HK Cafe

Our first day in Portland continued with a family dinner full of delicious Cantonese dishes at HK Cafe, not far from where we stuffed our faces with dim sum earlier in the day. I've grown up going to family dinners at Cantonese restaurants, so many of the dishes we had were very familiar to me. I think this was the first time I'd gone out for a Cantonese dinner with A's family so it was like both worlds colliding!

The meal started out with some soup, a clear broth with, I think, fish stomachs and other fish parts. From what we remember, this was pretty good. It was a thick soup with lots of flavor in the broth. The fish stomachs had a soft yet crunchy texture similar to a sea cucumber that's been stewed. The stomachs themselves didn't have much flavor though.

One of our favorite dishes at dinner were these salt and pepper fish. I'm not sure what kind of fish they were, but they were small like sardines. They were deep fried so that you could eat them whole, heads, tails and all.

In addition to the salt and pepper seasoning, which gave the fish a little bit of a kick, the dish came with plentiful amounts of onions, scallions, and jalapeño peppers, which made wonderful toppings for our rice bowls. This was definitely something we would love to eat again.

There was this casserole dish which had beef, tofu skin, and vegetables. I don't remember that much about it except that I wasn't a huge fan of the meat in it and I thought it was a bit tough. It didn't make a lasting impression on A either. He prefers the casseroles that my family orders with lamb or beef tendon.

Roast chicken is usually a fixture in a Cantonese dinner, but I don't remember if I ate any of this. I usually go for the white meat pieces, but I think they were gone by the time I looked for them since the chicken wasn't very big and I had been so obsessed with eating the salt and pepper fish. A had a couple pieces of the dark meat and thought it was just like almost any other Cantonese roast chicken that we've had in other meals with my family. It was topped with fried garlic which is another nice topping for the rice.

A well-rounded Cantonese dinner always has leafy green vegetables, preferably with lots of garlic. These pea pod greens were plenty garlicky and so good. One of our favorite healthy vegetables though shockingly expensive. HK Cafe delivered a good version of these.

They also ordered some fish with sugar snap peas, carrots, and mushrooms. This was good, but there wasn't anything really special or different about this dish from other places. It was simply prepared but it was fairly healthy and the vegetables were crisp and fresh.

Some of the more interesting dishes you can get at Cantonese restaurants involve pumpkin. I've only had a variation on this dish a couple of times, but this was a pumpkin stuffed with braised (I think) meat (not sure what kind) and pieces of the pumpkin that were scooped out. It had a nice sweetness from the pumpkin, and that balanced out the saltiness from the braising liquid/sauce that everything was cooked in. The meat was okay, a little on the tougher side again (but just remember that I have a bias against that and probably notice it more than other people do).

My family usually orders this Japanese tofu dish where the tofu is cut into rounds and served with lots of vegetables, especially mushrooms. We like that dish so much that we added it to our wedding banquet menu. This version was different, but really good. There were greens on the bottom, but the tofu came in large columns instead of smaller round slices. We've always heard it described as Japanese tofu, but the restaurant explained that it's egg tofu (which after some research is actually just another name for Japanese tofu). It's made by beating eggs into the tofu mixture prior to pressing so it adds some richness and creaminess as well as keeping the tofu from falling apart despite its silken texture. It also came topped with some sort of scallion, onion, and mushroom saute.

There was a dish of stir-fried shrimp with mushrooms, carrots, and chives. I love chives and this dish was full of them. This was fairly standard but good.

The meal ended with a sweet tapioca soup with taro. We've noticed that many Cantonese restaurants don't really end the meal with red bean soup a lot of times these days. There's a lot of tapioca soups. This one was not bad.

Having quite a bit of experience with Cantonese dishes in the States, I would say that the food at HK Cafe was pretty good. The quality of the ingredients was, for the most part, quite good, and everything tasted really fresh. Our favorite was clearly the salt and pepper fish, but many other dishes like the tofu and greens were also well done. Those were probably our top 3. We left quite satisfied!

HK Cafe, 4410 SE 82nd Ave, in SE Portland.