Dinner with Lily

You can be forgiven if you think that Lily isn’t a real person and this is a designer-created restaurant rather than one inspired by a real home, albeit a very rich one.

But folks at the new Hyatt Hotel and Casino Manila are quick to assure that Lily is indeed a real person, alive and well and living in a house much like this in the rarefied confines of The Peak in Hong Kong.

A little bit about her then.

Lily was to the manor born, daughter of a wealthy Chinese family in Hong Kong. She lived the privileged high society life of cosmopolitan Hong Kong, "infused with the strong flavors of Cantonese culture", until she went off to Paris to earn a degree in International Arts from the Sorbonne. She settled in Paris, opened a gallery specializing in Asian fine arts, met and married a Frenchman working with the United Nations in Geneva and for two decades lived the privileged high society life in Europe, with summers in Tuscany and other such diversions of the rich and famous.

Then Lily and a now retired husband Vince, with daughters Fei Fei and Bai Ling (remember these names), returned to Hong Kong to run Lily’s family’s many businesses... and she became a restaurateur as well.

Thus we come to our part in this story: Hyatt Manila’s signature restaurant Lily. Located on the fifth floor of the hotel (main access is on Pedro Gil Street, just mind the many one-way streets in the area), away from the traffic of slot machine players and other casino habitues, you walk down a short flight of black granite steps like some beauty contestant into an impressive receiving area, which could be the foyer of a residence.

You may wonder if you’ve come to the right place as there are no dining tables in sight; a glass wall that is a wine cabinet is on your left, the only hint that this could be the restaurant you’re looking for.

There is not one large main dining area, but rather, the restaurant is divided into several rooms, like a house. The general dining area has tables for 2, 4, 6, and 8 in very uncramped quarters. William Yuen, the hotel’s amiable Director for Food and Beverage, suggests Lily as an ideal if unexpected place for a romantic date–if you think "Chinese restaurant" and "romantic date" should not be used in the same sentence, check out Lily.

The dinner parties like those Lily must have hosted and that are, we assume, the target of this restaurant, are accommodated in the various individual rooms like the library (there are, indeed, a few books on the shelves, and a beautiful round table that seats 14), wine cellar (behind the glass wall you saw coming in, with a long table for 14), drawing room and two function rooms named Fei Fei and Bai Ling (remember them?).

The decor is Euro-Chinois chic; forget red lanterns and pagoda roofs. Interior design firm Bilkey Llinas blended Lily’s Oriental and European sensibilities in a decidedly upscale atmosphere. Art consultant Art Internationale Asia furnished Lily with antique pieces, works of art, decorative artifacts, and furniture. Even the tableware is not strictly Chinese, with specially crafted flatware in a frond pattern (some items, by the way, are available in the hotel’s gift shop), plates from Reynaud of France, and celadon bowls and dishes from Taipei that border on being art pieces. The flower accents are tastefully simple: white roses in glass bowls, yellow green spider mums in a half orb, a trio of casablanca lilies in a plain vase.

But a restaurant is still and all about food, and five master chefs from Hong Kong led by Chef de Cuisine Choi Wing Ki have pulled out all the stops in creating a menu that is still evolving, with new dishes introduced every so often.

The 12-item dim sum menu contains many of the standard favorites, like sio mai and har gao, char siu pao and chicken feet. But there are other specialties, like the Vietnamese-inspired deep fried prawns with sugar cane, fried spring rolls with shredded duck and enoki mushrooms, chicken and vegetable dumpling and a shark’s fin dumpling with crab meat and bamboo pith in bouillon.

The a la carte menu offers a very tempting, often intriguing, selection. You may shun the marinated layered pig’s ears with garlic soya sauce as being a tad too exotic, but it is a suprisingly delicious crunchy terrine.The roast duck and barbecue pork can improve with a master’s touch, but the Imperial Peking Duck reaches imperial standards with delicately thin pancakes served warm in a bamboo steamer, and a superb wok fried minced duck meat in lettuce leaves as the second incarnation of the dish.

If you’ve got money to chew go for the tiger shark’s fin with crab meat or the bird’s nest with minced chicken, and if you really want to chew, get the braised whole fresh abalone with oyster sauce (if you have to ask how much this costs, you probably shouldn’t order it).

The live seafood choices include three kinds of lapu-lapu, lobsters, crabs, shrimps and giant labirds (you read right, but even I still have to find out exactly what this is), with your choice of cooking method (steamed, wok or deep fried, baked, poached).

There are 16 items listed under "Lily’s Secret Recipes", and you can choose from staples like deep fried crispy chicken, shrimps with pine nuts in chili sauce, deep fried spare- ribs with salt and garlic to the more exotic wok fried lamb with leeks, braised suckling pig with bean curd and shrimp paste in casserole, stir fried prawns with lily bulbs, dried fungus and wolf berries. Sorry, sweet and sour pork and chop suey are not on this menu.

The desserts are very interesting as well. Home-made ice cream comes in green tea, red bean or black sesame flavor (the last gets my vote, on recommendation of assistant restaurant manager Ganzon Gan). There are black jelly and mango pudding (about the best in town, generous with real mango bits), bird’s nest with rock sugar (think long and hard before you order this; it’s a wallet buster), a tempting fried banana glazed with crunchy caramel (my next must-try), as well as decidedly western desserts like lemon confit centered double chocolate mousse, pine nut and fig caramel gateaux and a sure-to-impress grand dessert platter that has something for everyone–and then some.

The set menus range in price from P960 per person to an imperial P6,800 per person, and shades in between, with a minimum of eight persons to a table, quite a feast indeed anyway you look at it.

Something you must experience in this very civilized setting is the pure pleasure of a fine cup of tea. A tea bar offers a wide selection of 20 teas and equipment to brew a proper cup. Choose from green teas like the West Lake Dragon Well (which used to be reserved for the imperial court only) or Huang Shan Furry Mountain to aged pu er to red teas and white teas to the wonderful oolongs (my personal favorite) to scented floral teas. Their "service tea" is a choice of chrysanthemum or pu er, either one definitely two cuts above run-of-the-mill service teas, even in the "finer" Chinese restaurants around town. They must do something though to keep their specialized tea service warm, considering the efficient air conditioning.

All this refinement–in taste, in style, in ambiance–comes at a price, but then the finer things always do. While a rousing meal in a hole-in-the-wall eatery has its virtues, every once in a while one must seek out and indulge in the finer things in life. Dinner at Lily’s is one such indulgence.