Happy Veggies

This all-​vegetarian menu was a dream come true after a week in Hong Kong eating around meat-​heavy Cantonese cuisine. The portions were family-​style and very generous. Prices were excellent considering the quality of the food and the amount that you get. (I had the noodles with black fungus — delicious!)
The restaurant hires many waitstaff who are hearing-​impaired, which is an awesome way to provide opportunities for a population that might otherwise have trouble finding work. Our waitress was wonderfully attentive and very sweet. The restaurant has a great system for communicating any special requests — we wanted some cold water to drink instead of tea, so we pointed to the page with the characters «cold water» in Chinese and English.
My only regret is that I wish I had found this place earlier in my trip — I would have gone back at least two more times!

This place was absolutely fantastic. Our first meal in Asia and it was spot on. Staff is incredibly friendly and communication wasn’t at all an issue. We ordered dumplings, a noodle dish, and a pumpkin curry — the last dish was out of this world. Prices very reasonable. Highly recommended!

Pretty decent food, it was just nice to find one restaurant that was all vegetarian. It’s family style so you order big dishes and share with your table. I’d say avoid ordering two very, very bland dishes — the curry tofu vegetables and the giant mushroom. For some reason those 2 dishes lacked any flavor.

All in all, a great restaurant. They have a great cause by giving employment to the hearing impaired and they make delicious vegetarian food! We enjoyed the meal very much and would love to go there again some time.
The location can be easily missed since the sign is not too obvious. It’s located in a commercial building on some floor (sorry I forgot) that can be accessed by the elevator right when you enter.
A few of the staff there could speak and hear, and our host was one of them. We were greeted and promptly seated at a table. The place wasn’t big so the tables were closely spaced. However, the space didn’t feel too cramped. We were handed the menus with clear, big photos. We flagged down one of the servers and we were using hand gestures to communicate. The photos on the menu definitely helped a lot! At the beginning of the menu, they also showed a brief history of the restaurant and some simple hand gestures you could use to communicate with the hearing impaired. All the staff were really friendly and always smiling.
The food was really good! We tried a lot of items. The eggplant dish was delicious, not too greasy and lots of flavors. My favorite was the pan-​fried veggie noodles with chewy gluten balls, black fungi, mushrooms, bamboo shoots and greens. The noodles were very crispy and the sauce and toppings gave good flavors. The fried tofu skin with sweet and sour sauce is another dish not to be missed. It’s supposed to be one of their signature dishes and it did not disappoint. The tofu skin was crispy on the outside and soft and juicy inside. Sauce went great with the tofu. The steamed veggie dumplings had a good texture for the wrapping and the veggies tasted fresh and hot. We over-​ordered and had to take leftovers home!
Overall the experience was great. Light, healthy, delicious meal, friendly service and reasonable prices. Highly recommend this restaurant for locals and expats in the Wanchai area!

Ok, another good place to lunch for people working in Wanchai~
Happy Veggie is a restaurant opened by social enterprise. It aims at offering employment opportunities for people with hearing challenges. Its Chinese name in Cantonese means ‘enjoy farming’ when you literally read the words, but it is also a homonym to ‘enjoy being deaf’ at the same time, a thoughtful pun~
As the English name suggests, the restaurant serves vegetarian food, cooked in Chinese style. The food served here are mainly home-​cooked style though so they are less intense than the regular ‘Chiense-​take-​away’ oily and flavorful taste (you know what I mean). I have some friends who’d go vegetarian a few times a month (some for religious cause, some for heath, and some for environmental cause), and we often come here when they want breakaways from salads. (I love salads personally, but it’s good to have variety, no?)
The place is operated in a canteen style and you need to self-​serve. Since practically all workers have a certain degree of hearing difficulties, they give you an order sheet so you can tick the dish you have chosen and hand it to the cashier to pay — for people who can’t read Chinese, no sweat, they have an actual sample of ‘Today’s menu’ displayed on a table and it’s all numbered, so you can still choose with ease. You pay less than 50 bucks for 1 set lunch, in which you can choose 3 types out of 6 dishes available for the day, and the set also comes with 1 soup and free-​flow rice. If you like, you can also choose to add a piece of Chinese veggie dessert with minor addition in price. After that, you can get your food at the serving counter & head to the free-​seating area.
The place is indeed quite crowded at lunch hour, but all the workers are very helpful and friendly, and that’s part of the joy you get in a meal besides the food, when you visit a social enterprise. I hope I can schedule some time to try a dinner here too, the food photos look quite delish in the menu — and it’s bilingual too.
(On a side note, I saw in a TVB program that a famous HK star Eric Tsang (曾志偉) is one of the funding owner of the place.)