First Look: Oh My Goose!, quick and casual Cantonese barbecue bowls at Langham Place

Oh My Goose! certainly has that contemporary branding thing going on — the hot pink, neon light fixture bearing its name and goose logo shines brightly among the stalls that line Mongkok’s Langham Place Food Court. It’s hard to miss. 

Get a little closer and you’ll see that it’s hawking familiar wares, though: Cuts of barbecue pork and whole roasted chickens and geese hang from the display window up front. 

We’re told that the shop wants to do classic Hong Kong barbecue dishes with a “modern twist,” and to keep it all budget-friendly. Like a lot of these specialty roast meat shops, the selection is purposely kept small and focused — 12 dishes, to be exact.

Coconuts HK recently went down to give it a try. We started with their Triplet lemon iced tea (HK$8), so named because it’s made with three ingredients: lemon, lime, and salted lemon. Straight-forward, and refreshing.

Then we tried the scrambled egg with BBQ pork on rice (HK$45). Apparently they mix in Hokkaido milk — known for its ultra clean taste and light, creamy texture — into the eggs, which resulted in a scramble that was silky smooth and airy, rather than dense.

For those who like their egg yolks runny and meat chunks… chunky, then there’s also a BBQ pork and fried egg on rice served with Hainanese soy sauce (HK$52), pictured above in top photo. Oh My Goose! says this dish is meant to pay homage to the classic Stephen Chow movie God of Cookery, in which the BBQ pork and egg rice bowl features prominently in the story line [Ed. Note: If you don’t get this reference, please watch the movie — it’s hilarious].

The head chef, Sky Lin, trained with well-known traditional roast meat restaurants such as Sham Tseng Chan Kee before starting up at Oh My Goose! — and they tell us he’s very picky with his cuts. Instead of the commonly used pork collar-butt, for instance, Chef Lin uses the upper pork blade for the BBQ pork, or char siu, in both dishes. This is supposed to result in a more notably tender dish.

It definitely tasted like proper char siu, but maybe our tastebuds are a bit deadened or something, because we didn’t detect a pronounced tenderness in it. It was moist, alright — we just couldn’t really tell the difference between chewing this char siu versus our usual favorites.

OK, moving away from the pork products — next up, the shredded chicken with black truffle on spring onion oil-flavored rice (HK$48). In short, this one was excellent. Easily the best of all the dishes we tried. The black truffle paste gave the chicken an amazing, highly fragrant flavor, as did the spring onion and black sesame that came on top of the rice. And, those intense flavors blended together beautifully.

Then, of course, the goose. We had the roasted goose on glass noodles (HK$58). Ficus hirta, an herb which is usually found in Chinese soups, gives the noodle broth an extra richness and depth that we don’t usually encounter with this dish. The glass noodles were cooked just right — chewy and bouncy. They were served with eight pieces of tender roasted goose, with crispy skin. We only wish the duck was served with plum sauce, which, to us, would make this dish perfect.

The baked BBQ pork and goose with “10x cheese” (HK$48), which comes served on a sizzling plate so that the cheese is still bubbling and hissing when it gets to your table — well, maybe this makes us traditionalists, but we just don’t feel cheese like this is really a nice match for fried rice or BBQ pork.

The dining area is a little bit noisy — this is a mall food court, after all — but Oh My Goose! makes a solid option for those in the area looking for a quick, casual bite.

FIND IT:

Oh My Goose! is at F1, Level 4, Langham Place,
8 Argyle Street, Mong Kok
Opening hours: 11am to 11pm, daily
Phone: +852 2110 3998
MTR: Mong Kok, exit C3/E1