After arriving from Hong Kong, James and I discovered this “hole in the wall” restaurant in San Antonio Village!!! WE LOVE IT!!! No frills but really tasty and YUMMY Chinese food! We met the owner, Mary, and she told us that she really loves to cook and she really researches how to make certain dishes and goes to Hong Kong often because she loves Chinese food. We highly recommend this place! And if you have no time or in a rush, you can order for delivery! We had quite a number of dishes and we liked everything – high on the list of course is the pork asado, salted baked chicken, fried pork chop shallot rice, the shallot rice alone will be a good rice accompaniment, and the salt and pepper squid!! AMAZING! No need to go all the way to Hong Kong to get yummy chinese food and not to mention…at very very reasonable prices!
At the unlikely junction between Bagtikan Street and Sacred Heart Road in the heart of San Antonio Village in Makati lies a quaint and unpretentious little restaurant. With roast chickens hanging from the window, the restaurant claims that it offers “authentic Chinese food,” providing you with a “taste of Hong Kong.”
Owned by the gracious and equally unpretentious Mary Chan, Hong Kong Roast Food Express or HKR is the younger sibling of Mary’s already-successful printing business. For business purposes, Mary found herself travelling frequently back and forth from Hong Kong and China. Armed with a Hotel & Restaurant Management Degree from Dominican College and a love for food, Mary discovered the true recipe for asado, or barbecued pork as it is more commonly known overseas. A cook herself who trained under Chef Gene Gonzales as a college student, Mary decided to bring “the taste of Hong Kong” to Manila, with a strong focus on asado.
The recipe for asado is apparently a trade secret, which explains why only the Chinese chefs who work for Manila’s fine dining Chinese restaurants are able to copy the true Hong Kong asado well. Nevertheless, Mary felt the need for a restaurant that emulated the true Hong Kong dining experience – excellent food, fast service, unfussy surroundings and affordable prices. Therefore, she and her chef trained with Hong Kong and Shenzhen chefs to perfect the recipe, which is now one of the best-selling dishes at HKR.
Other notable dishes include the roast chicken, whose texture and flavor are reminiscent of Causeway Bay roast duck;
the appetizing salted baked chicken; and the Black Chicken Sesame – which you will only find at HKR. The dish uses the silk chicken, a type of fowl whose skin is completely black. In China, dishes with silk chicken are usually consumed twice a day post-pregnancy to bring the mother back to health. In HKR, the dish is cooked with ginger to eliminate unhealthy gas and acid from the system.
The taho and soy milk are manufactured completely in the restaurant. For an interesting salve to the sweet tooth, try the French Toast with sesame filling – a popular dish among gentlemen, Mary notes with surprise.
Perhaps one reason why the food tastes so much like authentic Hong Kong cuisine is because a lot of the ingredients are imported. For instance, HKR’s milk tea is such an accurate representation of its Hong Kong cousin because only Black & White Evaporated Full Cream milk is used to create it – one of the two brands used by Hong Kong restaurants to craft the beverage. HKR delivers to the immediate vicinity and uses only environmentally-friendly packaging made out of corn pulp to house the food.
HKR is the only restaurant that claims to have authentic Hong Kong food but does not have a Chinese chef on the payroll. Whereas this may raise some eyebrows to the restaurant’s faithfulness to the original, Mary believes that her patrons visit her to sample the excellent and affordable food, and not to watch a Chinese chef cook. Furthermore, her own enculturation in Hong Kong and Shenzhen cuisine, coupled with an eye for detail and careful management of her restaurant, lend HKR all the authenticity it needs.
Fried Pork Chop Shallot Rice
Bokchoy Garlic Saute
YangChow Fried Rice
Curry Beef Camto Soup
Beef Ho Fan Noodle Soup
Salt and Pepper Squid
This hidden gem is truly Hong Kong. Run by a Chinese lady with considerable experience in the culinary arts both here and abroad, serving dishes that are genuinely Causeway Bay café in taste and quality, HKR is a veritable little Hong Kong in the middle of Makati City.
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