Help, the dogs need a new DOGHOUSE!

Please note our Chinese New Year opening hours are as follows:

Central: 13th 8am-4pm, 14th 8am-4pm, 15th Closed, 16th Open as normal

Causeway Bay: 13th 9am-4pm, 14th 9am-1030pm, 15th Closed, 16th Open as normal

Thank you and Happy Chinese New Year to all

brunch club

For those in the art industry, you will be pleased to know that we currently have in stock the very informative Orientations Magazine. If you haven’t picked one up yet, it is high time you added it to your monthly list of must-read publications!

They are available in both brunch clubs.

Enjoy…

brunch club

Published in Hong Kong and distributed worldwide, Orientations has been delighting collectors and connoisseurs of Asian art for forty years. Every issue is an authoritative source of information on the many and varied aspects of the arts of East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia and provides invaluable insights into the international Asian art market, analyzing activities at major auctions in London, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing and other centres to reveal the latest price and collecting trends.

Orientations is unique in its presentation and is itself a collector’s item, with the quality of its content matched by the excellence of its design and production. `Perfect bound’ with a strong laminated cover, it is renowned for its superb full-colour reproductions. Orientations is a magazine that you will enjoy at your leisure, and that you will keep to read and refer to, again and again.

Would just like to update you on a two upcoming charity events that we support. If they strike a note with you, we hope you’ll support them too.

brunch club

Even for those who are not romantically inclined, we’ve got just the dessert to put you in the mood, read on for details and for our Valentine’s Day menu…

Tender lamb noisettes with homemade tapenade and roasted bellpeppers

Highlights include a Lamb Noisette with homemade tapenade and bellpeppers. Our regulars love this tender cut of Australian lamb, topped with an anchovy, olive and caper tapenade & grilled red bellpeppers. The Salmon Rillette on homemade rye toast and Baked stuffed avocado have also been very popular as a light dinner or appetizer. The yummy tartiflette is a French-like pizza and features our homemade herb foccaccia as its base, topped with a delicious carbonara-like sauce and Reblochon cheese. Vegetarians particularly will love our goat’s cheese crumble, which has a very strong cheese flavour coupled with star anise, and herb-garlic bread crumbs as the crumble.

Baked avocado stuffed with chicken, mushrooms & Swiss gruyère cheese

Salmon rillete with mixed herbs & mustard, served on homemade sourdough rye toast and salad

We also have a wonderful selection of homemade cakes & tarts which would make a great finish to your dinner. You must try our cream cheesecakes, and our baked cheesecakes have been a signature dessert since day one. Other bestsellers are the banoffee pie (homemade toffee) and lemon cream tart, made with fresh lemons and bananas of course!

Please click the box link on the left for the full dinner menu in Central.

Nestled in Brunch Club & Supper in Causeway Bay, you will find our artisan bakery quietly at work. As true artisans, we individually handcraft our breads, pâtisseries and cakes from scratch, using the finest and freshest ingredients with no short-cuts, no cost-cuts, no artificial additives, no preservatives.  We even grow our own yeast, using starters that we have cultivated more than three years ago, to give our breads a flavour that is unique only to us. We currently have at least three different cultures at our disposal.

As the in-house bakery for the “brunch club” restaurants, our mission is first and foremost to supply the best quality pastries, breads and cakes for our brunch clubbers. On the occasion when there are quieter days, we will tour the local food markets for some fresh new ingredient to turn into something delightful in the oven. We try to keep to a schedule of making a specially handcrafted bread on Wednesdays and a mouth-watering tart or pie on Fridays it will be!

Very popular rye raisin & walnut bread

Bread baking is a patient, careful process where many factors must be taken into account. Temperature, dough resting time, kneading intensity, humidity, the list goes on…all affect the taste of the bread. A change in any one of them, and you will have something different baking in the oven! Therefore we are constantly tweaking our recipes be it according to the change in weather or in any of the ingredients. We also take extra care in choosing our ingredients, for example by using filtered mineral water and sea salt in our baking. Our favourites are our walnut bread which has an amazingly soft, spongy texture complemented by the crunch of toasted walnuts, and the Rye raisin & Walnut bread, which is a dense and chewy loaf.

Marie's legendary croissant au beurre

Besides supplying to brunch club, we make by hand a small quantity of breads and pastries to a growing number of regular customers. In fact our handmade butter croissants are quickly becoming known as the best in Hong Kong. It is no wonder as we tested over 10 different butters before deciding on a particular one from France, and the entire process takes over two days to complete from flour to that deliciously flaky croissant that melts in your mouth. We uphold the same standards in all of our pastries, so treat yourself to a satisfying viennoiserie in the morning, and begin your day the way you deserve.  We now serve a pastry and a cup of piping hot organic fair-trade coffee for $28 every weekday morning from 9-11am. What a way to begin your day!

Banoffee pie - you gotta try it once!

Lemon Cream Tart - another brunch club classic made with fresh lemons

Our signature dessert is the Banoffee pie – a hot favorite among Brunch Clubbers. A favourite from England, the simple combination of bananas, biscuit, toffee and cream is a wonderful way to finish a meal; even the most disciplined of all Atkins-dieters will not be able to resist this decadent treat! Our cream cheesecakes and mousse cakes are heavenly, with a wonderful creamy texture that is amazingly fresh in the mouth. They are special as they are made without gelatin and with quality ingredients. Not content to just rest on his laurels, our pastry chef is also constantly coming up with new recipes to delight our customers. His recent creation, the decadent Chocolate Orange Mousse with Crème Chiboust promises to be another sure winner.

Our very own creation: Chocolate orange mousse with Crème Chiboust - with a taste that lingers

Our Breads, Pastries & Desserts

We have a small but popular selection of breads on sale, including the French Baguette, Walnut bread, Bran Bread, Linola Seed Bread, Herb Focaccia with sea salt, Scandinavian Rye Bread, Sour dough rye bread, Dried fruit bread and Rye Raisin & Walnut Bread.

Pastries include Croissant, Almond Croissant, Kouign Amann & Chocolate Danish (with Belgian Chocolate), some of which are available for breakfast in the mornings.

We have a wide selection of desserts available daily. The Blueberry cream cheesecake, New York cheesecake, Lemon cream tart and all-time favorite Banoffee pie are Brunch Club classics.

Marie’s Pâtisserie & Boulangerie  Special

Breakfast: Weekdays from 9-11am - Pastry + 1 piping hot Organic, Fairtrade Coffee @ $28

Dine @ the Brunch Club and enjoy 10% off all breads, pastries and desserts (take-away). Please show your receipt.

Besides our usual Traditional Christmas turkey, we are happy to include in our dishes, some delights from the newest addition to our family, “Marie’s Patisserie & Boulangerie”. As an example, the Pan-fried duck liver with white wine jelly comes with Marie’s croissant, which is made using only French butter and handmade by us using a 17-hour artisanal process! Our desserts too will be made by Marie’s Bakery.

In our New Year’s menu we have also included a mouth-watering Oyster Medley, consisting of one Oyster Kilpatrick and Two fresh oysters, as part of the successful fresh oyster promotion we have been running in Brunch Club & Supper in Causeway Bay. When in stock, we have the larger Smokey Bay & Sidney Rock oysters of Australia, and the more petite Fin de Claire, French variety-my personal favourites!

So if you are looking for a delightful, delicious, yet warm Christmas & New Year’s Eve dinner, come down to Brunch Club for pure deliciousness straight from our hearts to your plates…from appetizer to finish!

If the service gets a little icky next week, its because all the extra floor elves (us managers) will be quite busy at Marie’s Bakery baking 1000 cookies for a christmas party for children with disabilities. Thank you to Foodlink, who gave us the opportunity to do this. There will be about 500 kids, and we want to give two cookies per kid, a chocolate snowflake one, and an almond Christmas tree one. Plus, they’ll be decorated with icing sugar and chocolate: double, triple yum!!!

We tested some almond cookies today, they are all in our stomachs now…mmm, so good! We will start on them from Tuesday next week, to be ready for the party on Saturday. Its going to quite a task (and lots of overtime) baking and decorating 1000 cookies all by hand, but hey, to us, that’s what a business is for, to create jobs and help our community.

Almond Xmas tree cookies

And while we are on the holiday theme, just wanted to share with all of you some great holiday music I’ve found from “Straight No Chaser“. If like us you are sick of hearing the same tunes being played every year, this group put in a lot of effort to give us a very refreshing take on traditional Christmas carols.

Just listen to some of the lyrics – they are hilarious. Our fav is definitely “The 12 Days of Christmas”. They are funny, clean cut & wholesome, so when you listen you’ll laugh and feel real Happy & Christmassy at the same time. You’ve got to listen to them to know what I mean.

So you’ll get to listen to them at Brunch Club, together with Christmas songs from Taylor Swift, Michael Buble, Tyler Hilton, Faith Hill and others. Of course, they are not the usual Christmas carols you will hear played 1000 times everywhere else, cos at Brunch Club you always get something a little more special…Happy Christmas and FABULOUS New Year everyone!

Love

Brunch Club team

PS: if you want to spread some Christmas cheer, why not forward this email to friends and family

Thank you Time Out! You may read the full review here.