Red Seasons Aroma Restaurant 季季紅風味酒樓

It's a late entry on the restaurant that I had reunion dinner with my family just before the beginning of Year of Rabbit. This humble looking Chinese restaurant is one of the Recommended Restaurants in Michelin Guide Hong Kong 2011. Located in Tuen Mun's Lam Tei, honestly, it's quite far away for most of you and also locals. Even so, the restaurant's entrance was still packed with flocks of people who came for their family reunion dinner. We tried to book a table 1 day before a normal weekday, but were told the earliest table would be 9:30pm!! Crazy! Right before giving up, my mum said she could go there as early at 6:30pm to queue up for a table. Best of luck, we finally got a table for 4 at 7pm...


We ordered 4 dishes and 1 pot of slow-cooked soup. All are their signature items. The first to come was the Pig Lung & Pork Belly Pak Choy Soup (豬肺頂蝴蝶腩燉菜膽湯HK$68/pot). The portion was big enough even for 6 people 'coz it's served in a big Chinese soup claypot (sorry I didn't snap a shot on it...). Pig lung is an ordinary ingredient for slow-cooked soup in Cantonese home cooking, but because the process of cleaning up the lung is complicated, fewer people cook this soup at home nowadays. So it's a good idea to have it in a restaurant instead. :P The pig lung was fresh and clean, without any strange odour or taste. The soup was naturally sweetened by the fresh Pak Choy, it's a good replacement for dried Pak Choy, which is a typical matching ingredient for pig lung soup. Overall, it's perfect but just one thing to criticise, was the hard-to-chew pork belly...


Here comes the top signature dish, Char-grilled Suckling Pig (炭燒乳香豬 HK$88/standard portion). Skin was crispy and proportion of fat and meat was just right. It's far better than the one at Tai Hing New Century!

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Another popular signature dish is Grilled Ribs in Special Sauce (冰淋醬烤骨 HK$68). I called it special sauce because we were not able to taste what kind of sauce they actually use! Guessed it might include some plum sauce as it tasted a bit sweet and sour, which increased our appetite that my sis and I ate so much rice with it! I vote it as the star of our dinner that night!


Deep Fried Fresh Squid with Cashew (椒鹽脆果鮮魷 HK$68) was a bit disappointing indeed. Coated with thin batter and deep fried, it was so crunchy. However, squid pieces tended to stick to each other during the frying process, and the squid was a bit too hard to chew, made it difficult to eat. Salt & pepper were served separately in a small dish for us to dip instead of mixing into the batter, therefore it's not evenly spread on every pieces and might get "over dose" if it's dipped too much on each bite...


Fried Lotus Root Pancake (香煎蓮藕餅 HK$45) was recommended by waitress. It is a very ordinary and simple dish, but hard to make it good. The trick is to mix the crushed lotus root well with minced pork and make it like "dissolved" into the mixture that you can hardly eat the trace of lotus root but only taste its flavour. Most importantly, each piece was fried till very crunchy on outside. The restaurant has added a hint of dried tangerine peel (陳皮) to the lotus root pancake, and made it more refreshing.