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| - On a Sunday, our first night in town, the wife and I and a couple of friends went to dinner at Hakkasan. We started off with drinks. The wife's Smoky Negroni, while pricey at $18, was well made with top shelf ingredients (barrel aged Ransom Old Tom gin, Carpano Antica vermouth, Campari, and Grand Marnier all infused with smoke in a decanter) and possessed the expected traits of the classic original with bold, but pleasant smoky notes. My Manhattan ($17) made with Bulleit Rye, Carpano Antica, atomized Oloroso sherry, and Angostura bitters was no less successful possessing nice nutty notes on the nose from the sherry. Sadly, Hakkasan's cocktails were the highlight of our night.
Rather than pick items from the dinner menu, we decided to leave it in Hakkasan's hands and ordered its $88 Signature Tasting Menu figuring it would be a well thought out sampling of its signature items. Our meal started off with the Hakka Steamed Dim Sum Platter consisting of har gau, scallop shumai, perch dumplings, and black pepper duck dumplings. The selection of dim sum was beautifully presented, flavorful, but not much different and certainly no better than what you can find being pushed on a cart in a traditional Chinese restaurant. With the exception of the Roasted Mala Chicken with Cucumber and Cloud Ear Mushrooms, the Stir-fry Asparagus with Dried Shrimp and Preserved Vegetables and the desserts, the remaining dishes we were served were surprisingly one note in their preparation and/or flavor profiles as they were either fried (Salt and Pepper Squid, Crispy Silver Cod with Superior Soy Sauce, Crispy fried Red Snapper) or topped with a sweet and sour style sauce (Sweet and Sour Pork with Pomegranate) or a combination of both. Taken as a whole, the tasting menu was inexplicably strange and disappointing. Nothing tasted off or bad and it all seemed properly prepared, but the food was not appreciably better than what you could get at PF Chang's or your neighborhood Chinese take-out joint and the food definitely never came close to meriting its $88/person price tag.
The only things that saved this from being a one-star review were the solid (albeit pricey) cocktails and the attentive service we received throughout our meal. However, for an acclaimed restaurant brand and a Michelin-starred chef, Hakkasan and its tasting menu was easily the most disappointing and worst value meal I've ever experienced. Save your money and skip.
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