Delicious Italian buffet at Forte

Thanks to the communications team and Lemon Tea for inviting me to try the gourmet buffet at L’hotel elan.
The hotel is located in Kwun Tong conveniently near Ngau Tau Kok MTR station.

L'hotel elan is part of the China Chem group who have other restaurants which I wanted to try such as V-Cuisine that serves innovative dim sums.

When I got the email from the communications teams, their hotel footer was fun and stylish which really makes a difference from the standard emails.

At the hotel, there were lots of stylish elements, the check in counter is not on the ground floor but on the top floor!
It is located on the top floor because the views of Hong Kong are breathtaking, especially at night and there is a beautifully lit pool with deckchairs as well.

 

 

The buffet selection was really good, I would have been happy just having the buffet without ordering extra mains because there were so many of my favourites.
Normally when I go to buffets there will only be 2-3 choices that I like, but at Forte I liked most of the choices.
They even had caper berries and pistachio nuts.

 

The pistachio nuts were deshelled.

My favorite part of the buffet was the antipasto because I love proper Italian and Western dishes and they had portobello mushrooms as well!

 

 

 

 

Other items I really liked were the buffalo cheese, pistachio nuts, octopus in sun-dried tomato dressing, prawns in pesto.
The buffet costs $228 per person, which includes a soup, drink and a dessert platter.
For $70-$240 extra you can order mains as well.
Although the grapefruit juice was not included in the buffet, it was freshly squeezed and extremely refreshing.
The grapefruit juice costs $65 a la carte.

 

For the mains, there were three that I wanted to try:
-Polenta with Garden Vegetables & Rich Tomato Concasse
-Ossobuco with Saffron Risotto

 

-Roasted Whole French Yellow Spring Chicken

In the end I chose the Polenta because you can only order that in Fine Italian restaurants.

 

The polenta tasted similar to mashed potato and it tasted lovely and cheesy too and similar to thick porridge.
The char-grilled vegetables were delicious.
However I felt that there could be more polenta and less grilled vegetables.
To finish off, I had the earl grey tea with the dessert platter.

 

 

There were berries to garnish the dessert platter such as blackberries and redcurrants which are rare in Hong Kong!
For some other tables, I saw them serve just berries.
Overall, the buffet was fit for me and I believe it should be fit for expats too!
It was really good that most of the ingredients were imported and they did not use local items and pretend it was Italian/Western.