Wineshark HK Restaurant Review - Yixin Restaurant

This restaurant has now been opened for more than half a century, starting off from North Point and then moving a few times before coming to the present location in Wanchai. It has always been proud of preparing dishes of traditional recipes, the kind that someone of my age often tried to find to bring back good memories of our childhood.

The decoration of the restaurant was decent, a bit towards the style popular during the 80s, giving a nice consistency between the food and ambiance. With my mother joining us for tonight's dinner, we were able to order more dishes, and to start we had the Roasted Golden Coin Chicken ($64 for two pieces). This is a truly old-school dish, with a piece of chicken liver sandwiched between pieces of pork fat and meat. Not bad in taste, but I think the meat and liver were not tender enough and simply too rubbery for our liking.

Then we had the other signature Honey Glazed Barbecued Pork in Thick Sauce ($178). In previous visits I remembered all of us had praised how tasty this was, but tonight it was also a bit disappointing. Not that it was bad, but the pork are cut too thick and too big a piece, making it cumbersome to eat. I got a feeling that the chef had been a bit too casual towards quality of the dishes from what we observed in the two roasted dishes so far.

Another traditional dish we ordered was the Smoked Pomfret ($425). Every time I saw this on the menu I could not stop recalling the really delicious dish I had in Tai Ping Koon. When served the staff helped to remove the main bone in each piece, and there were three fairly large pieces in total. Honestly this was not particularly impressive compared with what I had tasted elsewhere. Again it was not bad on its own but I could not bring back the pleasure of the good old times.

Hopefully the remaining dishes could make amends. The American Oysters Baked with Ginger and Spring Onion ($248) was decent, served in a sizzling hot clay pot and the aromas from the ginger and spring onion certainly were appetizing. The oysters were creamy and generally I was not a big fan of the texture of American oysters, preferring the more crunchy varieties from France for example. Still among the dishes I think this was my favorite in the evening.

The other dish was the frequently ordered Boiled Vegetable with Peedan Eggs and Salted Eggs in Superior Soup ($135). If I had to do statistics this must be one of the most ordered dishes whenever we dined out, and very seldom making it wrong, it is unfortunately also not easy to be outstanding. In the end we gave the similar feedback of decent but not something impressive.

With three bowls of rice, tea and pickles, the total bill on the evening was $1291. Not cheap considering we were not going for expensive foodstuff, and taking the reputation of the restaurant, and the previous nice experience we all felt a bit disappointed. Was it because nowadays it became a  'tourist restaurant'? From a quick look I believe more than half of the tables were mainland Chinese or foreigners, I hope this was not the reason and they could recreate that taste which was fast disappearing in HK.