Hong Kong: Cambo Thai

I'm glad to have met a fellow foodie in Hong Kong! Her name's Parthenia (picture above, far right), and I was talking to her at the Hong Kong Model United Nations Conference Grand Dinner when she told me that she likes visiting websites on food and restaurants before trying them out with her friends. Foodie meets foodie!


So on our foodie night (with most of my delegation making up my entourage), Parthenia took us to Kowloon City to try out this famous Thai restaurant that has been covered in a good many magazines, newspapers, blogs and websites. At first, we were wondering why we were going to have Thai when we were in Hong Kong, but then we saw this:


Wow, so many reviews (for now, we're assuming they're all ravingly good reviews haha)? The other thing about this restaurant is that it covers half of the street that it is on, taking up around eight or more units. All of the units had customers, and all of them had colourful articles and reviews all over their windows. We decided to try a few dishes, and Parthenia herself urged us to order just a few dishes because she was bringing us for snacks and desserts after dinner.


Parthenia was telling us about a common practice in restaurants in Hong Kong, and that's about washing your utensils before you eat. There's a small jug of warm water on the table, so what you do is pour some of it into your bowl and onto your plate, and from there wash your chopsticks and spoon. It was definitely something new to us. A few minutes later, one of the waitresses put a small container on the table, to which we poured the water back in. Interesting eh?

Phad Thai


Yes, we're really eating Thai food in Hong Kong. The phad thai was quite good actually, it wasn't too moist nor was it too spicy, and the grated peanuts added the crunch to the noodles. If you want to know one of the better phad thais in Singapore, I would have to say Thai Express does a pretty good job at it.

Mixed Seafood



I'm making the name up, but you can tell what it is if you read the menu above. Soefie spotted the line "A dish for celebrity" and insisted we order it. This actually turned out to be the highlight of our dinner! This dish is both sweet and spicy, with a good variety of ingredients. And oh, Liyana felt that a chopstick in the picture would make it more artistic haha. It was also because everyone couldn't wait to get their chopsticks into such a delicious-looking dish!

Spicy and Sour Seafood Soup


We thought this would turn out to be the typical Thai "tom yum" soup, but it wasn't exactly so. One thing though: this soup is really really spicy! The restaurant uses chilli padi (some Westerners know it as "bird's eye chili pepper"), which is probably the hottest form of chillies around. It still tasted great, so as much as some of us were hissing from the spiciness, we were still enjoying it anyway haha.

We also had fried rice and sambal kangkong, the latter of which tasted very good. Just in case anyone is considering visiting this restaurant, here are a couple of pages from the menu!




Service
Good. But they couldn't really understand English, so luckily we had Parthenia there with us!

Price
HK$43 for the phad thai
HK$45 for the mixed seafood
HK$95 for the spicy and sour seafood soup
HK$38 for the sambal kangkong

Place


Somewhere in Kowloon City, I don't know the exact address. I think if you enlarge the picture above, there's some contacts and addresses at the top. That's if you know how to read Chinese haha.



The restaurant(s) has two different signboards, but we were assured they are all the same.