Restaurant review: Porterhouse steakhouse in Central, Hong Kong
New chef and new menus for this LKF steakhouse
California Tower is the tallest, glossiest building in Lan Kwai Fong. Naturally, it’s home to a number of fun loving, trendy restaurants from Jinjuu on the ground floor to CE LA VI on the top floor and rooftop. Porterhouse has been serving up steakhouse treats from the 7th floor of California Tower for some time now, but has recently come under new ownership. They’ve brought in a new Executive Chef, Angelo Vecchio, who has revamped the menus, and we were excited to see what would make Porterhouse standout from our other favourite steak places in town.
Vibe
I’d call Porterhouse’s vibe accessible glam. The ceilings are high, the lighting is dim, and the touches include marble, cut glass, and sculpted metal. Contrasting with the glam environment are friendly service staff, a top 40 soundtrack (think Howie Day’s Collide, and Walk the Moon’s Shut Up and Dance), and sepia-toned vintage-inspired prints.
Appetizers
We started with the King Crab Leg ($198). This dish was beautifully deconstructed, and all the ingredients were fresh and perfectly cooked/ripe. Unfortunately, the coulis (at least on our night) was way too salty and drowned out the delicate flavours in the dish.
The burrata ($198) was much better with the cheese being exceptionally creamy, and classically paired with sliced heirloom tomatoes and bread chips. Simple, yet delicious.
Fall is a great season for roasted root vegetables, and we had high hopes for the salt-baked beetroot ($158). We enjoyed the variety in this dish, with the different coloured beetroots being cooked differently (salty, sweeter). While pairing beetroot with goat cheese is far more common, it’s a combination that works. This dish was paired with Lancashire cheddar instead, a combination that we didn’t love. We found it too dry against the juicy beetroot, and the stinkiness of the cheese was unfortunately muted against the saltiness of the beetroot.
Mains and sides
While we had mixed feelings about the appetizers, we hit it off with the mains. Given the name of the restaurant, porterhouse steaks (filet on one side, New York Strip on the other) are the star of the show. We had a beautiful 300 day grain-fed Australia Ranger Valley Black Market M5 ($1388 for 34 oz/1000 grams). The meat was leaner and had a beautiful clean flavour. One steak was plenty for our party of three females. As for the sauces, we loved the buttery bearnaise and large selection of mustards (try the paprika option) and salts.
To accompany our steak, we had cajun dusted fries ($78), triple-cooked fries ($78) and smoked cheddar mac n’ cheese ($98). We loved all of these options (hooray for carbs), especially the mac n’ cheese which had a runny rather than stringy sauce but was 100 per cent tasty.
Dessert
Our meal ended with frozen hazelnut mousse cake ($98) and Madagascar chocolate fondant ($98). Both were good, but the fondant cake was our favourite. The airy outer layer suited the rich, gooey core.
Verdict
Overall, we left Porterhouse feeling very satisfied. Some of the appetizers weren’t to our taste, but the steak and sides were delicious. With the vibe and generous portion sizes, it felt like we could have been having a treat yourself meal in any urban American city. That’s meant to be a compliment, for Americans do comfort food very, very well.
7/F California Tower, 30-36 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, 2522 6366
Thanks to Porterhouse's PR for inviting me to review (image of interior is from the PR). This post will also appear on Foodie.
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