Kowloon

When booking a trip to Boston, check what else is happening or else the consequences can be dire. This trip was set up at short notice and the usual places to stay were all fully booked. For the first couple of nights it had been possible to find somewhere close to business appointments but even that hotel kicked me out for my last night in the city. There were so few available options that I ended up in the Red Roof Inn in Saugus. You know what to expect with Red Roof Inns. Cheap rooms, with facilities to match, but they’re a fairly decent bog-standard place to spend a night. The hotel met expectations but the setting on US1 North out of Boston was terrible. This part US1 is a dual carriageway with a six-foot tall fence running down the median. To visit anything directly across the road meant driving to the next exit, driving on the overpass at the exit to come back down the opposite carriageway to wherever you wanted to visit. If you wanted to walk to dinner then restaurants on the other side of the road were out of the question. This counted out Hooters and Hilltop Steak House. The options on the same side of the road as the hotel were Midwest Grill, a Brazilian buffet, Angela’s, a pizza and wings place and Kowloon, a Chinese restaurant. I actively avoid buffets and have a good local place to go to for pizza and wings so it seemed a good idea to try Chinese.

From the outside, Kowloon is huge and the full car park suggested an enthusiastic clientele. As you step in to the foyer there are at least three dining rooms with an additional dining room/comedy club upstairs. Each of the rooms has a maitre d’ and while trying to take time to figure out which room would work I was called over and ordered to sit in the Thai room. As it turned out, it made no difference where you sat because the same massive menu was available throughout. This allowed you to sample Cantonese, Szechuan, Polynesian, American and Thai food and each room also had a sushi chef available.

Looking through the menu, I was totally in the mood for spare ribs but there were a number of other appetizers that sounded good. Luckily the Kowloon Adventure platter included spare ribs and a number of the other starters that had sounded good. Main was an easy choice. The thought of a good spicy portion of Hunan chicken was too good to pass up.

To the food. According to the menu, the Kowloon Adventure included pork strips, barbecued spare ribs, crispy wontons and egg rolls. I love Char Siu pork so this looked like a winner on paper. But then I started eating it. Dear oh dear oh dear. The crispy fried wontons were almost as expected – greasy, crispy, moreish snacks, except that little care had been taken frying them so they’d folded on themselves and become oil traps. So, greasy – check, crispy – partially, moreish – definitely not.

The next least offensive part was the spare ribs. These were tepid to the touch and a weird lifeless appearance, like the living dead of spare ribs. They were almost edible.

The egg roll, cut into three parts and described as containing shrimp and pork, sound great on paper. As it turned out, eating the page with the menu description would have been more pleasant.  The roll had been cooked a long, long time before it was ordered so the wonton wrapper was leaden and had acquired the consistency of a dog chew. The pork was finely diced and was okay here but the vegetables in the roll were strangely woody so you ended up with a residue in each mouthful that did not want to go away.

The low point of the whole adventure was the pork strips. Organic meat producers will happily tell you that the ethical treatment of animals gives full-flavored meat as the end product. If this truly was pig then the poor sod had probably been confined to a sunless space no bigger than its body size with a daily whipping for good measure. This came across as pork product prepared from slurry, similar to chicken nuggets, but with the edges coloured with pink felt tip pen to give it a more authentic appearance. It lay on the plate and had a weird sweaty sheen and each time you cut into the pork more water(?) seeped out. The bland taste and weird texture combined to make this a really unpleasant experience.  

As adventures go, this equated to a trip that started with being mugged as you stepped out of the airport, followed by catching dysentery from local drinking water, with a bout of malaria to round things off.

There was some risk to ordering Hunan chicken as a main course. Although it is listed as a spicy dish on menus there is a tendency for restaurants in the United States to tone the spiciness down. There were chili flakes in the dish but as it turned out they were not enough to give it any sort of a kick. After the appetizer, it meant that this didn’t raise the game too high either. One problem was that it was not particularly enticing and sat on the plate and glowered like a sullen teenager just daring you to like it. The dominant tinned vegetables presented a uniform beige front with the only relief coming from the green of the broccoli and peppers. This dish suffered from a texture problem too, with the chicken having weird mushy, cotton wool type feel. It was another huge disappointment and it seemed that there is more love lavished in preparation of ingredients going into a La Choy tinned family meal than this. Similar to the Kowloon Adventure, a large part of the Hunan chicken was left untouched.

With two terrible courses attempted, there was no way that dessert would be an option. That meant finishing my Tsingtao beer that turned out to be the only good part of the meal and calling for the bill, to leave the table to be taken by some other lucky customer.

Overall verdict.
This was the worst Chinese food that I have ever eaten with no redeeming qualities at all. Review sites show that opinion of Kowloon veers between people who rave about it and those who view it the same way as me. It’s astonishing that it has obviously built a very successful business on food as poor as this.

Would I revisit Kowloon?
The chances of me going to Saugus ever again are infinitesimally small. If my travels ever take me there I would eat gravel from US1 North rather than risk eating at Kowloon again.


Overall Rating - 0/5