Warehouse Dining

The interior of Factory 99 Grill filled with customers on a Friday evening

My relatives who live in Tokwawan had told me about a restaurant in Kwun Tong that's located in a warehouse. They showed me pictures of a massive hamburger that two grown men had to share.

And so they decided to take me there last Friday evening so I could check it out.

The barbecue back ribs

It's near APM Mall and we walked along a few side streets before we arrived at Factory 99 Grill and walked up two flights of stairs to get there.

Inside it was a cavernous place -- probably a former factory space -- and it was filled with diners and the semi open kitchen at the back. There isn't much ambience as the floors are concrete and quite noisy. Even though we made a reservation we still had to wait about 15 minutes and so we perused the menu.

It's all western food here and very reasonably priced. We decided to take advantage of the set menu meals, all of which ranged from HK$169-HK$229 each and included mushroom toast, cream of mushroom soup, mains and a dessert.

We sat right by the kitchen so we could see the staff heating up mini loaves of rosemary bread, ladling out the soup (which the serving staff then dumped dried chopped parsley on top), and scooping mushrooms onto the small pieces of toast.

New Zealand lamb chops pan-fried medium rare

We preferred the mushrooms over the toast, while the soup was too creamy for me, but most locals would think this one was good, not too rich.

One of the mains was US barbecue back ribs and it was very tender, probably because they boiled the meat first before baking it with the sauce. Needless to say it was very meaty and we cleaned off the bones.

The pan-fried New Zealand lamb chops were cooked medium rare as requested and were quite large portions -- lamb chops on steroids?! It came with delicious fries, carrots and peas.

Meanwhile the squid ink spaghetti was a very black dish, completely infusing the pasta with the black ink flavour. It came with several scallops that were slightly overcooked.

I thought dessert was Movenpick ice cream but instead turned out to be ramekins of creme brulee that didn't quite have enough of an egg custard flavour, but sufficiently passed because of the price.

Very dark-looking squid ink spaghetti

We won't be rushing back here again, but it is value for money. Many families came here as well as young people on dates or get-togethers with friends. What's also interesting is that the place is open on Saturday for lunch but not for dinner, as it caters to the working hours of the people in the area who are mostly in factories and warehouses.

Factory 99 Grill

Flat A, 1/F, How Ming Factory

99 How Ming Street
Kwun Tong
2345 8333