has little flavor. None come close to “ten best” Hong Kong level. They’re acceptable country club fare.
Apple-Beet soup and a duck confit croquette
Surely the reputed genius of this restaurant will come forth with the duck. So many reviewers can’t be wrong. Meanwhile you each order another glass of wine and it is apparent that the good-natured waitresses know less about wine than making Kirs. (One readily admits she knows nothing about wine and refers us to the next who admits the same, who refers us to the manager who isn’t in.) They badly need a week in wine camp
The duck is warm, not hot. The skin -- that wonderful crackling -- is nowhere to be seen. The berry sauce seems premade (again, your wife asks if there are cranberries in it, waitress doesn’t know, consults kitchen). If the duck was just cooked, not reheated, it is no better than reheated. The skin, which finally appears under a glop of sauce is flaccid. The meat is tough. It’s medium, not medium rare which is ideal and more difficult to achieve. No one asked you how you wanted it which points to a likelihood of pre-cooking.
Much as it pains, you say it, Winebeast is unexceptional. Winebeast is plastic grapes. Either the other reviews are wrong, it’s changed, or it’s having an extraordinarily bad night (which certainly is possible and, if so, you’re sorry that your budget won’t allow you to eat there several more times in order to catch this.). It has good ideas, but does not execute them well, details misfire, the wait staff knows little or nothing about the food and, zut alors, nothing about wine. The bread is genius and you’re amazed the kitchen makes it (although it occurs to you that the kind and uninformed waitresses, in their desire to please, could well be mistaken about this). You wish the bread was for sale. It isn’t.
Plastic grapes
The restaurant would do better with simpler food. Simpler food needn’t be worse food, of course. Such might be the means to actualize the genius which might well reside within the kitchen.
Dessert is a poached apple (a bit undercooked) in a snappy red sauce decked with a crumble that is decked with luscious (but melting) pistachio ice cream. Your feline partner (having given up asking about cranberries) picks at it, but you think it’s delicious and you lap it up like a …
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 2
Ambiance: 2
Service: 3
Overall Value: 2.5
LE BISTRO WINEBEAST
It looks as though Le Bistro Winebeast has moved from where I visited and upon which my review is based. Apparently it has a “new menu” which is highly regarded by a reviewer for Foodie Hong Kong (https://www.afoodieworld.com/ashleywgtang/2018-06-20-new-menu-le-bistro-winebeast). Alas, by her own admission (in a note at the bottom of her review), this reviewer’s meal was comped which I believe utterly invalidates it. Really it’s an infomercial paid for by the restaurant, not a review. I write more to this point on my homepage.
Winebeast interior shot at time review was written. Looks like they’ve moved to a new location now.
The address at this time is:
G/F Newman House, 35-45 Johnston Road, Wanchai Hong Kong
+852 2782 6689