The thing I miss about Hong Kong is their HK style cafes. What is HK style cafes? Well it’s a casual joint where they serve a mix bag of Western/Chinese dishes such as baked spaghetti bolognese, club sandwiches, various noodle soups, stir fried noodles and snacks along side drinks of HK style milk tea, iced ovaltine etc. The best thing of all it’s all very cheap!
Back in Sydney there are a few HK style cafes and they aren’t that cheap! Mango in particular tries to replicate the HK style cafe and adding a twist to it with various Japanese inspired dishes such as wasabi prawns. They have alot of set meals on offer where you can choose a soup and a main plus a drink for less than $16.
Today we try their banquet for 2 menu where there is baked seafood soup, baked pork chop rice/spaghetti, stir fry beef rice noodle and any drink of choice, all this for $28.80!
Cheap cheap!
Their baked cream seafood soup comes encased with puff pastry. I love smashing a hole in the middle and let the soup drown in the pastry. The soup is slightly on the watery side but is full of seafood pieces of prawns, calamari and mussels.
Baked seafood cream soup
We chose to have rice with our baked pork chop and it arrives to our table bubbling hot. The added extra of a fried egg is a nice touch and there were generous amounts of pork chop in the dish. The tomato sauce is not your norm of just tomato and onions but it contains added vegetables of baby corn, mushroom and carrots. At some places I find the fried rice that it comes in being too dry and tastes like leftovers from the day before, but here the fried rice looks like it’s cooked fresh.
Baked pork chop rice
Our final dish of our banquet is stir fried beef noodle, once again it has generous amounts of beef. I didn’t find it too oily which sometimes can happen when you eat stir fried noodles. I would of liked more chives in the mix and more taste of the “wokness” in the noodle.
Stir fried beef noodle
Who says you can’t eat well when times are tough?
Mango
Level 1, 77 Archer St
Chatswood NSW 2067
Apple In a Bun 