Tasting notes, flavour profiles – pairing non-alcoholic drinks with food takes the same effort as wine pairings, and the results can be surprising
- Glassbelly in Causeway Bay serves Chinese teas with flavour notes such as spicy, earthy, nutty and floral, and its chefs prepare dishes to match – including caviar
- At Aulis, also in Causeway Bay, a guava, tomato and black pepper drink complements a dish of mackerel, cucumbers and horseradish
It used to be that food lovers who avoided alcohol for whatever reason only had the choice of drinking plain water or pairing dishes with sugary mocktails.
But forward-thinking restaurants, such as Popinjays at the Murray Hong Kong and Cultivate, in Central, Hong Kong are pairing their dishes with non-alcoholic drinks, selected with the same care that they would put into choosing a wine pairing.
One restaurant that opened recently is Glassbelly, which presents Chinese teas paired with food, not the other way around.
In Causeway Bay, Glassbelly has foodie-pleasing dishes such as sea urchin and crispy tofu with vegetarian XO sauce, and blue lobster with Chinese shrimp roe noodles and Spanish red shrimp sauce, but the focus is on the teas, including rougui tea (a mix of osmanthus and rose) and plum-scented pu’er tea.
Owner Wing Yeung explains the name Glassbelly comes from Shennong, a mythological Chinese deity related to agriculture and herbal medicine.
“He advised on what one should and shouldn’t eat. He had a glass belly so that when he ate, he could observe how the food affected his body. One time he ate something that made his stomach black, but he then ate a leaf that washed his stomach, and it was a tea leaf,” she explains.
