HK Food and Tea restaurant, Ipoh

During one of my visits to Kinta City, Ipoh, I passed by one of the relatively new restaurants there, known as HK Food and Tea restaurant. It is located towards the back of the mall, just opposite the Maybank ATM machines. Coincidentally, this place used to be a Western restaurant. Now that I come to think of it, there were many different restaurants taking place in this lot previously. Somehow, business always didn't manage to survive for long, resulting in frequent change of ownership. I wonder if it has anything to do with fengshui... Anyway, my family and I were hungry and we didn't have much choice Chinese food in Kinta City, so we went in to try.

witch on the red couch

Business was pretty brisk on that Sunday, filled mostly with teenager groups or families. My first order was this signature drink that was shown in the menu. It was apparently a mixture of yogurt and mango, which didn't work very well, I must say. I think they used too much ice. You can't see it from the picture below, but the whole glass was FILLED with ice! After a few sips, the drink became very diluted and I could only taste slight sourness and that's all. Not worth the price at all.

Signature mango drink

My grandma ordered this fried udon with seafood fish, which was the nicest of all our dishes, comparatively. It was actually pretty good if it wasn't too salty and oily. For people who like salty dishes (like my grandpa), it was a hit! :) It was fried with generous amount of black pepper too, so if you don't like black pepper, you might not want to try this.

Fried udon

My grandpa ordered the pork and century eggs porridge, which came with some crisps on top. I tried some of the crisps to find out that they're already not crispy anymore. :S I guess they thought it's ok because the customers would mix them up in the porridge anyway. Otherwise, the porridge was pretty good. It was thick and smooth, and there were plenty of century eggs inside too! Yum!

Pork and century eggs porridge

We also ordered this seafood noodles just because it was on promotion that day. I still remember the price to be RM8.80. The picture in the brochure definitely looked better than the real thing. For one, the prawn size was much smaller in the real order, and it wasn't very fresh. Also, the gravy wasn't thick/hot enough hence most of the noodles were still hard even after mixing them up together. Again, too salty. This comment was not only by me, but by my grandma and my dad too. It's not biased. :)

Crispy noodle with seafood

Then my dad ordered the honey pork ribs with rice. I guess this is a very common and basic dish in all HK eateries. The pork ribs were well marinated. I love ribs so I might be slightly biased in this dish. :) But it really wasn't that bad.

Pork ribs rice

As for dessert, we ordered one of the ice-cream dishes in the menu. I don't remember the name of this but it was the first item listed in the ice-cream section. The colours were a let down, really. I am turn off by food which is obviously coloured artificially, such as the ice-cream and the colourful flakes below. I regretted with this order, although I believe kids would have loved this. Nothing much to comment about this ice-cream, it's obviously from Walls.

Ice-cream

Overall, I think the food quality was OK, but there is still much room for improvement. Perhaps starting by making the food less salty. I have yet to try out their other HK specialties such as the toast and polo bun. A reason for a next trip! :)