Hui Lau Shan

Intrigued by the promise of healthy desserts, we’ve stopped into Hui Lau Shan twice to experience the Hong Kong chain’s signature items – mango-heavy drinks and desserts – for ourselves. Our second time was primarily to confirm what we’d experienced on the first visit: unspectacular quality and mostly indifferent service.

As a chain, Hui Lau Shan is so focused on mangoes that one would expect its stores to have constant levels of supply and demand for this once exotic tropical fruit, guaranteeing freshness or better yet access to some particularly excellent variant. We might have gotten this impression from their social media, which claims “our mangoes are simply better.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t actually anything special or superior about the mangoes we tried here. The highlight of our visits was a multi-layered drink combining mango with coconut juice and aloe jelly – it was fine, perhaps because it didn’t need to rely so substantially on mango to stand out. We also tried a Fresh Milk Taro Swirl, which was more pasty than anything else.