Social Place, The L. Place, Hong Kong Central

We heard about Social Place (2/F The L. Place, 139 Queen's Road Central, Central, tel : +852 3568 9666) from social media. It looked like a place where the food is a bit more fun and definitely contemporary with various Chinese influences without taking themselves too seriously. Mostly their rendition of dim sum, small plates and selected Chinese dishes.

Ants on a plate.

Their house made plum wine was sweet. According to the menu, paired well with their roasted pigeon. It did.

That's organic black soya milk.

Foie gras with rice wine was nice. The main flavours came from the foie, the rice wine and salt & pepper.

We enjoyed their flavourful roasted white king pigeons. These didn't have so much meat but made pretty good greasy nibbles with crisp skin.

These tasted to me like mala snails in a sauce with the flavour of Shaoxing wine. I was imagining their texture to be more akin to what I have had of Japanese baigai but these were a little crunchy like gizzards and were more difficult to extract from their shells.

Those were skinned cherry tomatoes with osmanthus sauce. They were chilled and refreshing.

That's chopped up century egg with tofu and sesame sauce. Pretty impressed with how they fanned out those delicate bean curd slices when I couldn't even pick any of them up without breakage.

These were cuttlefish har gow. I don't know if the cuttlefish merely referred to the ink that was used for the skin but there were definitely more than just prawns in the dumpling. Maybe cuttlefish too. Surprisingly tasty.

Pretty impressed by the fried rice with abalone and black truffle. It didn't have the grainy texture of regular fried rice as it was all pretty moist even without the sauce. The abalone flavours permeated  though. I'm usually not big on abalone but I liked this. 

This was known as eggs (ain't) that simple. Apparently a signature dish at Social Place. It's commonly also known as la zhi ji (辣子鸡), a Sichuan dish of spicy fried chicken. Those "eggs" on the side were actually spherified mango puree in a gelatinous skin that held their shape. The chicken weren't as spicy as I would have expected of la zi ji but it wasn't bad. While the serving looked large, there wasn't so much chicken as there were dried chilli. 

Sweet and sour pork on rice and fruits. The skin of the pieces of pork were crispy and the meat had some fat. Rather liked this.

Dessert was double boiled pear with aged mandarin peel. Nice flavour from the mandarin peel. This tasted clean after all the food.

The other stuff we tried was something called the "bayberry". I just Googled it and realized that it looked similar to actual bayberries. The skin was akin to mochi or some chewy Chinese fried pastry. The menu described the filling as custard but it tasted like some berry jam.