There is a psychedelic green wall of bushy foliage at the back of Tuan Tuan Brasserie on the third floor of Megamall’s new Fashion Hall. This artificial hanging shrubbery is not a little at odds with the nostalgic posters of early 20th-century France that rub shoulders with old framed Chinese photographs and printed advertisements.
This, in turn, is lit by ornate, gleaming chandeliers that would not be out of place in a Viennese opera house. If you try too hard to make sense of it, your brain may explode under the strain. Best to accept the surreal interiors for what they are, and concentrate on the food.
The menu, mounted on café-style wooden poles, arrives as a printed newspaper a little larger than the increasingly popular Berliner format, and looks not unlike a copy of a literary journal such as The Manila Review. The front page, of course, is devoted to The Philosophy, plus a slightly disjointed but compelling exposition of the chef and the team behind the restaurant.
Again, it’s probably not best to analyze too much; it’s on the next page that the real fun begins, with the noodle soups, and then on to the mains and congee. Every item is solemnly translated into French; well, why not, it calls itself a brasserie, after all.
Tuan Tuan is another restaurant from the same group that brought in Lugang, with its equally over-the-top but not unpleasant interiors, and a compelling, pan-Chinese menu. At Lugang, fiery chilli-laced fish from the Sichuan region rubs shoulders with xiao long bao from Shanghai, three-cup chicken from Jianxi, west of Fujian, and so on.
Tuan Tuan is a riff on mainly Hong Kong and Macanese food and culture, though perhaps “riff” is too mild a term; it’s a rhapsody on a theme of Hong Kong, played by a grandiloquent jazz player intent on not letting any of the 88 keys of the piano go to waste.
Very good pork buns
We didn’t get to try the noodle soup, so beloved of the tiny, dingy noodle and congee shops with grumpy waiters who all sound like they’re having a very bad day. We had pork buns, which I’ll be able to compare with the Michelin-starred Tim Ho Wan two levels down once I work up the courage to brave the queue. But these were very good, bursting with hot fragrant gravy, and people who have had both tell me that they come close, though aren’t as amazing as their more lauded counterpart.
People have also been raving about the beef brisket and tendon curry, the grilled tongue and the honey garlic spareribs; in addition, the server recommended the steamed halibut with chilli and garlic to round things out.
Like many places that have been built up by word of mouth, the reality fell short of the hype, and is perhaps not worth braving the insane traffic scheme around Megamall to get to. It’s by no means bad food, and is in fact well above average; but it wasn’t the same gluttony-inducing slap of flavor and novelty that Lugang Café brought to a Chinese food scene dominated by Cantonese haute-cuisine establishments and sleepy Fujianese canteens when it first opened.
But my fascination with Hong Kong food runs deep; only Paris and Tokyo excite me as much as a place where every single meal is a chance to have something so good that one can burst into tears.
The popular roadside drink, pantyhose tea, more primly called milk tea or nai cha in Mandarin, has gone from something thrown together with cheap fannings (the remnants, or dust, of tea served in better restaurants) and tempered with evaporated milk, into something that’s been fetishized as a connoiseur’s drink. It’s still everywhere in Hong Kong, but other street food that used to be in every other alleyway in the Mid-Level Escalators or the seedy maze behind the Chungking Mansions have become harder to find.
Familiar but not common
I’ll be back for the pork chop on rice (a staple of office workers and busy shopkeepers), and to sample their interpretations of the canonical canteen noodles in soup and congee, and
sauteed Chinese spinach or watercress. I’m still undecided whether it’s a good thing for Hong Kong street fare to be putting on airs, like Good Morning towels being reissued with Egyptian cotton and a high thread count.
Perhaps the unfortunate problem of creating a restaurant that’s a palimpsest of Hong Kong food is that Hong Kong is just 90 minutes away by air, and might arguably be easier to get to than Megamall. And their food is familiar to us, but not so common that we want it to be toyed with.
However, if you take the entirety of the playful, tongue-in-cheek concept of the restaurant in the same loose-footed vein, you might actually find yourself enjoying yourself and having a very decent, though not wildly extraordinary meal.
Tuan Tuan is at 3/F Megamall Fashion Hall, Mandaluyong; tel. 6327483.