I spent a lot of my Friday night last week thinking about the state of people's shoes. Specifically, how do so many people in Hong Kong manage to keep their shoes so clean? In my experience, there is at least an 85% chance of you getting dipped on by a dirty, leaky air con unit the moment you step foot on the pavement. Merely suggesting that you might go to Lan Kwai Fong on a Friday night seems to cover my shoes in horrible blackened scum, like I am some kind of Dickensian street-urchin. Even a short journey on the MTR generally results on my shoes being soiled by thousands of people trampling over my feet. Yet here, at Cassio, a new-ish Spanish (s)wank-fest in Central, people were prancing around in box-fresh suede loafers, patent heels, cream coloured (yes, bloody cream coloured) leather sandals without a care in the world. Who are these people?
It wasn't supposed to be this way. I had been looking forward to this trip for a while, as Cassio's proudest culinary claim to fame is that its food is "by Barrafina", which just happens to be my favourite London tapas bar. When I lived in the UK, sitting at the long marble bar at the branch near Covent Garden and chowing down on their brilliant, refined Spanish tapas never got old and is still something I try and do each time I go back. It doesn't have the rustic charm of one of the arse-to-elbow establishments in Barcelona, San Sebastian or Seville, but it does give you elegant food which isn't too far removed from its roots in relaxed and comfortable surroundings.
When I first heard about Cassio, this meant I was excited. "The menu font even looks the same!" I could hear my inner glutton squeal, as I frantically ran through my mental rolodex of people who would be up for going.
Being under common ownership with the massively pretentious Dragon-I, it should have been no surprise that this place pretty much summed up clean-shoes living – if you can afford to eat here, you probably got a cab and, frankly, a new pair of shoes. I shuffled my used-to-be-brown shoes under the table and concentrated on the menu.
One of the charms of the original Barrafina is that, being solely bar-based and with an open kitchen behind the bar, the waiters are the chefs and the chefs are the waiters. This means that the service is usually knowledgeable, quick and pretty charming. It was a shame that the inverse was true at Cassio. As well as our food being massively and frequently delayed, we asked three times for the wine list before eventually walking to the bar and getting our own. On one farcial attempt to get a waiter to do his job with a polite waive, our table received a comical "hi, how's it going?" wave from a waiter, who then went back to polishing spoons without further effort to engage.
The food itself was, frankly, disappointing, as it always will be when you compare it to somewhere that is 10,000km away and which holds a special place in your heart. It was not all bad by any means – the pear and walnut salad was great and the croquettas (fried balls of béchamel) were the kind of oozy in the middle and crispy on the outside that made you want to keep ordering them until the kitchen ran out. The "juicy seafood rice" was dark, rich and awesomely prawny. There were some hideous, unforgivable errors though, magnified in the long periods of waiting for our food to arrive. The tortilla, which is supposed to be slightly runny in the centre and with a jam-like quality to it, was basically a thin omelette housing warm-ish uncooked liquid egg and a few sad potatoes. One of my dining companions drank everything but the thin casing with a spoon, although a straw would have done the job just as well. It may just be me getting older, more greedy and fatter, but the portions were also tiny which, when you are spending cHK$650 a head for a couple of glasses of wine and dinner, makes you feel a bit robbed.
The place turned into a nightclub as we left, which was a surprise, but also a handy explanation for what had gone before. As I remarked to a friend the next day, Cassio sums up the best and worst things about the Hong Kong dining scene in a neat 3000 square foot terrace setting. Yes, you can get pretty much anything you want to eat here (including a HK$250 single red prawn air flown from Europe, which looked bloody delicious), but all too often style tends to win over substance. Probably a good spot to impress a date though, as long as she isn't hungry and you're wearing a new pair of shoes, that is.