So I previously posted my Oscar predictions here. Overall, 24 categories, 18 predictions, 13 correct, not too bad!

Here are the winners:

Picture Hurt Locker check

Director Kathryn Bigelow check (shouldn’t she also get an award for being 58 and still looking so damn good?)

Actor Jeff Bridges check

Actress Sandra Bullock check

Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz check

Supporting Actress Mo’Nique check

Animated Feature – Up check

Art Direction -Avatar oops

Cinematography – Avatar oops

Costume -Young Victoria (didn’t make a prediction here)

Documentary Feature – The Cove (didn’t make a prediction here)

Documentary Short -Music by Prudence (didn’t make a prediction here)

Film Editing – Hurt Locker check

Foreign Language film- Secret in Their Eyes (didn’t make a prediction here)

Make Up – Star Trek check

Score – Up check

Song – Crazy Heart check

Animated short – Logorama (didn’t make a prediction here)

Live action short – The New Tenants (no prediction here)

Sound editing – Hurt Locker check

Sound mixing – Hurt Locker oops

Visual Effects – Avatar check

Adapted Screenplay – Precious oops

Original Screenplay – Hurt Locker oops

Big Lychee reviews food reviewers and finds only one source that he admires.   And I like a reviewer who is not afraid to savage a place, something one doesn’t encounter too often in restaurant reviews locally.  But then, again, do I agree with some of his other assessments or do I think he’s completely off his rocker?  “Whores AND prostitutes”?

TARGET (泰達財經) does not appreciate Lan Kwai Fong.

It is a filthy place, in the main, and some of the buildings in their present state ought to be condemned, in this medium’s opinion.

The entire Lan Kwai Fong, though it is well known to Hongkongers as an entertainment area, is a horrid admixture of European and Asian drunks, sitting outside bars and restaurants, while whores and prostitutes roam the street, looking for johns.

At the same time, homosexuals scour the area in search of new partners.

For young girls to visit this area of Hongkong Central, it may seem an exciting adventure into another side of the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but, probably, more often than not, innocent girls are corrupted by the fast-talking inebriants that frequent what this medium would claim is a blot on the territory.

This guy knows something about food but somehow I don’t think I’d want to share a table with him.

Sabah is one of our favorite restaurants.  As some of you probably know, my ex-wife is Malaysian Chinese, from Kuala Lumpur, and she made it a mission to try every Malaysian restaurant she could find in Hong Kong.  She rated Sabah as the best, even though to a certain extent they’ve adjusted their recipes for HK tastes (meaning less spicy).  I continue to go there at least once a month and my gf likes it as well and has recommended it to all of her friends.

This place is nothing fancy.  The service can be spotty.  The food will probably never find its way into a Michelin guide and truthfully has sometimes varied in quality from visit to visit.  But it’s generally quite tasty and satisfying and we usually get away with dinner for two for under $300.  The place is very popular and if you go at peak times, you will be waiting outside for a table.

And that was the case tonight.  Normally I don’t like to wait for a table in restaurants – if one is busy, there are so many other choices so close by.  But tonight I was really in the mood for this.  After waiting around 10 minutes, the manager came outside and asked if we were okay to eat “upstairs” – that we could be seated immediately, otherwise we might have a long wait ahead of us.  So we agreed.

He walked us and two other waiting couples into the apartment building and we took the elevator up to the fourth floor.  It seems they rented a one bedroom flat in the building and converted it into a dining room!  The room could seat around 26 people and one corner of the room had been turned into a bar and service area.   With just 10 other people dining at the time, it had a real “private kitchen” feel to it.

Of course one of the downsides of this arrangement is that when the food was ready, a waiter had to pick up the tray, exit the restaurant, enter the building, wait for the elevator and ride up to the 4th floor with the food.  The food was more than warm but certainly less hot than when we usually dine downstairs.   One waiter remains upstairs at all times, mobile phone in hand to call down orders and requests.  Actually, when we were ready for the bill, they had to call downstairs and have someone bring that up as well!

Since I hadn’t had a “good” meal since our dinner at Abé last Wednesday, I ordered our perennial favorites – beef rendang, dry fried chicken curry and roti, with two mang0-coconut shakes.  We basically wiped the plates clean.  Sorry, no photos but there are 215 photos at their Open Rice page.

For our last full day in Manila, we were pretty tired from the previous day and stayed relatively close to the hotel, just a bit of shopping malls and shopping.

In Landmark, I almost fell for a tiny scam.  My gf is busy trying on shoes, I’m off in another section and this guy comes up to me.  He tells me he’s the security guard from my hotel and has held the door open for me which is why he recognized me.   At this point I probably should have said, “I don’t recognize you, what hotel are you referring to?”  Because it’s not a big stretch of the imagination to see a white guy standing there and guess that he’s a tourist.  The guy goes on to tell me that he’s there with his family to celebrate his daughter’s birthday.  I didn’t see any sign of him being with anyone else but Filipinos are open and friendly and always striking up conversations with each other and I figured this was more the same.  So I pretended to be interested and asked a question or two.  And then he said, “Oh, by the way sir, can I have some tips from you to buy my daughter ice cream for her birthday?”   At that point I started to reach for my pocket.  I thought I’d give the guy 10 or 20 pesos to get rid of him.  But before my hand made it to my pocket, he added, “Chocolate cake costs just 374 pesos, sir.”  I didn’t say “fuck off” at this point but I told him to get lost.

Dinner time, I suggested that we walk over to Greenbelt 5 “Phase 2″ and check out the new restaurants, especially the ones with outdoor seating.  We passed this amazing looking bread shop.

I thought about trying a restaurant called Lorenzo’s Way.  Their menu gathers favorite dishes from other LJC restaurants, but since we’d eaten at Abe the night before, I thought this would be overkill.

Eventually we settled on a place called Tapella – nice looking spot with comfortable seats.

I have no idea who “Gaudi” is.   I ordered four different dishes and two glasses of wine.  I was very pleased that our waitress was able to explain the menu to us and seemed to know her way around the wine list.  We were relatively happy with the wine we chose.  After that, things went slowly down hill.

The Spanish cold cuts plate was okay.

Everything tasted nice enough, but I kept thinking back to a similar plate at Uno Mas.  Uno Mas drizzles a bit of olive oil over the meat, puts some olives on the plate and gives you enough toasted bread for 3 platters.  Here the plate was relatively plain with just those four tiny pieces of bread (though it was nice bread).

We were told that their absolute best seller was melted Camembert cheese with caramelized onions so I figured we should try that.

Again, the bread was really nice.  The onions almost completely over-powered the cheese, not that there was much cheese there to begin with.  And honestly, isn’t that the saddest looking plate you’ve ever seen?  That one teeny bit of parsley?

The salad with tuna and “assorted vegetables.”

A thimble-full of bland dressing.  And a smidge of diced beet and cucumber – I’m guessing less than a slice of each.

Finally, Moroccan chicken skewers.

Almost completely lacking in any sort of spice.  Once again, a sad bit of parsley and nothing resembling any sort of sauce or dip.

I certainly wasn’t expecting an authentic tapas experience here but was expecting tastier food, especially at that price and in this kind of setting.  (The meal came out to around 1200 pesos.)   Maybe their paellas are better but I don’t expect I’ll be going back there to find out.

We paid the bill and walked over to Greenbelt 2.  The weather was quite pleasant and we were in the mood to sit outside for awhile longer and have another drink or two.  We chose Spicy Fingers, the busiest place on the stretch, since we know a couple of the owners and one of them was there to greet us.  Inside the bar, this band was playing an energetic set.

I quickly found the limitations of a SanDisk III CF card.  Shooting on continuous, the camera kept pausing noticeably each time the buffer filled, writing the images to the card.  I could have saved some time by switching from RAW+JPEG to just JPEG but, well, I prefer RAW.  Obviously this week I’ll be investing in a faster CF card (or two).

After midnight, we went over to Greenbelt 3 and Cafe Havana, packed as always.

Here’s a couple of bonus “spy cam” shots.  My gf liked this girl’s shoes:

And a different angle on one of the singers from the band at Spicy.

For our last day, time for a bit more walking around and lunch before heading to the airport.  I spotted this limited edition Victorinox Manny Pacquiao watch.

Limited edition, just 1000 pieces (or so we were told) selling for around US$500.  It also came with a boxing glove with his “autograph.”  This is the second edition and I just didn’t like the watch enough to blow that kind of money on it.  Home now, I can see what the first edition looks like – I would have been a lot more tempted on this one (which I see is going for US$550-750 on eBay).

Alain Ducasse, recipient of nine Michelin stars, is in Manila for two days.  The newspapers are filled with interviews and details of his visit.  The best quote can be found here.

Learn the craft perfectly. Remain curious. Work more, faster, better. Or be a hairdresser.

For me, no trip to Manila is complete without a dinner at Abé, the Capampangan style restaurant from the LJC group at Serendra at Fort Bonifacio.  I get to eat some of my favorite food in the Philippines and then follow with a visit to Manila’s largest bookstore (Fully Booked) and a walk along Bonifacio High Street.

Exterior of the restaurant – clearly this is the most popular restaurant in Serendra, with the most outdoor seating and the only restaurant tonight where one had to wait for a table.

The theme of the restaurant is a tribute to local Filipino writers and artists.  They are shown throughout the restaurant and many of the dishes on the menu are presented as favorites of specific writers, complete with quotes from them about the food.

And now, our food, starting with green mango and bagoong salad.

Bagoong is a variety of shrimp paste and the salty, slightly sweet taste contrasted amazingly well with the very sour mango.

This is the dish I always return for, crispy tadyang.

Deep fried beef ribs, crispy exterior and tender interior, seasoned I think with just salt and pepper, good quality beef, I could live on this.

Gambas al ajillo, prawns with garlic and virgin olive oil.

I get this one almost every time I visit here.  Like most of the dishes, simple presentation but excellent ingredients well prepared equals satisfying food.

And finally, the piece de resistance for the night, lechon cubano.

Actually, after we ordered this, we were told they were already sold out for the night.  My gf called over the manager to check and he told the waitress to “find one more” – perhaps they reserve some portions of this each night for “special guests?”

Regardless, my gf pronounced this the best lechon she’s ever had in her life.  I’m no expert on this dish but I found it fabulous, just simple food perfectly prepared.  The manager gave me his card and mobile number and said next time we come, be sure to call him and he’d reserve both a table and the dish for us.

All of the above, plus two fresh mango shakes, came out to P1750, roughly HK$300.  And the simple fact is that to the best of my knowledge, there is no restaurant in Hong Kong serving this kind of food that even begins to approach the quality that you get here.

As soon as @hypercasey discovered that Main Street Deli was doing a 20 inch hot dog, he proposed a tweet-up there to try this out.  While a lot of other people said they would make it, in the end it was him, me, @adalinelau and @littlefatchick.  Three hours of shoving tube steak into our faces and talking about various geek-related things and a side helping of gossip.

Hyper and I got there first and split this ten inch, all beef dog:

They have a huge list of toppings, sauces and sides to choose from.  I found the caramelized onions a bit too sweet for my taste and I think the cheese could have been melted a bit more.  The dog itself was quite nice.  Those are sweet potato fries on the side.

Now, here is what Main Street Deli calls a potato knish:

This doesn’t look like any other knish I’ve encountered anywhere else in the world.  And the taste was bland.

@adalinelau is a vegetarian and so she went for the 10 inch veggie dog:

“Idaho potatoes” on the side, they looked a little like overgrown tater tots to me.  Adaline described the dog as tasting a lot like vegetables – if I remember correctly, she said her preference is normally for HK-style vegetarian cuisine, which is often tofu shaped and colored to look like something else.  I decided I could survive without sampling this.

And then we got @littlefatchick (who, by the way, should consider changing her Twitter handle to @tallthinlady) to go for the full-on 20 inch beef dog.  She got hers with jalapeno peppers and chili on the side.

By the way, this stuff isn’t cheap.  Two ten inch dogs, one twenty inch dog, the knish and about half a dozen soft drinks and the bill came out to around HK$1,000.  But all four of us had a great time!

Some shopping today courtesy of DC Fever.

First stop, TST, to get a used Wacom Intuos4 tablet (link is to US web site in English).   It sells new here for HK$2800.  The guy’s ad said $2400 “non-negotiable” but I noticed that his ad was just over a month old.  So I asked if he would accept $2,000 and yes indeed, he would and he did. (6 months old, doesn’t look new but looks barely used.  I’m too cold to install it and test it right now!)

Then over to Admiralty to get a Nikon AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED.  I know this is not one of their sharpest lenses but it sells new for HK$5,040 and I got it used for $3,480.  (3 years old, looks very clean, took some test shots in the MTR station.)   This gives me some time to play with it before the 7s and if I’m not happy, I can turn around and sell it for a similar price pretty easily.

Oh, I’m such a pimp. Of course both of these guys are photographers so I gave them the card for PASM.  The first guy seemed interested so I gave him a 5 minute spiel about the parties there.  The second guy was more interested in how I was able to navigate and read DC Fever (which is an all-Chinese web site).  But I gotta say, in all seriousness, all the people I’ve met through DC Fever, whether buying or selling, were nice, a pleasure to deal with.

At this point, it was 6 PM and I hadn’t eaten all day.  Since I was in Admiralty, I decided to go to Dan Ryan’s and grab a burger.  I’ve been going to DR’s for 15 years (a lot more often when I worked nearby 12 years ago) and I don’t think anything at all has changed there in that time (except maybe the prices) and that’s fine by me.  They still do one of the best burgers in HK in my opinion, good size, good char-grilled taste.  And my question is, do these places make more money off bacon than booze?  Two crummy slices of bacon for HK$10?   And what does that cost them, about 38 cents?  But of course every time I have a burger I must have a bacon cheeseburger to enjoy the vicarious thrill of breaking two dietary laws at once.

And then …. home.  Yeah, home by 8 PM.  Look, I love the US Navy as much or more than the next guy, and I’m thrilled when the fleet comes in and they spent millions of dollars having their well-deserved r ‘n r in one of the best cities on the planet.  But that doesn’t mean I wanna hang out in Wanchai when they’re here.

So back home, where it’s raining and 6.5 degrees outside.  (The light rain is the reason that I didn’t go back to the same spots as last night to try the news lens.)  Of course at home my maid left the windows open to “air out” the place.  Heaters on full!  Getting under the covers with a movie shortly.  But thinking how good a massage and a schvitz would feel tonight.  I don’t have a favorite sauna in Hong Kong any more – any suggestions?  Or should I consider a late night sauna run up to Shenzhen?  Drive to Lok Ma Chau, bus across the border, I’m told there’s lots of new, nice, cheap sauna palaces in Huanggang.

Sorry, my fingers are too cold to hunt down links tonight!

We ventured out of the house around 8 PM,  got in the car and the car told me it was just 7.5 degrees.  In Hong Kong, that’s cold! Nevertheless, Sai Kung town was serious busy, with cars parked in places that you never see cars parked and the police out in force writing parking tickets. (Which, frankly, I don’t understand.  None of these cars were blocking traffic, it’s a freaking holiday, no one was parked in a double yellow, so what? Make people miserable on a holiday because you’re forced to work and it’s a good revenue generator?)(Hong Kong’s on-street parking laws make little sense anyway.  You get a ticket for parking in a place “not designated as a parking place, even though that’s about 75% of the streets and why shouldn’t you be able to park there after 7 or 8 PM if you’re not in a double yellow, not blocking traffic or a cross walk?)

Walking around in Sai Kung town.  I thought this might be the night that we’d finally try Saigon Flavour, a small shop in town that fits the definition of cheap ‘n cheerful, but they were closed.  Walking through the back alley, almost every place was closed.   One that was open, a Thai place, was doing overflow business.  Paisano’s was very busy and we weren’t in the mood for take-away.  We walked into new spot Aqua Plus but were not impressed with the menu.  Lynn’s Cafe was empty, never a good sign.  Steamers?  “That would be my last choice,” I said.   Walked past the now-Michelin-one-starred Anthony’s Kitchen and it of course was overflowing.

So over to AJ’s Sri Lankan Cuisine and I’d say we were 95% happy with our dinner.  Started off with their fish cutlets, small round deep fried balls of fish and herbs that kind of reminds me of gefilte fish for some reason, served with freshly made pineapple chutney. (I think they said pineapple.)  Then a chicken curry, devilled prawns and Sri Lankan roti.  The owner stopped by our table to give us a plate of eggplant on the house and my gosh that was seriously tasty too.

Back home after dinner, I put on Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges film that has him in the front runner position for the Best Actor Oscar.  I thought I was gonna love it when the first line out of Bridges’ mouth was, “Not another fucking bowling alley!”  (Dude!) but really, the movie isn’t much.  The story of a once-famous alcoholic country singer on the road has been done many times before and at best this story was TV movie of the week quality, something for the Lifetime Channel.  The only thing that raises it above the ordinary is a truly great performance by Bridges and some good original songs by Stephen Bruton and T-Bone Burnett.  Maggie Gyllenhall is quite okay, Robert Duvall could have done his role in his sleep and Colin Farrell as a country singing star?  Really?  (Actually he’s not bad but still …)

So see it for Bridges’ 5 star performance but the rest of the movie rates just 2 or 3 stars as far as I’m concerned.  (And yet this scores a 100% rating among “top critics” on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess they saw something in it that I didn’t.)

Tomorrow morning my gf gets on a plane to Manila and it will be 32 degrees there when she arrives.  I’m jealous.

Mine was pretty good.

Normally when we are spending the day at home, by 3 or 4 PM my gf will start asking what I want for dinner and will start defrosting something.  Yesterday she claimed she wanted to stay in but since she hadn’t taken anything out of the freezer, I took it as an obvious hint that we should go out somewhere.  So we got in the car and headed for Wanchai.

Our first pick, Sabah, was closed, which wasn’t a huge surprise to me – it was of course the first day of Chinese New Year and this is a Chinese-run place.   As we walked around, I noted that all of the small Chinese places were closed while all the larger Cantonese seafood halls were open and crowded.  I did toy with the notion of going for hot pot but then suggested that we should see if we could get into Uno Mas.

Actually we have both loved Uno Mas in the past but it was 10 months since our last visit there, right before I got so sick last year.  I had, as you might recall, two months of being pretty much confined to the house and bed.  And once I got better, I couldn’t have any alcohol for six months and the thought of going to Uno Mas and not having at least a glass of wine with dinner was more than I could stand.   So we simply didn’t go there.

Last night it was open and we could get a table without a reservation.  Of course they had a special Valentine’s menu for two.  Not only didn’t it contain any of our old favorites, it had stuff on it that I knew my gf wouldn’t like.  So we went for old favorites – starting with the charcuteria platter that has jamon iberico, chorizo, salami and another kind of ham, along with some really nice toasted bread and a bowl of olives.  From there we moved on to their signature paella, which was as good as I remember – though I would have preferred if they’d cooked it just a minute or two longer so that there would be some burnt crispy pits to scrape off the sides of the pan.   No crispy bits, but the saffron rice tasted great and there was a decent amount of sausage, chicken, prawn, squid and clam in the pan.  We were very full.  I suggested that we let things settle and wait a few minutes so that we could also have some churros, and that was also every bit as good as I remembered.

From there, we went over to Amazonia.  It is, after all, the place where we first met, almost 3 years ago.  I took some photos of the bands (haven’t looked at them yet) but had a bit of bad luck – got some pix of Icebox when they were doing their normal stuff.  What I didn’t know is that every night they now do this schtick where they set the floor on fire while lead guitarist Willie – who normally tears off these amazing guitar runs without a hint of expression on his face – runs all around doing a variety of tricks.  And while they were doing all of that, I was outside smoking!  I came back inside, saw what was going on, saw the crowd between the front door and where my camera bag was and knew that I had blown it for the night.   I asked him later, he does that at least once every night now so I’ll know to wait and get some shots next time I go there.

Anyway, we had a good time and headed home around midnight.  Later that night, I dreamed I was a dead super hero – at first no one could see me, then people could see me except they didn’t know I was dead except I could float or hover – not quite fly – and they thought that was unusual.  And then it turned out that I wasn’t dead after all.  But I could still float.