With the city of Hong Kong being a vibrant, busy and always bustling place, there are few places in which you can escape to a calm, slower and more relaxed pace of life. One of these places, though, is a hidden treasure called Gaylord.

In the middle of the hugely busy Tsim Sha Tsui you are already in a foodies’ paradise with the likes of Aqua Spirit, Tang Court and even DimDim Sum Dim Sum Specialty Store within walking distance.

Yet within this category, you are mainly talking about fantastic traditional food. Gaylord, on the other hand, offers you an escape to India, which is a break you may need after days of enjoying local cuisine.

Walking into the calm and slow paced restaurant after a busy day on the fabulous Hong Kong Foodie tour and then on Lantau Island, we both knew we had found the perfect end to our day. It also helped that the prices were reasonable!

We weren’t that hungry (the foodie tour really filling us up!) so we decided to share a small plate of vegetable samosas as a starter. These were aromatic, with melt in the mouth cashew nuts adding to the texture, and a crisp pastry that was a million miles away from some of the awful samosa experiences I had during my student days!

Yummy!

With the starter done, we moved onto a choice that our waiter wasn’t sure about – Chicken Vindaloo and Lamb Vindaloo. He was unsure as to whether we were going to be sharing our dishes, in which case we would have had, in his opinion, two very similar dishes.

However, we had decided that a bit of spice was a good thing on this occasion, meaning that we were happy to have our own plates!

Once they arrived, the dishes did what they needed to do – blew our socks off with the spice but retained texture, aroma and most importantly did not overawe you with the chili flavour to the detriment of the rest of the dish.

The fantastic garlic naan certainly added an extra dimension to the dishes.

Nice and spicy!

All in all, as the live band started playing and we noticed ourselves nodding off after feeling happily full and rather tired from a busy day we both agreed that Gaylord had been the perfect choice for an escape to India in the middle of Hong Kong.