Hong Kong doesn't tend to do "neighbourhood-style" restaurants particularly well, perhaps as a result of the fact that most people's neighbourhoods consist of a few dozen 50 story tower blocks, a worryingly pungent wet market, a quite preposterous number of shops selling assorted electrical items and a large, noisy road or two thrown in for good measure.
In my estimation a good neighbourhood style restaurant can be defined by three things: location (a relatively quiet but ultimately charming part of town that you could easily wander round before or after dinner), atmosphere (pleasantly buzzy, busy enough on weeknights and with the potential for raucous escalation on a weekend) and great food (obviously). In fact, I lied. Hong Kong does have some great neighbourhood-style restaurants - Tai Hang, Kennedy Town and a few other further-flung locations could legitimately state some worthy claims to housing a few, although the feeling that everyone goes elsewhere after 9pm on a Friday and Saturday for fun is a bit of a buzzkill and means they are marked down in the "potential for raucous escalation" stakes.
Which brings me to Black Salt. Sitting (as I was, just about), swaying and looking unconvincingly at a second bottle of wine on one Friday night which firmly ticked the "raucous escalation" box, I wondered to myself if this was really a good idea. I also wondered if the booze was impairing my judgement, which, given I was even asking the question, suggested that it had. That night was a whirl of glass clinking, odd toasts, hilarious cross-cultural comparisons and general party-like-its 1999 fun. It was a shame, if largely inevitable, that the night ended swiftly in a food/wine coma about 1 hour later, after a desperate but ultimately abortive attempt to extend the fun by "going for one more somewhere else". What I do remember was that everyone remarked the food was great and the bill was reasonable, which, if true, was indeed very reasonable given the grossly unreasonable amount of food and wine we had consumed. Perhaps they forgot to bill us for the second bottle?
So my second visit was really a fact-finding mission more than anything else. A bit like piecing a night out back together the next day through assorted receipts, but in reality more like going back to a crime scene and looking for evidence of corroboration even though you have already decided who had done it and how.
The (complimentary) amuse bouche – some spiced lentils and crispy mini-poppadums – began the trip down memory lane (was that when we did the linking arms and drinking out of our own wine glasses thing? But this was the PRE-STARTER! That must have been later). The food we ordered, like any restaurant that has opened in a hip location over the last 10 years or so, came out at random in a small/big-plates format. One thing I should say at this point is that it really pisses me off when someone brings out a curry and then doesn't also realise that it would be a good time to also bring the rice and other assorted carbs you ordered to mop up the sauce. But I was not pissed off. The first time I was drunk and elated at the arrival of any food and the second time I was merely elated, as the food was bloody brilliant. We got our rice (after asking, both times) and dug in.
I'd say the food is "Indian-inspired" without being really Indian. If I were a baseball batter, this would normally be firmly in my area of concern, close enough to my strike zone to be tempting, but also an easy place to be tricked into wasting a swing. Happily, this one knocked it out of the park. The dishes are too numerous in their brilliance to mention, but of particular note were the beetroot chops (a dish of earthy beetroot smothered with spiced spinach, avocado, coconut and (apparently) brussel sprouts), which on its own would be enough to turn me vegetarian had they not then brought out some momos (basically meaty dumplings) in a lick-the-plate good sauce and a fiery ox-cheek vindaloo, which both quickly helped remind me why vegetarianism is not all that. The baked camembert masala (basically, baked gooey cheese in another lick-the-plate good spiced sauce) was some seriously next level shit and had me leaning back towards vegetarianism briefly before I gobbled down more vindaloo. The bill was, as expected, reasonable, almost comically so when set against the aggressive pricing of most Hong Kong restaurants. HK$400 or so a head should leave you a little tipsy (if you're a lightweight like me) and blissfully full of good stuff, which (admittedly, first world problems) now passes for great value when you consider the price of a cocktail at the nearby Potato Head.
So is this the neighbourhood restaurant of my dreams? Food (tick). Atmosphere (tick). Location (Err. The actual street itself – a cosy little cul-de-sac replete with outside mood lighting and a relaxed vibe - is a definite tick, but let's be fair, no-one goes for a casual stroll around the endless hills of Sai Ying Pun for a lark, so I'll give this one a maybe). Either way, it's bloody brilliant, so go. Although if you want to remember it afterwards, maybe skip the second bottle of wine.