The Vault

I was exhausted today, the kind of tiredness where you're devoid of energy, it's all you can do to stop yourself from blacking out in a meeting and falling off your chair in an unruly mess of limbs. I don't think I added much value today.

Marcheing Orders

For lunch we went to Marche, a Swiss market restaurant on top of a shopping mall. In Singapore. I don't think this was culturally appropriate.

Greek

Tonight we went to a Greek restaurant in Bukit Timah. This being Singapore, there's no public use of the bouzouki, smashing plates is strictly illegal and I can't think of any more hackneyed Greek stereotypes.

(Un)Original Sin

This evening we went back to Original Sin, for a friend's birthday. The last time I went to this restaurant, I got so blotto that I couldn't remember a single thing from the menu. I had only feelings of vague misgivings about the meze (unfounded) and the cheesecake (quite correct, unfortunately - it advertised itself as being chocolatey and was just a bit insipid).

Original Sin(gapore)

Rather than stay in the hotel drinking cans of overpriced beer ($11.50) and making myself tofurkey sandwiches while watching depressing sounding pornography (Carnal Crimes, anybody? Sounds about as appetising as Lonely Business Traveller III:Anal Retentive Invaders) I went out to Holland Village to see an old university friend for dinner.

Posh dining

Tonight we had dinner at the Four Seasons, courtesy of a gift certificate I won by buying a balloon a week ago. This was a markedly different affair to last night's Peking duck at American Peking, served by a series of septuagenarian waiters in a mobbed restaurant and costing half the amount.

Antipasto

Antipasto is an Italian restaurant on Elgin Street. Well, Antipasto is a restaurant on Elgin Street, serving pizzas and pasta and such. Italian food.

Past my Peak

Tonight I went to Cafe Deco on the Peak, a restaurant looking down on Hong Kong from, well, the Peak. As the name suggests, it's decorated in an art deco style. Well, there are no giant pink neon Hello Kitty sculptures and there's quite a bit of fairly minimalist ironwork.

Out for duck

This evening we went to American Peking in Wan Chai for some Peking Duck. Well, I'm vegetarian, so I went to watch my friends eat duck, while I had rice and bean curd. Yeah, that's living alright.

Bad Indian

This evening friends invited us to a new Indian restaurant in Central, which had been advertising through Groupon. This was the first time I'd encountered Groupon being used in Hong Kong; until now, it's only registered for me as somewhere to get discounts on things I don't want to buy.

Classified - no need to talk about it

I was feeling brutalised after today in the office, so to cheer me up my fiancee took me to Zitti's, a pizza parlour in Tin Hau.  Unfortunately, Zitti's is no longer a pizza parlour in Tin Hau. It's now a boarded up shop front with a sign saying that you can go somewhere else for pizza.  So much for that.

Horses and hummus

It's not every night that I find myself in a darkened room with a horse's head in my crotch. And I'll punch anyone who says otherwise.

Too much Japanese food, too much information?

This evening I went out to dinner with the rest of my team from work, to Haniguchi, a Japanese restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong.

It's in a rather unfortunate location, next to the fake Irish pub, and in Lan Kwai Fong, although that's slightly less oppressive now half the bars have shut while Alan Zeman turns the whole place into a corporate hell-hole of Hard Rock Cafes. (I wonder if there's space for a Planet Hollywood too, to really demean everyone drinking there.) A year ago, LKF would have been rammed full of drunken gweilos, but on a cold Thursday in February, it's eerily deserted. Perhaps the Rugby Sevens will bring the drunks back. I hope so.

Planning for Valentine's Day

This evening I got an email from Caffe Habitu, a small chain of coffee shops and restaurants in Hong Kong. To promote their Valentine's Day dinner, there's a prize draw for a free meal on Valentine's Day, for the rest of your life. The only catch, if you don't feel very romantic about all of this, is that you only enter the draw for the prize if you propose while you're at dinner.

A refugee from Bankerland

A chum who's a Master of the Universe was in town for meetings this week, so we arranged to see him for dinner tonight. Last time we did this, he told us he'd be out at 6 and appeared at 9, and wise to this, we didn't turn up until 8:20. By which time the poor chap had been standing in the International Finance Centre mall for ten minutes, destitute of purpose, hungry, and having to return to his meetings at 9.

Sevva

Last night I met my fiancee outside the Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Central, and walked through the maze of malls and overhead walkways to the Prince's Building, where she'd decided to surprise me with dinner at Sevva, up on the 25th floor.

The consequences of cake

I was aghast to discover I'd put on two pounds between yesterday and this morning. That's what comes from replacing dancing like a moron in front of a television screen with eating as much Italian food as Hong Kong can provide you.

Christian restaurants

There's a Christian cafe in Causeway Bay that's apparently really pushy, and let's face it, who wants to be proselytised while they're eating?

If you're that sort of pervert, there's a bunch of places in Wan Chai for that.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

Brunch is, as I may have said before, not a proper meal. Nobody is given advice that they should brunch like a prince regent, dine like a pauper. But despite this, people continue to believe that they should eat brunch.

Jimmy's Kitchen

Tonight was a special occasion, so I took the girlfriend to Jimmy's Kitchen, where she'd already made noises about visiting.