The restaurant’s strongest quality is clarity. Rice, cut and temperature lead the meal. No theatrics, curious oddities or instagrammable showpieces. Kumogaku belongs to Hong Kong’s newer wave of specialist sushi restaurants rather than to a famous Japanese branch network. The restaurant runs on local ownership and execution, with Japanese seafood and Edomae structure adapted to Hong Kong diners.

The name and room are understated. Diners sit close to the chef, and the experience depends on the sequence of otsumami and nigiri rather than a large dining-room production.

Chan Wing-kin is the Hong Kong-born chef. Chan entered the kitchen at 18, but he treated the work as just a job until he sat on the customer side of an omakase meal. That experience changed his view of sushi and pushed him towards the craft.

Before opening Sushi Kumogaku, Chan spent close to a decade in established sushi restaurants. The clearest connection is Mori Tomoaki, whose Mori 醍醐 counter preceded Kumogaku at the H Code location. Chan worked under Mori for years and later became head chef before taking over the space when Mori Tomoaki closed and Chef Chan rebranded it to Sushi Kumogaku.

Chan’s Hong Kong background shapes the service. Local diners often come to omakase restaurants for celebrations and may not know Japanese counter etiquette. Chan uses Cantonese conversation to make the room less formal, while adding more otsumami and cooked dishes than a stripped-down Edomae progression might contain.

His style uses scoring, ageing and gentle sauces with restraint. That leaves the rice, temperature and fish texture exposed. Kumogaku feels more local than a strict Japanese outpost, but more restrained than Hong Kong counters that foreground sauces, luxury toppings or overt Western technique. It sits closer to an independent chef-led sushiya than a branded hotel operation.

Salmon roe as an amuse bouche. Deceptively simple, with yuzu or ponzu adding a hit of acid and undertones of bonito broth.

The second dish was flounder fin and uni served with wasabi and salt.

The individual appetisers came between the nigiri, which gave the meal a different rhythm from a straight sushi progression. The nigiri started almost right away, with a piece of cuttlefish nigiri topped with salt.

The legs of the cuttlefish were grilled and served separately.

Sea Bream nigiri

Simmered octopus in a sweet mustard-seed sauce. A very unusual preparation, and one of the more memorable appetisers.

Sweet botan shrimp.

Pacific Saury.

The highlight. Rich monkfish liver in a sweet caramel sauce, finished with a sprinkle of sansho pepper.

A riceless maki roll with trout, chives and pickled ginger. It reminded me of a similar dish at Nikuya Tanaka.

Chutoro.

The chef handed me a maki roll with grilled barracuda wraped in nori. Given the reputation of the fish, I was expecting it to be tough, dense, aggressive. Surprisingly, it was incredibly light and fluffy.

Simmered abalone, a classic omakase course, served with a slightly bitter and complex abalone-liver sauce.

As is traditional, we received a small ball of sushi rice to mop up the remaining abalone sauce rather than letting it go to waste.

Roasted sea bass.

A giant butterflied clam, topped with yuzu

Tempura fish in a sweet ponzu sauce, topped with shaved bonito flakes. The fish was wrapped around a shishito pepper. Another unconventional, but absolutely delicious dish.

The classic uni gunkan.

Light, fluffy grilled anago nigiri. One of my favourites when it is in season.

Egg castella marked the end of the meal. Two large pieces, light and fluffy, with sweetness and a savoury undertone. One of the best tamago I have ever had.

The customary bowl of miso soup.

There was a choice of fresh Japanese peach or milk pudding for dessert. My companions were full, so I tried both. Both were excellent.

Overall, I was impressed by Sushi Kumogaku. The restaurant lacks some of the polish of its longer-established neighbours. A few courses went to the wrong table, and the wait staff missed a few details during the meal. The nigiri doesn’t follow the conventional progression, and serving mixed courses of appetizers between pieces of nigiri definately changed up the pacing a bit. Still, the food punched above its weight, and I understand why Kumogaku is becoming one of Hong Kong’s more popular omakase restaurants. Worth returning!

Total Damage: HK$11,400/3 people

The format is a tasting-menu restaurant with a giant marble counter facing the open show kitchen. 25 diners sit at the counter, while tables for up to four and a private room for eight provide other options. The food is technically polished and each course is carefully explained.

Chef Cheng was born in Hong Kong and spent nearly two decades working in Canada and the US before returning home to open VEA. He has said that he watched Jamie Oliver and Emeril Lagasse while living in San Francisco, then started cooking professionally in Toronto while studying at George Brown College. Chef Jason Bangerter taught him knife skills at Auberge du Pommier, while Chef Anthony Walsh showed him how to respect local ingredients at Canoe. At 21, Cheng moved to New York and joined Daniel, Chef Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant. By the time he returned to Hong Kong, he had spent roughly two decades around French cooking in Canada and the United States.

He opened VEA after running the kitchen for a period at Liberty Private Works. The menu places fish maw, abalone, sea cucumber, preserved vegetables, Chinese wine, local seafood and childhood flavours inside a French fine-dining structure.

VEA calls the concept “Chinese x French”. French technique provides the sauces, structure and presentation, while Chinese ingredients, seasonings and memories provide much of the flavour vocabulary.

While VEA remains the clearest expression of Cheng’s French training, Wing, which opened one floor below in 2021, takes a more direct route through Chinese classics and regional references. Cheng has described VEA as the restaurant where his French background remains most visible, while Wing focuses on what he calls “boundaryless Chinese” cooking.

An envelope awaited us when we arrived.

Breaking the seal, inside was a card explaining VEA’s culinary concept, along with the menu for the night.

In a remarkable show of salesmanship, we were presented with a display showing the each of the supplements for the menu. I’ve never seen a fish maw of that size, and an abalone wellington sounded like an interesting concept, so we decided to do both.

I could not drink, so I ordered from the tea menu: the rice-scented aged pu’er. I am a sucker for anything with a pandan flavour.

The amuse-bouche was a bok choi and salted-fish doughnut with a light bok choi and salted-fish sabayon. The restaurant placed a music box under the display. It played a Chinese love song Chef Cheng had used when he proposed. The dish came from that song, and two rolls of parchment carried its lyrics beside the sauce.

The next course was a seasonal green asparagus tart with the asparagus cut into a fine lattice. Herbal, earthy and fresh, with springy asparagus and a crisp, intricate structure.

The next display showed Taiwanese water bamboo, lily bulb and six-month-aged Hangzhou caviar.

The lily bulb tartare came with a layer of dashi jelly, snap peas and broad beans in a smoked coconut-milk sauce. The textures worked well: crisp snap peas against soft lily bulb. A great start.

The next dish highlighted preserved salted lemon, a classic Hong Kong ingredient.

Day-aged red prawn sat on avocado with two forms of preserved salted lemon: a gel over the prawns and a sorbet beside it. A bright sweet-and-sour kiwi and coriander sauce finished the dish.

Pan-seared Japanese flounder barely touched by fire and came with Japanese turnip, watercress gel, turnip purée, Longjing tea gel and a buttery sauce. The fish stayed delicate, while the different preparations of turnip gave the course some weight.

The next course focused on rehydrated sea cucumber. I was surprised by how much it expanded after several days in water.

The restaurant misted the sea cucumber with Chinese yellow wine at the table.

The giant piece came stuffed with tiger-prawn mousseline and more aged yellow wine, then sat in a deeply savoury crustacean sauce. Mini mantou arrived on the side for dipping into the extra sauce.

The hawthorn sorbet acted as a palate cleanser. It recalled the hawthorn-flavoured biscuits that are common Hong Kong childhood snacks.

The next course used Noirmoutier potatoes, harvested for one week each year. They had a mineral, salty flavour and came with a sauce made from 20 year aged Chinese turnip.

VEA prepared the potatoes in two ways: small chips and a roasted whole potato. Black truffle and a thick chicken jus finished the dish. I did not expect to like it as much as I did.

The fish maw supplement replaced the potato for my companion. Like the sea cucumber, the fish maw had gone through several days of rehydration. VEA prepared the sauce in front of us with caviar, chives and toasted quinoa. It added flavour to a rich, gelatinous ingredient without overwhelming it.

To cut through the richness before the next dish, a shot of Iron Buddha tea.

The abalone and sweetbread Wellington arrived next.

Once cut open, the pastry showed Candy Heart abalone layered with sweetbread, wrapped in fennel sausage and duxelles before the pastry went around it. A thick abalone sauce, enriched with fish maw, came alongside.

This was the only miss of the night. My companion found the abalone tough and lacking in flavour. Another day of rehydration may have helped.

The watermelon, lychee and osmanthus pre-dessert brought some fresh sweetness.

VEA then served an off-menu dessert with pear chunks, pear sorbet and cooked sugar shaped to resemble bird’s nest.

The mushroom tart was unusual. Thin slices of raw mushroom sat over sautéed mushroom cream, pine nuts and mushroom ice cream. It made for a light, earthy dessert.

The petit four was condensed-milk pudding inside rice mochi, sandwiched between flaky crackers.

The final dessert played with a Hong Kong street-food classic: a French crêpe wrapped around coconut ice cream and crystal sugar. Absolutely delicious, and a great end to the meal.

As we left, the restaurant gave us a marshmallow cookie to take home.

After trying Wing, I could not wait to try VEA. Wing is the restaurant that is always booked out, while VEA is supposed to be the flagship. I understand the booking situation now. Wing has limited public seating, while VEA has more flexibility with its larger counter and dining-room arrangements.

The contrast between the two restaurants was clear. Wing felt more familiar and more Cantonese, with a formal Chinese dining-room experience. VEA felt more like an event, using Cantonese ingredients and references while placing French technique and the tasting-menu format at the centre.

I ended up preferring VEA. The meal felt more whimsical, and both restaurants executed at a high level. Wing is the stronger expression of modern Chinese cooking, but VEA gave me the more memorable evening.

Total Damage: HK$8,500/2 people

Returned to Don Pedro again, and it’s as good as always. It’s a fairly limited menu, but every single item is good. The tomato salad is particular killer.

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty quiet month. Doing a lot more cooking at home, finding inspiration from flavour profiles and techniques I’ve encountered at all these amazing restaurants I’ve been to.

The restaurant made history in the inaugural Michelin Guide Hong Kong and Macau, becoming the first Chinese restaurant to receive three stars. It held that rating for fourteen years. Michelin reduced it to two stars in 2023, and it remains at two stars in the 2026 guide. That is a disappointment, but Lung King Heen is still operating at the top end of Hong Kong Cantonese dining.

Four Seasons built the restaurant around Chef Chan Yan Tak, who came out of retirement to lead the kitchen. Chan started working in kitchens as a teenager and learned through restaurants rather than formal culinary school. His career took him through Dai Sam Yuen, Fook Lam Moon and Lai Ching Heen before he arrived at Lung King Heen.

Chan spent much of his senior career at Lai Ching Heen in the former Regent Hong Kong. He joined as sous chef in 1984 and became executive chef about a year later, staying for around fifteen years. He helped turn it into an internationally recognised Cantonese restaurant.

After his wife died, Chan left the industry to look after his children. Alan Tsui, a former Regent colleague who later became general manager of the Four Seasons project, persuaded him to return..

The cooking is recognisably Cantonese, with a fine-dining finish. Sauces are controlled, seasoning is restrained and the presentation is modern without turning the food into a design exercise. Brilliant execution for classic Cantonese dishes tell you more about the kitchen than any new fusion novelty .

The tea menu was fairly extensive, with a good selection of exotic aged pu-er teas. I went with an unorthodox choice, a Lapsang Souchong smoked over pine needles. An elaborate tea ceremony followed with them washing and preparing the tea in front of us.

The amuse-bouche was deceptively simple: cordyceps mushrooms tossed with mala chilli oil and sesame seeds.

Some cashews kept us company while we worked through the extensive menu. We skipped the tasting menu and ordered a la carte, choosing a mix of seasonal specialities and signature dishes.

Off the seasonal menu, the deep-fried oysters came in a light, crisp batter. Well-executed but fairly uneventful.

The sliced abalone with red jellyfish and asparagus was all about texture: tender abalone, crunchy jellyfish and springy asparagus. Very lightly seasoned, but the point was really to highlight the different textures.

One of Lung King Heen’s signatures is the massive wok-fried sea cucumber with leeks in abalone sauce. It is a substantial dish, with the giant gelantious sea cucumber slathered in the rich sauce with plenty of wok hei. A huge hit!

The braised oxtail was another seasonal dish. It arrived as one massive piece of oxtail, slow-cooked in a rich, gelatinous sauce. Flavourful, tender and full of collagen and rich mouthfeel. I underestimated how filling this dish would be.

The fish maw casserole is one of the restaurant’s most famous dishes. It came with huge pieces of rehydrated fish maw, abalone, shrimp, scallops, shiitake mushrooms and bok choi in a rich oyster and abalone sauce.

We finished with seafood fried rice containing shredded crab meat, shrimp and a blast of wok hei.

We were completely stuffed by this point, deciding to pack half the fish maw casserole for the lunch the next day. The waiter did warn us subtly while we were ordering, deciding to reduce our fried rice order to half an order instead of giving us the full order.

This was one of the best Chinese meals I had this year. It comfortably beat most of the other hotel Chinese banquet restaurants. I much preferred Lung King Heen to Lai Ching Heen, Rùn, Tin Lung Heen and even three-starred T’ang Court.

Ordering a la carte was the right decision. We got to choose the dishes that interested us, and the final bill was far lower than I expected given the ingredients and the setting.

Total damage: HKD $3,600/2 people

The hotel opened in 2019, with Rùn as its flagship Chinese restaurant. The dining room takes its design cues from a Chinese tea pavilion. The result feels quieter and more residential than the grand hotel Chinese restaurants around Central, yet the service still has the polish and staffing of a large luxury hotel.

Chef Hung grew up in Hong Kong and has more than three decades of hotel-kitchen experience. Before joining Rùn, he worked at Cuisine Cuisine at The Mira and Man Wah at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong. His cooking follows the classic Cantonese repertoire: wok cookery, roasting, steaming, soup work and dim sum. The kitchen adds modern presentation and occasional contemporary pairings, but this remains a restaurant for ordering a Cantonese meal rather than a chef’s tasting menu.

The dining room was packed for a Wednesday night. We skipped the tasting menu and ordered a selection of signature dishes from the à la carte menu.

The amuse-bouche was a sweet vinegar jelly with pig ear. The jelly brought sweetness and acidity; the pig ear added crunch and spring. Deep-fried tofu filled with minced shrimp followed, with a crisp, spongy shell and a warm, gooey centre.

The smoked foie gras was one most unique dishes at Rùn. Dense slabs of foie gras came smoked over applewood, with deep-fried mantou and homemade chilli jelly. The smoke was strong without burying the foie gras, while the mantou gave the dish a sweet, crispy fried counterpoint.

Another appetiser paired sliced fish maw with celtuce, mountain yam and several kinds of wood-ear fungus. Sichuan pepper oil finished the dish. The mix of textures worked, although the foie gras left a stronger impression.

In an unorthodox move, my companion decided they wanted dessert in the middle of dinner, and Run gladly obliged with an order of egg tarts. They came promptly and were surpringly good.

The double-boiled abalone with young coconut and goji berries was the highlight of the meal. The kitchen cooked the abalone in a rich consommé inside a young coconut, using the coconut water for a three-hour double boil. The broth carried a concentrated coconut flavour, and the abalone had the texture expected from a dish at this level.

Braised wintermelon came with shrimp cakes and dried shrimp in a thick, flavourful sauce. It was a good supporting vegetable dish.

The deep-fried local Hong Kong three-yellow chicken was another highlight. The skin sat close to separating from the tender meat, and the fat had rendered clear of the flesh.

The Fukien fried rice was dry rather than sauce-heavy, with plenty of wok hei. Great execution.

A palate cleanser before the petit four, a cold brewed lychee tea.

Some butter cookies for the petit four…

… and concentrated jelly made from hibiskiss flowers.

Rùn gave us a good meal with three memorable dishes: the smoked foie gras, the young-coconut abalone and the fish-maw appetiser. The restaurant would not sit at the top of my list, but worth another visit.

Total Damage: 2900 HKD/2 people

Wing has become a global 50 Best darling, ranking 2nd on its list of Asia’s top restaurants, while the Michelin Guide still refuses to award it a star. That gap forms part of the story. Wing’s reputation rests on its service, personalisation, confidence in Chinese fine dining more than Michelin validation.

Wing opened in 2021 as Cheng’s second restaurant after VEA. VEA opened in 2016 and built its reputation around Cheng’s “Chinese x French” philosophy: French technique, Chinese ingredients, and tasting-menu structure. Wing reverses that emphasis. Here, Cheng works inside Chinese cuisine rather than using Chinese references to complicate French cuisine.

Wing grew out of an invite-only midnight-supper test kitchen at VEA. Cheng used those dinners to test whether his Chinese dining memories and French fine-dining training could produce a distinct restaurant below the successful one upstairs.

Its philosophy as “Chinese x French”, with each dish placing Chinese elements, heritage, and memories inside a French technique frame. Cheng’s approach is the evolution of Chinese cuisine, using quality ingredients and refined finesse to make dishes inventive while keeping them rooted in tradition. While VEA expresses Chinese memory through French fine dining, Wing handles Chinese cuisine with fine-dining precision.

Wing uses Chinese dishes, Chinese textures, and Chinese table logic, then sharpens them with modern fine-dining service. The kitchen draws from the eight great Chinese cuisines and the cooking is selective and chef-led.

Cheng wants guests to leave feeling that they have eaten a Chinese meal, with the warmth and precision associated with European fine dining. Wing keeps some shared-dish logic, then removes friction through portioning and guidance.

The restaurant works best as Cheng’s homecoming project. He uses fine-dining discipline to make Chinese dishes precise and luxurious without turning them into French food.

When we arrived, it was clear why reservations are nearly impossible to get. Apart from the private rooms, which come with hefty minimum charges, the public dining room has only four tables.

A decorative dragon display awaited us at the table.

Shots of wintermelon and honeydew tea as an aperitif.

Because reservations are so difficult to secure, we pre-ordered the premium tasting menu with nearly all the optional supplements. That may have been a mistake. There was an enormous amount of food even before the supplements, and it was all excellent.

Some of the largest cashews I have ever seen arrived at the table, dusted with Chinese five-spice powder to keep us company while we waited for the first course.

A display showed the exotic ingredients used in the meal: giant botan shrimp, a Macau sole, soft-shell turtle, sugar cane, Alaskan king crab, two kinds of sea cucumber, a crystal egg, which is a white version of the normally black century egg, razor clams, fresh sugar snap peas and dried tangerine peel.

The appetisers arrived together in an intricately arranged display.

Firstly, two botan shrimp, served “drunken” in a sweetened soy and Chiu chow sauce.

Thinly sliced razor clams came topped with kelp and pickled Yunnan chillies.

An interesting variation on a classic Sichuan appetiser: century egg and tofu in mala sauce. Instead of the usual black century egg, Wing preserved the egg’s translucent white. The tofu was deceptive as well. This dish usually uses soft silken tofu, but Wing took some inspiration from Okinawa and used jimami tofu made from peanuts, giving it a slight springiness and chewiness uncharacteristic of normal tofu.

There was another surprise. Once we had eaten the century egg and tofu, the staff brought out a mouthful of noodles to mix with the remaining mala sauce, leaving no sauce behind.

The final starter in the display was a tender quartered asparagus spear, lightly poached and served in a green Sichuan pepper sauce. It left the characteristic Sichuan numbness on the tongue.

Our drinks arrived at this point. I chose a semi-dry Riesling, while my companion ordered Champagne. I usually find Riesling quite sweet, but this one had excellent balance.

We could smell the first optional supplement before we saw it. Wing’s Hong Kong variation on deep-fried prawn toast adds a generous amount of stinky tofu. The toast came with a sweet hoisin sauce and a savoury Chiu Chow chilli paste. Once we got past the pungent aroma, the combination of sweetness, heat, and deep savoury flavour hit hard. Delicious!

Taking more inspiration from the Sichuan region, Wing’s version of the hot and sour soup added soft shell turtle, which was largely unnoticable, but also added fresh lemon zest microplaned on top of the soup, which was a really unique, and welcome addition.

Moving into the main courses, the steamed Macau sole was brought out for display before being portioned and blistered with hot oil. It was topped with coriander and several varieties of spring onion. The kitchen then blistered the fish with boiling oil cooked down with sweet soy sauce.

This was one of the highlights of the meal. The fish was perfectly cooked. Steamed fish can be difficult to judge, with a narrow line between undercooked and overcooked determined by the thickness of the fish. Wing got it exactly right. My only complaint was that I wanted more.

The Alaskan king crab was also brought out for display before being portioned. Two pieces of leg meat came with pan-fried crispy cheung fun in a crab-meat and innard sauce.

Moving into the reds, we had a fairly light-bodied red, but otherwise forgettable.

The next dish reminded me of the mala lobster spring roll at Duddell’s: an intensely crisp, airy, light spring-roll shell filled with rehydrated giant sea cucumber. This one was much better than the one at Duddell’s.

Absolutely delicious. The gelatinous texture of the sea cucumber contrasted with the crisp, light shell. This is one of Wing’s signature dishes and it’s pretty clear why. This was one of my highlights of the meal.

Before the pigeon, a shot of refreshing chrysanthemum tea cleansed the palate and cleared the heavy flavours and slick mouthfeel left by the sea cucumber.

I normally avoid baby pigeon, quail, and other small birds. The effort rarely seems worth the amount of meat. This dish changed my mind. Cooked in sugar-cane syrup and gently smoked, the pigeon had crisp skin, juicy meat, and perfect seasoning.

The second optional supplement was a braised whole sea cucumber in mapo tofu. It was an unusual combination. Sea cucumber has little flavour of its own and absorbs the flavours around it, so it is rarely cooked in a spicy broth. The pairing worked surprisingly well.

The spicy, gelatinous sea cucumber was served on its own. Another big hit and highlight.

The mapo tofu came with a spoonful of rice.

A small vegetable dish reset the palate: sweet snap peas cooked with dried bamboo shoots in thick pork lard. Springy, floral, flavourful, and surprisingly good.

The final main course took inspiration from Taiwan: a warm, thick beef soup with slow-cooked beef tendon, brisket, and raw slices of fatty Wagyu. It had a slick mouthfeel, intense richness, and the characteristic flavour of braised turnip, all served over flat rice noodles. A soupy noodle dish is an unconventional starch for the end of a Chinese banquet. Traditionally, the final starch is dry, while soup noodles are often served as a meal on their own. It was delicious nonetheless.

The mignardises arrived before dessert: rice mochi filled with walnut paste made from Hangzhou walnuts.

Small doughnuts filled with salted duck-egg custard.

Dessert was a traditional sweetened soup made from ground mung beans. Wing infused it with black truffle and topped it with slices of fresh black truffle. The take was unique, with an almost overwhelming truffle flavour. It worked well enough, but by then we were too full to eat much more.

To add insult to injury, the waiter arrived with one final surprise: a trolley of fresh fruit. Japanese peaches, baby apricots, lychees at the height of the season, watermelon, and pineapples - each sweeter than the last.

I can see why it’s nearly impossible to make a reservation to Wing. The four tables aside, this was probably the best meal I’ve had in Hong Kong this year, and tying with 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana for my favourite experiences in Hong Kong ever. The style of dining, using Chinese influences in Western-format dining reminds me of Tate Dining Room (RIP), but Wing’s execution stays closer to Chinese dining, using Chinese dishes, and not merely Chinese ingredients in the tasting menu format. This one is a must return, and I look forward to trying Vicky Cheng’s VEA as a comparison.

Total Damage: 10k HKD/2 people

Found myself briefly in Shanghai, where there were massive clusters of artisanal coffee shops. I found my cafe vienna, while my companions enjoyed the Shanghai take on a Vietnamese egg coffee.

One standout dish I had was the Beggar’s chicken, a slow cooked chicken wrapped in parchment paper and left to cook in its own juices.

A really extremely interesting take on pigeon - crisped up skin, juicy meat gently smoked on tea leaves. One of the better pigeon dishes I’ve had recently.

A Shanghainese specialty - raw drunken crabs. Yeah. I still don’t get this one. Wasn’t a fan.

The room has had a full reset. Sevva’s dark interiors have given way to an ornate French Riviera look, with sweeping curves, a raw bar, but keeping the large terrace looking over the harbour and Central. Malherbe Paris has leaned into brasserie and luxury-train references. The view remains the main event.

I have been staying dry lately, so I started with sparkling tea from Tea Saicho.

Warm sourdough with walnuts and sunflower seeds arrived with salted French butter. A good start.

For starters, we ordered the Mediterranean octopus and cuttlefish with grilled artichokes, romesco and crisp ham. Both were cooked properly and the portion sizing was generous. The trio of crudos followed on a scallop shell: red shrimp with cherry tomatoes and miniature mozzarella, scallop with shiso and watermelon, and yellowtail with pickled cucumber. Fresh, clean and refreshing!

For mains, I had the Poulet Basquiaise, a slow-braised basque stew with chicken tomatoes onions and basil. For a local touch, they featured Hong Kong’s famous three yellow chicken. Chicken breast has a habit of drying out, but slowly braised, then managed to keep it moist and juicy.

My companion ordered the Saint-Jacques with saffron risotto. That was the best dish of the meal: very fresh scallops and a rich, well-seasoned risotto.

Charred Brussels sprouts with Parmesan was a great side. Worth ordering.

For dessert, the fraise rose paired a traditional blancmange with rose ice cream, strawberry sorbet and lychee granita.

Petit fours arrived after: jellies, chocolates and warm madeleines straight from the oven.

The meal was good. Nothing went wrong, nothing was amazing. It was just very “blah”. There wasn’t really a lot to say. Nothing made me want to return for another meal. Terrace Boulud has improved the food offering in the old Sevva space, but the formula has not changed much. Go for drinks on the terrace on a warm day and enjoy the view. The kitchen is a supporting act.

Total Damage: 1850 HKD / 2 people

It opened in late 2021 under Chef Miguel Gallo, initially as a more formal tasting-menu restaurant built around smoke, hot and cold dishes, and the grill. Jaime Ortola took over in 2022 after La Paloma and moved it towards a la carte, lunch sets, brunch and steak. That feels like the current restaurant: good produce, serious beef buying, and enough fire to keep the room from becoming another dark, polished steakhouse.

The cooking relies on wood, binchotan, a Mibrasa grill and a brick oven. Fireside still leans hard on the open-fire language, but the kitchen handles the smoke with some restraint.

We arrived at the fifth floor restaurant and were greeted by a flaming centerpiece highlighting the live-fire nature of the cooking.

Passing the aging room with the steaks cut out for the night on display.

Additional primals in various stages of dry aging were sitting in the meat lockers behind the display counter.

We went with a larger group and booked the Tuesday steak tasting: five steaks from different countries, served for groups of four or more. They brought out the cuts before cooking. On the left was a wet-aged Uruguay Patagonia Angus striploin; on the right, four dry-aged ribeyes: John Stone Irish Hereford, Italian Marango, Danish Jersey dairy cow and nine-year-old Spanish Rubia Gallega.

For five people, each steak looked closer to 600 to 800 grams than a tasting portion. There was no shortage of beef.

The grill was already going by the time the whole table had arrived. Looking at the amount of steak lined up, and the lack of anything else, we ordered a few starters while we waited.

The warm sourdough came with whipped smoked butter.

The blue belly shrimp crudo came with the heads fried crisp and an escabeche sauce.

The burnt crab roll: charcoal brioche, crab, and a generous layer of uni. It gave the meal some lift before the steak parade started.

When the first two steaks arrived, the restaurant asked us to choose our weapons. We soon asked for sauces, horseradish, anything to help cut through the incoming volume of meat. The chef refused. His view was that the steaks needed to be tasted with salt alone, then he relented enough to send a small extra dish of salt.

I understand the argument. The tasting exists to compare the beef. Still, after several large cuts, salt is not much of a strategy.

The first pair was the Uruguay Angus striploin and the Irish Hereford ribeye, served with blistered padrón peppers under an unidentifable cheesy sauce. The striploin was leaner and cleaner. The Hereford had more marbling and a deeper beef flavour. Both landed at a proper medium rare: a thick striploin and a thinner ribeye, perfectly executed.

The first two steaks were served with some blistered padron peppers topped with a unidentifable cheesy sauce.

Then came the Italian Marango and the Jersey dairy cow, both ribeyes, with a small head of charred butter lettuce and ponzu mayo. The Marango was my favourite of the five. It was extraordinarily fatty, almost too much so, but the richness carried real depth rather than just grease. The Jersey was also excellent, with the lactic sweetness you expect from dairy cow.

The Rubia Gallega came last. At nine years old, it was less tender and less fatty than the earlier ribeyes, but had a concentrated, savoury beef flavour.

Fireside served it with smashed potatoes, aioli and herbs. By then, the potatoes felt less like a side and more like a rescue operation.

Dessert was lemon sorbet over dried coconut flakes. Clean and useful after that much fat.

Fireside sources its meat well. Its beef list runs from Australian Wagyu and Korean Hanwoo to Italian Carima Frisian cow, Irish Hereford, Spanish Rubia Gallega and El Capricho, German Simmental dairy cow and Portuguese Minhota ox. The steak tasting gave us a real sense of the differences between the cuts: texture, fat, flavour and ageing all came through. The kitchen cooked every one of them perfectly.

But the format is hard to love. The meal became mouthful after mouthful of beef and salt. There were two small vegetable and potato accompaniments, but they did not balance the scale of the steak. I would take two-thirds of the beef, more sides, and a few sauces without hesitation. It would make for a more relaxed dinner and a better conversation.

The tasting prioritises a sourcing exercise over a good night out. Fireside can buy serious meat, explain where it came from, and cook it well over fire. Five people can enjoy a steak comparison without treating it like an endurance event. It’s a shame, because the sides were absolutely excellent. I would’ve just preferred a lot more of them.

For a normal dinner, I would go a la carte. Order one or two cuts to share, keep the crab roll and shrimp crudo, add vegetables and potatoes, and let the grill do its job. Fireside has more personality than the usual Central steakhouse and the cooking is better than the whole live-fire performance suggests. Just do not book the tasting unless you want an awful lot of beef.

Total Damage 8200 HKD/5 people

The restaurant opened in 1984 as Lai Ching Heen, became Yan Toh Heen during the InterContinental Hong Kong years, before returning to the Lai Ching Heen name when the hotel reverted to Regent. This is not a new restaurant trying to borrow history from an old one. It is the same Cantonese institution moving through different hotel-brand eras.

The continuity runs through Executive Chef Lau Yiu Fai, who joined the hotel in 1980 and was part of the original opening team. He came up through old Hong Kong Cantonese kitchens, including Tai Sam Yuen and Fook Lam Moon, before moving through Vancouver, Tin Shan Palace, and then the Regent / InterContinental room.

Head Chef Cheng Man Sang is the other half of the story. He has worked alongside Lau for decades, and current coverage frames the restaurant as a Lau-Cheng partnership rather than a one-man room. This is cooking built around consistency, temperature control, seafood handling, dim sum, roasting, banquet-grade polish, and service choreography.

The grammar is luxury Cantonese: crab, lobster, scallop, abalone, Hokkaido seafood, Kagoshima wagyu, suckling pig, Peking duck, premium tea, house XO, caviar touches, and black truffle where useful. It’s less about reinvention than the kitchen keeping a difficult form of hotel Cantonese cooking intact through ownership changes, room redesigns, and dining-fashion cycles.

You enter through a long jade hallway. Jade is the recurring motif, and the restaurant leans into it hard.

The hallway eventually opens into a dark dining room facing the Hong Kong skyline. A slightly theatrical atmosphere: controlled lighting, polished service, harbour view, quiet money.

We went with the Prestigious tasting menu, which is effectively a greatest-hits menu built around signatures developed over the past 40 years.

The amuse was a small vegetarian dish of wheat gluten, Chinese mushrooms, and bamboo shoots, lightly marinated. Fine, but mostly a palate-setter.

The appetiser had two pieces of crunchy jellyfish, pickled in a slightly sweet and sour liquid with a little heat from pickled peppers. Beside it was a meaty scallop in a slightly soggy shell, topped with caviar. The jellyfish was the better half of the plate.

Then came the golden stuffed crab shell, similar in idea to the version at T’ang Court. Lai Ching Heen stuffs the shell with local red and green crab meat, cooks it down in a rich onion and milk sauce, then serves it gratin-style. It is old-fashioned, rich, and a classic banquet dish.

The main event was Buddha Jumps Over the Wall. This was by far the best dish of the meal. The soup came as a deep chicken consomme packed with classical luxury Chinese ingredients: fish maw, abalone, sea cucumber, dried clams, black chicken, mushrooms, and bird’s nest. The bird’s nest gave it that gelatinous, slippery texture without making the soup heavy or muddy.

The dish is a classic Fuzhou banquet dish from Fujian cuisine. It’s less as normal soup and more a luxury braised casserole served in broth, all slow-cooked until the broth absorbs the flavour of land and sea.

The best-known lineage of this dish ties it to Juchunyuan, a historic Fuzhou restaurant founded in 1865, and chef Zheng Chunfa. The Juchunyuan version is now national-level intangible cultural heritage, prepared with more than thirty ingredients and seasonings, layered into a Shaoxing wine jar and slow-cooked over low heat.

The name itself comes from another Chinese food legend: the aroma was so strong that even Buddhist monks, bound by vegetarian discipline, would jump over the monastery wall to eat it.

It was intensely savoury, deeply aromatic, and extremely filling. The dish had the density and confidence that the rest of the menu did not always reach. This was the reason to be there.

The meal continued with wok-fried lobster, vegetables, and a minced cuttlefish patty wrapped around a Hiroshima oyster. The lobster had good wok hei and was a clear hit, although the portion was a bit small. The cuttlefish patty had the right springy texture and the oyster gave it a bit of interest, but it did not leave much of a mark.

For the main, Kagoshima wagyu came three ways. The cheek was braised until fall-apart tender in a marsala sauce with turnip, radish, and spring onion. The tongue came as thin slices, deep-fried in a salt-and-pepper batter. The third part was crispy egg noodles topped with a thick sauce of bean sprouts, spring onion, carrot, and minced wagyu.

All three are familiar Chinese restaurant forms. Nothing here was especially surprising, but the execution was solid. The cheek was the best of the three. The tongue was pleasant enough.

Dessert moved outside the usual Cantonese register: avocado cream and honeydew melon popsicle with fresh passion fruit sauce and strawberry jelly. This did not work for me. The avocado felt forced, and the whole plate seemed more interested in being unexpected than being delicious.

The petit fours returned to safer ground: sesame roll, steamed white sugar cake, and a delicate pineapple jelly shaped like a goldfish. Much better. Small, traditional, and well judged.

The Buddha Jumps Over the Wall anchored the meal. Without that dish, this would have felt like a polished but fairly standard luxury Cantonese banquet menu, the kind of thing you could imagine being served in a thousand high-end banquet halls across Hong Kong.

The kitchen is serious, the room has history, and the service is exactly what you expect from a Regent-level Cantonese institution. But on this menu, only the soup felt essential. The crab shell was good, the lobster was well cooked, and the wagyu was competent, but none of them would bring me back by themselves.

We also missed some of the restaurant’s other major signatures because they require pre-ordering and are better suited to a larger group, especially the suckling pig and Peking duck. That may be the better way to do Lai Ching Heen: come with more people, pre-order properly, and treat it like the grand Cantonese banquet hall it is.

Total damage: 4500 HKD/2 people.

The room fits the concept. The Baker & The Bottleman sits in the more polished, gentrified part of Wan Chai, surrounded by new restaurants and high-rise apartments.

MARROW takes over the upstairs space. It is dimly lit, intimate, and small, with a few tables around a bar-height centrepiece. More neighbourhood grill than luxury steakhouse.

Chef Chris Ma is the reason the pop-up is more interesting than another expensive meat concept. His background runs through serious kitchens: Cepage, Amber, NUR, Fish School, and TATE Dining Room. Fish School is probably the most useful reference point, since that restaurant was built around local fish, Hong Kong flavours, and daily sourcing. MARROW swaps seafood-first cooking for fire, meat, and odd cuts, but it keeps the same instinct.

The menu backs that up. The flavour language is very Hong Kong and regional: typhoon shelter crumbs, Sichuan seasoning, salted egg, Shaoxing wine, salted plum, fermented soy bean, and Taiwanese Magao pepper.

The Sichuan steak tartare was the strongest starter. It took a classic steak tartare and added a clean mala edge without turning the dish into a gimmick. Instead of toast, they served it with puffed beef tendon. Good execution, and very similar in spirit to the bone and flesh dish I remember from 1887.

The namesake dish was less successful. The Typhoon Shelter roasted bone marrow came as two pieces of bone marrow topped with fried garlic and spices. It should have been the dish that explained the whole restaurant: a Western grill-room object treated with a Hong Kong seafood-stall flavour profile. In practice, the fried garlic mix overpowered the marrow. Not a disaster, but disappointing given that this is the dish the restaurant is named after.

The blue crab rigatoni was cooked properly. The pasta was right, the sauce worked, and the crab was generous enough. The only miss was temperature. The picked crab felt like it had come straight from the fridge. Warming it first would have made a big difference.

Overall, pretty good for a brand-new pop-up. I was disappointed by the bone marrow, especially because it should be the signature dish, but the tartare, rigatoni, and chuck eye made up for it. Worth returning.

Total damage: HKD 1,350/2 people

Found myself drinking at a German bierhall and ordered myself a Bavarian pretzel. Auntie Anne’s this was not. Massive honking pretzel, served with a curry horseradish and aioli. Not as sweet, or salty as the American pretzel I’ve had so much. More just like… bread.

A fairly decent beef tartare at Rowley’s. Really heavy on the capers and gherkins.

Chef-owner Eric Räty is the centre of the restaurant. His background runs through Helsinki, Chez Dominique, Aqua in Wolfsburg, and Gray Kunz’s Cafe Gray Deluxe in Hong Kong. That lineage explains the cooking better than the easy label of Nordic-Japanese. Arbor does not feel like rustic Nordic food, and it does not feel like Japanese fine dining either. It is a Hong Kong tasting menu that borrows Nordic acidity, dairy, herbs, berries, smoke, and restraint, then runs those ideas through Japanese seafood, seaweed, caviar, wagyu, noodles, dashi, and fermentation.

The room supports that idea. Arbor means “tree” in Latin, and the restaurant leans into a calm forest mood: wood, soft lighting, muted luxury, no unnecessary chaos. The service is equally engineered. Wine director Sebastien Allano brings serious pedigree from La Tour d’Argent, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Four Seasons George V, Daniel, Le Bernardin, and Four Seasons Hong Kong. Head of operations Timothy Chan adds a Caprice and hotel-service spine. This is not a casual chef-led room pretending to be relaxed. It is a fully composed fine-dining machine.

We decided to go with the full nine-course tasting menu.

Dinner started with the new potato dish: potato and egg salad shaped like a piece of salmon nigiri, topped with a slice of salmon. It had a kick of horseradish, enough to cut through the richness without bullying the dish. It was one of the better openings of the meal because the idea was simple and the execution landed really well.

Next came a shot of rich, thick fish soup with dill. It was creamy and comforting, with the dill keeping it from becoming too heavy. Arbor’s Nordic side showed clearly here: dairy, fish, herbs, warmth, and a certain cool-weather logic, even in the middle of Hong Kong.

The somen dish moved the meal back towards Japan. Sweet tomato, slimy seaweed, abalone, and somen noodles made for a slippery, marine bowl. It was more about texture than punch. The abalone gave it weight, while the tomato brought sweetness and lift.

The eel pancake was one of the more interesting constructions. It came across a little like a summer roll: grilled eel, cured cucumber, herbs, and crisp fried herb leaves on top. The herbs and cucumber helped keep the eel from feeling too oily.

The bread course was a piping hot sourdough loaf with Japanese brown cheese and natto butter. This was an umami bomb. The butter had depth, funk, and savoury pull. We ended up finishing the entire loaf.

The scallop and caviar was the highlight of the night. The scallops were barely cooked, sweet, and tender, topped with caviar and served with crunchy fresh peas in a yoghurt and dill oil sauce. It had the balance Arbor is clearly chasing: luxury without heaviness, acidity without sharpness, and enough texture to stop the dish becoming soft luxury mush.

The Norwegian langoustine came on an egg mochi cake, topped with spicy pollock roe in a kimchi and langoustine-shell sauce. It was richer and louder than most of the meal. The mochi base gave it chew, the roe brought heat and salt, and the shell sauce gave it depth. It was a good dish, though not as clean as the scallop.

Before the mains, Arbor served a warm truffle dashi as a palate cleanser, with an assortment of mushrooms and sweet radish. “Palate cleanser” slightly undersells it. This was a heavily truffled broth course, closer to a small savoury interlude. The mushrooms and radish worked, and the warmth helped reset the meal before the main.

For the main course, I chose the Murray cod in mushroom sauce with yellow wine foam. It came with a fish and egg-white mousse, a juicy matsutake mushroom, and a rice crisp. The cod was well handled, but the mushroom was the real standout of the dish: plump, fragrant, and much more memorable than the fish. That says something about both the strength and weakness of the plate.

My companion chose the pigeon, which was the right call. It was juicy, properly seasoned, and served with peppercorns and a loose sausage of innards. The dish had more character than the cod. It also felt more like Arbor at its best: refined, but not timid.

The signature dessert was genmaicha and caviar: a crisp matcha shell filled with genmaicha ice cream and chewy Japanese mochi, with caviar adding salt. It sounds like a stunt, but it worked. The tea flavour, mochi texture, and salt from the caviar made it more interesting than a standard sweet finish.

The second dessert was peach and rhubarb, with a slice of peach set inside a yoghurt base, plus peach sorbet under crisp meringue. It was lighter, cleaner, and more conventionally pleasing than the genmaicha and caviar. The acidity from the rhubarb helped.

Then came aptly-named chocolate: a chocolate panna cotta topped with passionfruit and a homemade marshmallow. It was pleasant rather than revelatory, with the passionfruit doing the necessary work of cutting the chocolate.

The petit four was a freshly baked madeleine with lemon zest and Chantilly cream. A warm madeleine is hard to argue with, and this one did its job well. It ended the meal on a polished, familiar note.

Overall, Arbor is a neat concept, and the execution is clearly serious. The new potato and the scallop with caviar were the standouts. The pigeon was the better main. But the meal as a whole felt a little underwhelming. Nothing was badly done, and several dishes were very good, but not much stayed with me afterwards.

That is the caveat with Arbor. The restaurant has pedigree, technique, and a coherent point of view. It also has a tendency towards restraint that can make the meal feel more admirable than exciting. I liked parts of it. I would not rush back.

Total Damage: 4700 HKD/2 people

The structure is simple: one counter, one menu, no preview, no substitutions. You arrive in the lounge, start with canapes, move to the open show kitchen for the meal, then return to the lounge for petit fours. The full dinner takes about four hours. At the end, they hand you the menu you have just eaten. That format is the restaurant. Knappett builds the menu after the day’s produce arrives. He talks through each course as it lands. The counter has 20 seats around an open kitchen, so there is nowhere for the kitchen to hide and nowhere for the diner to drift.

The original site also housed Bubbledogs, Chang’s hotdog and Champagne bar. Bubbledogs ran for eight years, built a loyal following, and closed during the pandemic in 2021. The couple then folded the space into Kitchen Table as a lounge and cocktail bar.

Knappett’s background explains the restaurant better than any concept statement. His early kitchens included Restaurant Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road, The Berkeley under Marcus Wareing, The Ledbury under Brett Graham, Rick Stein’s Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Per Se in New York, and Noma in Copenhagen.

Per Se is where he met Chang. Noma gave him the foraging habit and the confidence to treat British countryside ingredients as serious luxury product.

Knappett was born in Soham, Cambridgeshire, trained at catering college, and still cooks behind the pass each service. Plenty of two-star restaurants of this age run on systems, but Kitchen Table still feels tied to the chef standing in front of you.

Chang is California-born and worked at Per Se and Noma before opening Bubbledogs and Kitchen Table with Knappett. She is one of London’s more recognisable sommeliers, with television work on Saturday Kitchen and Sunday Brunch and judging work at the Decanter World Wine Awards.

Both remain involved day to day.

Kitchen Table closed for renovation during the pandemic and reopened in July 2021. The old white tiles went. Walnut panelling came in. Oak replaced the metal counters. The seats were reupholstered. The U-shaped counter stayed.

The hallway gives you the idea before you sit down: British produce on display, including strawberries, asparagus, root vegetables and peppers.

The restaurant works with the best available each day. The menu is built around whatever arrives at its best, not around a fixed plan.

Along with the fixed menu, I decided to go with the non-alcoholic soft pairing.

Kitchen Table cooks modern British food with European technique. The Keller line shows in the polish and control. The Noma line shows in the foraging, the wild ingredients, and the willingness to build a course around what arrived that morning rather than what a menu document promised last month.

The cooking usually starts from one central British ingredient. Wild garlic, stinging nettles, blackberry leaves, bulrush stems, damsons, watercress, chickweed and pine needles have all appeared on menus. This is the better version of seasonal cooking: specific product, tight technique, no faux-rustic dressing. The trade-off is rigidity. If you want choice, this is the wrong room.

The first bite was served in the lounge - a raw oyster under cold granita, with pickled rhubarb and piped sour cream. Sweet granita, acidity, cold shellfish and tang. A clean opener.

They offered caviar and summer truffle supplements. I took both.

Cured mackerel came with charcoal tart, jalapeno apple puree and pepper. Light, sweet, and good on texture. The charcoal shell gave it a darker note without turning the dish heavy.

The famous chicken skin followed, with liver parfait. It is easy to see why this signature dish has lasted. Crisp skin, rich parfait, salt and fat in the right order. A small thing done with confidence. The dish has been on the menu since the restaurant opened and serves as its iconic calling card.

We then moved into the main dining room. In my case, there was no “we” in any meaningful sense: I was the only diner in that sitting, facing a 20-seat counter and the full kitchen.

The first soft pairing was a locally foraged sorrel fizz. That set the pattern. Herbs, wild leaves, acidity and British countryside flavours kept returning.

Melon granita came with compressed cucumber, apple marigold leaves and apple marigold oil. Cool, green, direct.

The trout aging in the fridge, used in the next dish.

Seven-day aged trout followed with raw almonds, green strawberry, foraged sorrel, elderflower, juniper and dill oil. The dish had cured fish, yoghurt creaminess, almond crunch and enough sharpness from the green strawberry and sorrel. Classic flavours, handled well.

The bread course was strong. Warm house rolls were brushed with cultured butter and sea salt, then served with creme fraiche, onion marmalade, chives and pickled wild garlic. It had the comforting richness you want from bread, with enough acid and allium to keep going back.

The next soft pairing was toasted barley and coconut water with roasted hay. Smoky coconut water sounds like a dare. It was more interesting than expected.

The caviar dish was the highlight of the meal. Raw hand-dived Cornish scallops came with roe and dried roe, Wye Valley white asparagus in hollandaise, and caviar on top. Sweet scallop, asparagus, egg-rich sauce, salt and pop from the caviar. Luxurious, but the white asparagus gave it structure.

The soft pairing tried to evoke Merlot without simply dealcoholising Merlot: Merlot grape juice, juniper, oolong, acidity and blackcurrant. A clever idea.

Cornish langoustine came with scrambled eggs, tamale, diced mango, crushed peanuts and curry emulsion. This was the most Thai-influenced dish of the night: spicy, sweet, savoury, creamy and crunchy. It had a lot going on, but the langoustine held.

The pasta was the other standout. Homemade agnolotti filled with goat’s curd, violet artichoke, condensed chicken stock and the summer truffle supplement. Rich, savoury, slightly lactic from the curd, with the artichoke and truffle pulling it into a more grown-up register. Absolutely delicious.

Lamb saddle came with lamb sausage, an intensely sweet dehydrated tomato and yoghurt sauce. Good lamb, clean cookery, and the tomato did useful work as a concentrated sweet-acid counterpoint.

The almond blossom drink came next: lemon with almond blossom tea. Gentle and well placed before the meal moved into cheese and dessert.

The cheese course also acted as a pre-dessert. Goat curd from the pasta returned with crispy soda bread toast, caramelised apricot and individual thyme leaves. It was a smart bridge: savoury dairy, toast, fruit and herb rather than a heavy cheese trolley.

The final soft pairing was elderflower with foraged lemon balm and verjus. Fresh, aromatic, and palate cleansing before the desserts.

Dessert started with fennel granita, fennel ice cream and fennel seed marmalade. It had only been added to the menu a week before. Fennel is an awkward ingredient if mishandled. Here it worked: cold, clean, lightly bitter, and more memorable than another safe fruit dessert.

The second dessert was Kent strawberries, sliced and as compote, with elderflower ice cream and coal-seared meringue for smoke. Delicious. It reminded me a little of Humo, with the charcoal seared meringue.

A selection of wild-foraged herbs made into an after dinner tea with locally-sourced honey. A classic canale, served untraditionally warm, and a loose cocoa tart ended the meal.

Dinner was fun. Being the only diner helped. I had the full attention of the staff, with a long conversation about food culture, dish inspiration and other restaurants. That is the counter format at its best: not theatre, but access.

The restaurant’s strengths are clear. British produce, local foraging, exact execution, and a chef still present enough to explain why each dish exists. The white asparagus caviar dish and the goat’s curd agnolotti were the two courses I would most want again.

The meal lacked a bit of spark. Execution was close to flawless, but there were not too many dishes I would rave about later. Still, Kitchen Table is a serious London restaurant with a real point of view. I would recommend going, especially if you care about British ingredients and like the discipline of a counter-only tasting menu.

Total Damage: 350 GBP/1 person

At the start of 2023, he moved the restaurant into tasting-menu territory. The room became an 20 seat counter, with an eight-course menu described as Japanese food with a European accent. That version earned Humble Chicken its first Michelin star in the 2024 Guide, then a second in the 2025 Guide. Going from one to two stars in a year is rare, and Michelin called the jump remarkable.

Shortly after the second star, Sato shut the restaurant for a full rebuild. Humble Chicken reopened in 2025 as Humble Chicken 3.0. The new version is much more serious. Covers are down from 20 to 13 per sitting. The kitchen is bigger. The room was redesigned by Raven Collective, with dark blue, light wood, a cherry wood counter and copper and brass details. Even the utensils have been upgraded, with bespoke ebony and gold pieces made in Niigata and hand-blown ceramics from Herefordshire.

Sato has said openly that the goal of Humble Chicken 3.0 is the third Michelin star.

Chef Sato’s background is unusual. He was born in Japan to a Japanese father and German mother, both missionaries for a religious sect before leaving when he was 14. He has described his childhood as normal, but also said the lack of formal education made the real world difficult. He did not attend culinary school or regular school, and has said he arrived in London at 18 unable to read or write in any language.

His culinary education came entirely through work. He started in a local Japanese restaurant at 14, worked for free at a fish market before shifts to practice filleting, and learned to break down a chicken into more than 30 pieces at a yakitori restaurant. He later worked at RyuGin and Narisawa in Tokyo before flying to London on his 18th birthday and walking into Restaurant Gordon Ramsay to ask Chef Clare Smyth for a trial.

He then worked at Trinity under Adam Byatt, Eleven Madison Park in New York under Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, and Restaurant Story in London under Tom Sellers. At Story, he became head chef within four months of opening and stayed for around three years.

Before Humble Chicken, he tried Mission Sato, a bento restaurant in Old Street, and Omoide, a rice bowl takeaway. Both are now closed. A pop-up at Restaurant Story attracted interest from JKS Restaurants, but the deal fell apart over equity. Sato later said, “I’ve just spent 12 years being someone’s bitch and if I take this deal, I’m going to go right back to that.”

That probably explains a lot about Humble Chicken. It does not feel like a chef casually trying to run a nice restaurant. It feels like someone building towards a target with frightening intensity.

The restaurant sits in the middle of a busy part of Soho. Inside, the counter wraps around a small open kitchen. There are only 13 seats, and the chefs work directly in front of you. The kitchen has the rhythm of a proper show kitchen, but without theatre for theatre’s sake. Everyone has a specific job. The coordination is tight, and the pace never drags.

The meal opens with five small bites.

The first is the humble mussel, steamed and stuffed with avocado and fermented onion, then finished with soy-citrus ponzu. It is a clever opener. Bright, savoury, and much more interesting than the description sounds.

Next is Fish a Chip, a crisp seaweed chip topped with two kinds of tuna: akami and an otoro mince. It is a neat little bite, with the fat of the tuna balanced by the crispness of the seaweed..

The fried veal sweetbread comes next, topped with garlic emulsion, pea and lovage pesto, dill and microgreens. Warm, rich, and comforting. A strong early course.

The chicken liver parfait is served over diced mango, with frozen foie gras shaved on top. Rich and fatty, but the mango keeps it from becoming heavy. It is an unusual combination, and it works exceptionally well.

The Rest of the Langoustine is served inside an eggshell. Langoustine and pig trotter sit on scrambled egg, with a langoustine bisque foam. This had deep, condensed shellfish flavour, with a slight smokiness. One of the better early courses.

Old Town 97 is named after a late-night restaurant the team often goes to after service. It is Humble Chicken’s version of shrimp toast: deep-fried sesame-crusted bread, shiso leaf, Korean chili paste and a langoustine tail. Delicious!

The Black Cod chawanmushi was one of my favourite savoury courses. A piece of smoked black cod sits on top of delicate egg custard, surrounded by beef bone marrow broth and fire-touched peas. The burnt scallion oil gives it a huge smoky note. The peas add crunch against the soft custard. It is a very good example of what the kitchen does well: smoke, heat, texture and fat, all handled with control.

Then comes the bread course, called Picnic. This is already one of the restaurant’s signatures, and it deserves to be.

The bread is warm, sweet Japanese shokupan. The condiments lean more German: seven-day cultured butter sandwiching a layer of pigeon liver parfait inside, lacto-fermented white asparagus pickles, pork terrine covered with herbs and microgreens, and a small pot apple mustard. The idea is that you build your own sandwich. It sounds slightly cute on paper, but in practice it is one of the best bread courses I have had in London. The terrine on the soft shokupan was excellent. The white asparagus pickles were also very good.

After that came sea bass in a clear dashi, cooked over coals so the skin blistered. The skin was crisp, the fish was clean, and the dashi gave it enough depth without turning it into something heavy.

The main event is the pigeon.

Chef Sato cooks the pigeons himself. While the rest of the team handles the preceding courses, he works at the grill, moving each pigeon on and off the flame, then smoking it on pine needles for nearly an hour. The breast is served on a bed of pine needles, which are set alight underneath for a final hit of smoke.

As I was dining alone, they gave me the whole pigeon, which is normally shared between two people. This was generous, but slightly dangerous.

The rest of the bird is used for pigeon rice, served alongside the breast with a Sichuan-inspired mala sauce, grated radish ponzu, pickles and pigeon stock.

By this point I was completely full, and barely managed half of it. Still, the dish was excellent. The breast had a deep smoke, the rice was rich, and the condiments gave enough acidity and heat to stop it becoming one-note.

Dessert was Everything Strawberry, inspired by a New York cheesecake. A piped cheesecake cream base came with different textures of strawberry: sorbet, dehydrated crystal flakes and frozen strawberry micro planed over the top. Clean, precise, and not too sweet.

The petit fours are apparently another highlight, but I was crashing hard from jet lag after landing in London earlier that morning. I was barely able to stay balanced on the bar stool, so I asked for the bill and skipped the petit four. On the way out, they gave me a packet of freshly baked madeleines, still warm from the oven.

Overall, I had an excellent meal. I was not sure what to expect from Humble Chicken 3.0, especially given its yakitori origins, but this is now a very serious restaurant.

The use of heat and smoke reminded me of Humo. The precision reminded me of Alex Dilling at Hotel Cafe Royal. The intricacy of the preparation reminded me a little of Row on 5. That puts Humble Chicken in very good company, and among some of the best restaurant’s I’ve tried in London over the past few years.

The bread course and pigeon were the clear standouts. The menu is unconventional, but it has real identity. Sato is clearly chasing three stars, and based on this meal, it would not surprise me if he gets that coveted third star soon!

Total Damage: 270 GBP/1 person

The relevant question is not whether Rules competes with London’s modern tasting-menu restaurants. It obviously does not. The question is whether the room, history, oysters, game, pies and old British puddings still add up to a serious meal.

On paper, it should. The menu is conservative, but not incoherent: oysters, potted shrimps, terrines, steak and kidney pie, steak and kidney pudding, braised meats, roast beef, fish, game, proper puddings and a wine list built for people who still enjoy claret-shaped dining.

The risk is equally obvious. You are paying for the room and the lineage as much as the cooking. If the kitchen misses, the whole thing can slide very quickly from heritage into expensive theatre.

Thomas Rule founded the restaurant in 1798 as an oyster house. Rules describes itself as London’s oldest restaurant, and the ownership history is unusually tidy. Thomas Rule & Sons ran it from 1798 to 1918, Tom Bell & Daughter from 1918 to 1984, John Mayhew from 1984 to 2022, and Richard “Ricky” McMenemy from 2022 onwards.

The handovers are part of the mythology. Shortly before the First World War, Charles Rule considered moving to Paris and met Tom Bell, who owned the Alhambra restaurant there. They swapped businesses. In 1984, Tom Bell’s daughter sold Rules to John Mayhew. In 2022, McMenemy, who had already worked at Rules for decades, took over.

The oyster-house origin still matters because Rules continues to sell the same basic story: oysters, game, pies, puddings, old London, and a dining room packed with paintings, cartoons, prints, velvet and wood panelling. The restaurant’s own roll call includes Dickens, Thackeray, H.G. Wells, Henry Irving, Laurence Olivier, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

The food is traditional British restaurant cooking with a heavy game-house bias. The structure is simple: oysters and cold starters; terrines, rillettes, potted shrimps and smoked salmon; pies, puddings, roast meats, lamb, fish and seasonal game; side vegetables; then nursery puddings, savouries and cheese.

Given the room, I thought I should at least try to meet Rules on its own terms. I asked the waiter what the most British things on the menu were. He recommended the cream of spinach and nettle soup, and the steak and kidney pudding.

The soup came first, in a dense emerald green. I was not sure what to expect from nettle soup, but Rules gave me a fairly quick reminder of how British food acquired its historic reputation.

There were some faint grassy and herbal notes, but the main impression was that nobody had introduced the soup to seasoning. After adding a fairly serious amount of salt, the problem shifted from seasoning to flavour and texture. The famous British palate was not making a strong opening argument.

The menu had both steak and kidney pie and steak and kidney pudding. The difference is mainly the wrapper. The pie comes with baked puff pastry. The pudding comes wrapped in steamed suet.

I chose the more British option, which was probably the mistake.

The pudding arrived with a broiled oyster on top. The filling had the expected minerally offal note from the kidney, plus tough pieces of steak and some button mushrooms. The suet wrapper was thick, pale and slightly soggy. Since it had been steamed, there was no browning and no real texture. With enough gravy, the filling was edible. That is not high praise.

The creamed spinach was uneventful. It was underseasoned and bland, although that was probably the least offensive version of the dish they could have produced.

I did not finish much of the pudding or the spinach, so dessert became the last chance for the meal to recover. I skipped the waiter’s recommendation of sticky toffee pudding and ordered the poached pear with chocolate mousse instead.

This was better. The pear came on a bed of brown sugar, and the dark chocolate mousse was rich, dark and hit fairly hard with alcohol. I finished the pear.

I was not expecting luxury fine dining from Rules. I wanted a dose of old London, somewhere in the general world of Wiltons, The Savoy Grill or Bentley’s. Instead, I got a fairly brutal reminder of why historic British food spent so long as a punchline. Don’t bother.

Total damage: 70 GBP/1 person

The founding group explains the concept. Yenn Wong of JIA Group, Alan Lo of Press Room Group, and wine importer Paulo Pong built Duddell’s out of Hong Kong’s overlapping restaurant, art and money circles. The pitch was never simply Cantonese food. It was a social room with a serious art programme and a kitchen good enough to carry the whole idea.

The address also helps. Duddell Street is one of those odd Central pockets that still feels like old school Hong Kong, best known for its granite steps and surviving gas lamps. The original Ilse Crawford interior leaned into that sense of lived-in polish: an art collector’s apartment rather than another glossy Hong Kong dining room. Mid-century furniture, warm tones, a garden terrace, enough softness to make the place feel human.

By 2025, though, the room needed work. Duddell’s closed for a full refresh by André Fu Studio, its first major renovation since opening. Fu recast it as a contemporary collector’s maison, drawing on Lingnan culture and the 1920s diaolou watchtowers of Guangdong. Sensible move. The old room had started to feel tired, and Duddell’s depends heavily on the room feeling current without losing its clubby identity.

The food is modern Cantonese, but not in the gimmicky sense. Under Chef Chan Yau Leung, the kitchen talks about reviving forgotten flavours and old Cantonese techniques. Chan has the right background for that. Before Duddell’s, he cooked at Fook Lam Moon in Hong Kong and Macau, ran Fook Lam Moon kitchens in Tokyo and Osaka, and led Guo Fu Lou in Central, where he helped earn and hold a Michelin star. He joined Duddell’s in 2022 and rebuilt the menu again after the 2025 renovation.

Duddell’s has changed chefs several times since opening. The restaurant’s identity sits as much with the room, ownership and art programme as with any single chef. Previous chef Li Man-Lung brought Ritz-Carlton Macau and Tin Lung Heen experience, but Chan is the current figure to watch. His cooking is disciplined, classical, and more interested in Cantonese continuity than show-off modernisation.

The art programme is still central. Duddell’s has rotating exhibitions, talks, screenings, performances and lectures, with parts of the programme open to the public. That matters because it keeps the place from being just another expensive Cantonese restaurant with nice chairs. The cultural salon positioning is the differentiator.

The meal started with the dim sum staples: har gow and siu mai. Both were properly executed, especially the siu mai with a generous slice of scallop on top. This is the kind of thing Duddell’s should be good at, and it was.

The steamed rice roll with dough cruller was more interesting. Adding daikon gave it a little lift and texture, enough to make a familiar dish feel adjusted rather than messed about with.

The mala lobster spring roll was the more overtly contemporary dish. Crisp, rich, a little punchy, but still recognizably Cantonese rather than fusion for its own sake.

The taro puff came with abalone instead of scallop. A small luxury substitution, but a good one. It fits Duddell’s well: not revolutionary, just more expensive and more polished.

Then Peking duck, served two ways. First the skin in wraps, which basically turns the table into a test of everyone’s burrito-making competence.

The second serving was the meat finely chopped, cooked with pine nuts, and served with lettuce wraps. Classic, tidy, and exactly the sort of thing that works well in a room like this.

Overall, I have been to Duddell’s countless times over the years. The food has always been consistent, although before the refurbishment the interior was starting to look dated. The menu has shifted slightly, and the room now has its polish back, but the basic proposition is unchanged: no-frills, reliable, high-end Cantonese dim sum in Central, with enough cultural dressing to make it feel like somewhere to bring visitors.

Total Damage: 2600 HKD/3 people

I’ve always held the belief that Singapore is the exception to the rule that the farther you get from Tokyo, the worse the Japanese food gets. Singapore’s Japanese restaurants keep on punching well above their weight. Two absolutely amazing meals this month at Hatamoto and Nikuya Tanaka.

I managed to get a reservation to 1887 by Andre. He’s a legend in Singapore, and I knew about his legacy from other restaurants that I’ve tried, but he had long moved on by the time I tried his successors’ restaurants. Boy did 1887 deliver in spades.

But each of those restaurants have their own posts, and my monthly roundup is a more casual place to talk about restaurants that I didn’t bother writing up, or what else is going on in my life.

I ended up at the Lobster Bar and Grill at the Shangri-La. The food wasn’t particularly amazing, but they had an a top notch Jerusalem Artichoke soup - best I’ve ever had, and great for the rare cold night in Hong Kong.

A buddy of mine just opened an Argentinian steakhouse in Hong Kong, and invited me to the soft open. An in-house charcuterie program, a chorizo flambe, absolutely perfect steaks and my defining mark for a good Argentinian steakhouse, a great chimichurri. What’s not to like? Give Don Pedro a visit if you’re in Hong Kong! Their whisky-finished gelato is deceptively strong too!

Heading back to Singapore, I had lunch with an old friend at a street-side pizza joint. They had an amazing vodka pasta that we added stracciatella to. Skip the burrata outer shell, just give us the soft, creaming stracciatella inside. Delicious!

Of course, when in Singapore, I’m going to get some chili crab. In this case, because I’m lazy, I had my crab picked and combined with the sauce and served with some deep fried mantou.

The other thing about southeast Asia is that they go all out on desserts. Given the heat, eating alfresco always requires a frozen dessert to cool me down, and the logan shaved ice delivered well.

The meal works best when you judge it as Chiba’s own counter: good sourcing, careful technique, a lively room, and a chef who enjoys explaining the details. It works less well when you judge it against the restaurant’s stated idea of protecting traditional Edomae sushi.

Mamoru means “protect” in Japanese. The restaurant uses the word literally. The pitch is preservation: traditional Edomae technique, direct relationships with Japanese fishermen and farmers, and a focus on ingredients that do not often appear outside Japan.

Chef Chiba is the centre of the restaurant. He is a third-generation sushi chef with more than two decades of experience, including fugu training, time at Sushi Iwa and Zorokuzushi in Tokyo, Sushi Kohaku in Hong Kong, and now Mamoru.

The room is run by Leading Nation, and it feels like it. It is slick, expensive, and more theatrical than the usual windowless sushi box. The entrance takes you through an understated door, past a dramatic wood-panelled hallway and an old bonsai, before opening into the counter.

The counter itself is arced hinoki. We later found out the arc came from the room’s previous life as a teppanyaki restaurant. It also has something rare for a sushi counter in Hong Kong: a view outside. Most counters shut the world out and force your attention onto the chef and the rice. Mamoru lets the city into the room.

We started with a cloudy sake. Crisp, umami-heavy, and much better than the one we had recently at Hana no Kumo not too long ago.

The first bite was a strange one: monkfish liver braised in red wine sauce, next to a firm oyster marinated in olive oil, bay leaf, red pepper, and a lot of garlic. It read more like Mediterranean antipasto than Edomae sushi. Not unpleasant, but it immediately made the restaurant’s “protect tradition” line feel a bit loose.

Two cuts of barfin flounder followed, served with yuzu radish and ponzu. This was more controlled. The point was texture: different parts of the same fish, handled cleanly, with enough acid to keep it bright.

Osaka surf clam came next, using both the skirt and the clam. Crunchy, clean, and exactly the sort of shellfish course I want early in a meal like this.

The octopus tentacle came with smoky yuzu pepper paste on the side. The paste had real kick. It pushed the dish away from the more restrained Edomae register, but it worked.

We had visited Sushi Saito not too long before, and the overlap in ingredients was funny. Same season, same greatest hits. The grilled scallop nori wrap felt like a replay. A good one. Sweet scallop, warm nori, enough fat and smoke to make the bite land.

Braised abalone with liver sauce followed. A classic omakase dish, and a strong one. No need to complicate it.

Firefly squid were at their seasonal peak. Chiba poached them, touched them with fire, and finished them with shichimi. Close to what we had at Saito. Good again.

The Hokkaido hairy crab was one of the better composed dishes of the meal. It came with a little bitter crab innard and pickled cucumber for crunch. Rich, clean, and balanced. A big hit.

Then we moved into nigiri. Horse mackerel came first, topped with shredded shiso. Bright and direct.

Grouper followed, cured before being pressed into nigiri. Firm, clean, and restrained.

Then Spanish mackerel.

Goldeneye snapper from Shizuoka came next. Chiba pointed out that the tuna served after it was also from Shizuoka, so there was a decent chance the tuna had been feeding on the snapper before it was caught. Good line. Better piece.

Chef Chiba then spent real time explaining each cut of tuna, where it came from on the fish, and how he wanted us to read the progression. He even took out a model tuna and dissected it into individual parts in front of us. This is where the restaurant is strongest. He is charismatic, specific, and engaged with the product.

We started with akami: ruby-red lean tuna with ground sesame on top.

Then straight into jabara otoro, the fattiest cut of bluefin. Rich, heavy, and exactly what it sounds like.

The giant tiger shrimp was the first nigiri that lost me. Chiba put salted duck egg between the rice and shrimp as a Hong Kong reference. I understand the idea. I did not think it belonged there. The shrimp did not need the extra gesture.

The shrimp was served as a single piece for the men and cut in half for the women.

Then came a rare sight at an omakase counter: Indonesian mantis shrimp. Chiba said large mantis shrimp are hard to source in Japan, so he had to look elsewhere to get pieces big enough for sushi. This was one of the more interesting sourcing choices of the meal.

The uni gunkan was classic: creamy sea urchin, a little sea salt, no drama.

Anago was one of my favourite pieces. Sea eel with yuzu zest, lighter and fluffier than unagi, almost melting into the rice.

The savoury section ended with a roll of minced tuna, uni, chive, and sesame. Rich, crunchy, and a little more built-up than the nigiri before it.

Pickles and castella-style tamago followed.

The miso soup came with chilli oil, another Hong Kong reference. This one worked. It gave the soup a little lift without turning it into a gimmick.

Dessert was cream cheese ice cream with strawberry mango jam. On paper, I hated the idea. I would prefer muskmelon at the end of sushi. In practice, it ate like a small cheesecake and worked better than expected. It still felt odd in this meal.

That is the issue with Mamoru. The restaurant talks about protecting tradition, but the meal drifts further from traditional Edomae than Saito or Shikon . The chilli oil in the miso soup, the crab with pickled cucumber, and the yuzu pepper with octopus worked. The Mediterranean oyster, salted duck egg shrimp, and cream cheese dessert did not.

The meal is good. Chef Chiba is fun, generous, and technically serious. The room is comfortable. The sourcing has real thought behind it.

I do not think Mamoru is the best version of what it says it wants to be. For traditional Edomae sushi in Hong Kong, I would book Saito or Shikon first. For a polished, more experimental Hong Kong omakase with a charismatic chef, Mamoru makes more sense. For me, a decent meal, but not one I would rush back for.

Total Damage: HKD 7,200 / 2 people

Chef Anne-Sophie Pic is one of the most important French chefs working today. She is best known for Maison Pic in Valence, the family restaurant whose third Michelin star she regained in 2007. She became the fourth woman to hold three Michelin stars and was named The World’s Best Female Chef by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2011.

Her cooking is built around precision, perfume, acidity, sauces, and unexpected aromatic pairings. That sounds vague until you see the combinations: coffee and sobacha, black garlic in dessert, Douglas fir with lobster, shiso with pear, sake lees with Chinese pea, gyokuro, dashi, citrus, flowers, smoke.

But it’s not Chef Pic who is cooking in Central every night. Chef Marc Mantovani runs the Hong Kong kitchen. He comes from Romans-sur-Isere, near Valence, and has worked under Anne-Sophie Pic for more than 10 years. He joined Maison Pic young, moved through the Pic system, led La Dame de Pic London at Four Seasons Hotel London at Ten Trinity Square, before coming to Hong Kong for Cristal Room.

Pic’s food is not old-school French in the heavy butter-and-truffle sense. It is lighter, more perfumed, and more aromatic. She likes tension: floral with bitter, sweet with saline, smoke with citrus, French sauce-work with Japanese or Chinese ingredients. The signature is controlled complexity. Not minimalism.

The speed of the Michelin rise is notable. Hong Kong Michelin likes polished international French rooms, but one star within months and two stars within roughly two and a half years is still a serious result.

The restaurant sits high up in Landmark, among a cluster of luxury restaurants on the upper floors of Gloucester Tower.

The dining room is open, with views into the kitchen. The kitchen is arranged into two stations around the room, with staff working in full view.

The harbour view is amazing, though partly interrupted by the iconic round windows of Jardine House.

We were in a but of a rush and went for express lunch menu, but added the signature Berlingots.

The canapes arrived on Baccarat glassware. Light tarts with microgreens. Pretty, precise, and on-brand.

Then a small taco filled with more microgreens.

For my starter, I chose the ebi chawanmushi. A variety of textures with a giant tiger prawn and a layer of soft egg custard underneath.

The sourdough came with some of the most carefully arranged butter I have seen: composed into a rose, delicate enough that the butter became part of the theatre.

The Berlingots were the dish to order. Tiny triangular parcels filled with 24-month Comte, served in a mushroom consomme with smoked oolong and vanilla. This was the clearest Pic dish of the meal: aromatic, technical, and strange in a way that made sense.

The main course was Hong Kong Three Yellow chicken done in a French style. It came encrusted with tonka, double-sauced, with corn and a fluffy doughnut on the side. Good technique, but the dish did not leave much behind.

Dessert was mango sorbet infused with geranium, served with mango coulis, mango on biscuits, and a crisp tuile for texture.

Then a chocolate tartlet with a lot going on: crisp cocoa wafer, chocolate ganache, vanilla cream, crushed nuts, and chocolate leaves.

The meal ended with homemade madeleines with local honey. Fine. Pretty vanilla.

Overall, the restaurant executes French technique well. The room is beautiful, the service is polished, and the Berlingots are worth ordering. But the meal was unremarkable. For a room with this much pedigree, theatre, and Michelin momentum, I wanted more dishes that stayed in my head after lunch. Most of it felt correct rather than exciting. Cristal Room is a good luxury French restaurant. It is not one I feel much need to rush back to.

Total damage: 3,900 HKD/3 people