Hubby and I decided to try Kanizen during our Wednesday weekly lunches. Kanizen is very trendy. Upon entering you are greeted with their immaculately clean crab pool filled with different sized Japanese horsehair crab and other varieties from Hokkaido.

Hubby and I decided on two set lunches, crab tempura for him and shabu shabu crab for me. Towards the end of our meal we added on two extra orders of crab tempura because it was just so tasty. Total cost was $574HKD($74USD) and worth every penny.

The grilled edamame and the egg custard came first. Edamame was good as it is pretty hard to mess up. The egg custard was OUT OF THIS WORLD. The texture and smoothness of the egg custard was impressive. Lei Garden does a pretty mean egg white custard, but Kanizen’s tops Lei Garden’s.

Next came a dollop of crab guts with slices of cucumbers for you to spread it on. Moss green in color and chicken liver pate like in texture. If you enjoy crab guts, you will like this. Expensive and completely wasted on me.

Hubby’s crab tempura set consisted of 1 large claw, 2 small legs, a soft-boiled tempura quail egg, some kind of shiso leaf wrapped around crabmeat, one piece of tempura eggplant, and one piece of tempura mushroom. Best tempura hands down that I have ever had. However the portion was very small.

The shabu shabu part of the meal was interesting. Our waitress set a bamboo basket lined with wax paper with a steel plate on the bottom of the basket on top of the  induction stove built into the table. She then poured a clear broth in it, and instructed us to boil our vegetables first and eat that before boiling the crab. The dipping sauces for the shabu shabu was interesting, one was slightly tangy and the other slightly sweet. It went well with the vegetables and the crab.

Our waitress came by again and tossed udon noodles in the enriched broth. The noodles were extremely tasty, full of umami flavor. After we finished our noodles, it was time for the congee. A bowl of rice was dumped into same broth used to cook the noodles and a beaten egg was stirred in. Delicious but only wished the rice in the congee was more broken. It was at this time that our second order of crab tempura came. It tasted great with the congee.

Dessert is also included in the set lunchs. I had the pomelo sorbet which was homemade with pomelo bits in it. Hubby had the coffee which had jelly in it. Both tasted great with the pomelo being more refreshing and the coffee being richer.

Overall: Kanizen is a trendy hip place that lives up to the hype. The set lunches are a great deal compared to the dinner sets which start at $700HKD($87USD). There is not many Japanese restaurants that focus on crabs which is a shame. A definite recommend for foodies who visit Hong Kong. Service is excellent and the wait staff speaks English. The menu is Japanese/English/Chinese so no problems there.

Located at: G/F, 3 Thomson Road, Wan Chai, 2866 1618 Reservations recommended.

*I have been back several times since. It is so delicious and healthy that I try to go every two weeks. I also bought Cindy & Wenting here and they said it is the best tempura they ever had.