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

The restaurant occupies the hotel’s old formal dining room, previously associated with the Elizabethan Grill and Raffles Grill. 1887 by Andre is Chef Andre Chiang returning to Singapore, yet it is not Restaurant Andre rebuilt in another room.

Andre Chiang is Chef Patron. This is not a tiny counter restaurant where Chiang personally cooks every plate. He shaped the concept, menu direction, team and tone, but the daily restaurant is run through the Raffles machine, with Chiang as creative authority rather than resident craftsman. Leading the kitchen team are chef de cuisine Ben Wang, 34, and sous chef Roy Kuo, 35. Both Taiwanese chefs had worked at chef Chiang’s two-Michelin-starred Raw in Taipei, which closed in 2024, before joining the team at the Raffles.

While Restaurant Andre was Chiang’s private language: Octaphilosophy, memory, texture, terroir, restraint. 1887 starts from a different archive. The raw material is Raffles itself: old menus, silverware, dining-room ritual, trolley service, French technique, colonial hotel theatre, and Singapore as a stopover for travelers and ingredients.

1887 sits where two histories overlap: Chiang’s Singapore years and Raffles Hotel’s long afterlife as a colonial grand hotel.

Chiang became a Singapore name before he became an Asia-wide chef figure. Jaan par Andre gave him his first major platform here. Restaurant Andre opened in late 2010 and became one of the defining restaurants of Singapore fine dining. It held two Michelin stars and reached No. 2 in Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants that same year. Then Chiang closed it in February 2018 while it still had awards, demand and global status. He said he would return the Michelin stars. That decision became part of the Andre myth: closure on his own terms rather than keeping a famous restaurant alive as a trophy.

1887 belongs to a later phase. Chiang returns to Singapore after building a wider Asian network. He is now less the lone chef at the pass and more a director of systems, teams and restaurants built around memory, craft and cultural material.

At Restaurant Andre, Chiang worked from his own memories and French training. At 1887, he works from Raffles’ memory: menus, rooms, guests, rituals, stored objects, and the hotel’s habit of turning Singapore history into theatre.

Raffles Hotel opened in 1887 as a 10-room hotel founded by the Sarkies brothers, Persian-Armenian hoteliers. It became one of Asia’s most famous grand hotels. The National Library Board records it as a national monument gazette in 1987. Raffles’ own mythology leans into writers, dignitaries, travelers and celebrity guests: Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy.

Chiang and the team draw from hotel archives, early dining-room recipes, Victorian rituals, local produce and Singapore’s multicultural flavours. It also mentions Raffles’ old silverware and the silver trolley said to have been buried in the hotel grounds during World War II and uncovered afterwards.

1887 belongs with the small group of Singapore restaurants where chef history, room and institution all matter: Odette, Les Amis, Born, imported Zen-style precision, and the old Restaurant Andre memory that still hangs over the city.

The entrance sets the colour story immediately: emerald green drapes, a shade that keeps returning through the meal.

The room is opulent in a very Raffles way. You walk into polished silverware, mechanical palm leaves fanning the dining room, and the sense that the hotel wants you to notice its own past.

At the back, the chef’s counter wraps around the show kitchen. The cooking stays visible, but the room never becomes a kitchen-counter restaurant. The hotel theatre still wins.

The Chendol Old Fashioned is a clever opening drink: chendol frozen into the ice cube, sweetness kept in check, strength hidden until it is too late.

The green motif returns in the amuse bouche, especially the herbal tart inspired by the herb garden outside the restaurant. It is a small detail, but it ties the room to the property instead of leaving the decor as costume.

A layered shot follows. The idea is more important than the liquid: the meal keeps using colour and format as memory cues.

The Spice Bomb lemonade asks you to crush the spices yourself. It lands somewhere between lemonade and chai, with enough aroma to make the interaction feel earned rather than decorative.

The pickles with the hors d’oeuvres do useful work. They reset the palate and stop the opening snacks from becoming only richness and crunch.

The Trio of Fish and Chips is the kind of dish this restaurant should be doing: fish and chips done three ways, tightened into a small-format snack.

The Hae Bee Hiam prawn roll is fragrant, savoury and direct. It does not need much explanation. The reference is clear.

Bone and Flesh pairs puffed beef tendon with cured wagyu ham. It is light, crisp and a little spicy, with chilli oil doing the work of keeping the luxury from feeling too tidy. Absolutely delicious and one of my highlights of the night.

Crispy rice encrusted on to a stuffed chicken wing filled with crystal capellini and Alaskan king crab pushes harder into texture. The dish is busy on paper, but the point is straightforward: crunch, poultry depth and cold seafood sweetness.

Turtle Soup from 1887 is one of the signature dishes. The team takes an old luxury dish from the Raffles archive, removes the obsolete ingredient, and rebuilds the memory with double-boiled chicken, grouper, herbs and a springy konnyaku ball for texture. This is the restaurant’s thesis in a bowl.

The grilled skate is a better tasting dish than it looks. It takes a Singapore seafood memory and runs it through French meuniere technique, with lemon, butter and capers doing heavy lifting. It is not pretty. It is delicious.

Bread comes in four choices: flaky toast feuillete, mini brioche, pain de campagne sourdough, and a steamed buns finished in an iron pan.

The flaky toast is the right pick. Hundreds of laminated layers get compressed into something closer to milk bread, served with pear and onion marmalade. It is technical, indulgent and still readable as bread.

Royale of Foie Gras, “Memory”, is the direct Andre Chiang callback. He created the dish in 1997 while working at the three-Michelin-starred Jardin des Sens. It is a warm foie gras custard layered with truffle coulis. Rich, controlled and unmistakably his.

Lobster Heh Mee “Al Ajillo” turns a humble local noodle memory into sakura ebi and lobster-bisque spaghetti. This is the East-West theme at its clearest: prawn intensity, French luxury, local logic.

Boeuf au Sept Poivres 1887 brings seven-pepper short rib cooked until it gives way. It is not the most conceptual dish on the table. It does not need to be. It is tender, deep and satisfying.

The Frites Maison Allumettes are absurd in the right way: nearly foot-long fries that look like breadsticks, served with homemade ketchup and curry oil. They are memorable because they understand that grand-hotel dining still needs pleasure.

La Vert, or Verdant Forest, keeps the dessert course inside the green motif. The avocado souffle is the anchor.

A slice of musk melon sits on pistachio kombu ice cream. It is delicate, clean and more interesting than another heavy luxury dessert would have been.

The green matcha pudding continues the colour line without over-explaining it.

The final sweets, a green olive macaron and an After Eight-style mint chocolate, close the meal with the same idea as the room: old-world reference, and a little theatrical control.

Overall, absolutely amazing. For a restaurant that’s a month old, service and execution were absolutely spot on, and dinner was delicious, if not a bit excessive. By the time we got to the short rib, we were already stuffed. We gave up halfway through dessert. If the degustation menu is a bit excessive, Chef Andre has kindly also also offered every dish a la carte, and in smaller set menu formats as well, so it’s not necessary to go all out to have a great experience here.

In fact, I tried to get a follow up reservation to try the signatures that I missed, but the restaurant is booked out for months. Definitely worth returning, maybe when the initial hype and reservation line dies down.

Total damage: 1050 SGD/2 people

Tanaka was born in Gifu Prefecture in 1967. His grandfather was a livestock broker. His father ran a butcher shop. Tanaka says he started using a knife at three, went to cattle auctions with his father as a child, helped with trimming and butchery from a young age, then eventually took over the family butcher shop. He opened Yakiniku Tanaka in 1992, expanded into wagyu-focused restaurants in Gifu and Shiga, opened Omi beef Setsugekka in Hikone in 2010, grew to 10 restaurants by 2015, then opened Nikuya Setsugekka in Nagoya in 2016.

The Singapore restaurant opened about six months ago as Tanaka’s first overseas expansion. It follows the Ginza format: a small counter, Kobe beef and purebred Tajima-lineage wagyu, then Japanese techniques around it. Charcoal grilling, tataki, sashimi-style service, shabu-shabu, tempura, rice, dashi and seasonal dishes.

Head Chef Yosuke Sekiguchi is one of the two named chefs for Singapore. He has around three decades of Japanese cuisine experience and worked with Tanaka on the menu before moving here. He brings the kappo structure: soup, sashimi-style handling, seasonal produce, pacing and counter service.

Chef Masaya Yano is the other named chef. He trained under Tanaka in wagyu handling. His business card says “meat specialist”, which sounds a bit much until you watch the work. The trimming and cutting are part of the show, not background prep.

The Singapore branch is the first Nikuya Tanaka outside Japan. It uses the same grammar as Ginza: a small chef-facing counter, Japanese tableware and carpentry cues, binchotan grilling, and a kappo menu built around beef from a single Tajima/Kobe cow.

The restaurant sits in Tanjong Pagar, along a stretch of shophouses that now has a heavy concentration of high-end dining.

The entrance is understated. A narrow dark hallway leads to a lift, which brings you up to the second-floor kappo counter.

Tanaka selects meat from a single whole cow, usually raised for around 35 months. The point is texture, marbling and flavour. The restaurant also stresses traceability. Each Kobe beef portion comes with certification and an individual serial number. The beef is flown chilled from Japan to Singapore rather than frozen, to avoid damaging the fibres.

The cuts for the night would be the sirloin and chateaubriand, the best part of the tenderloin. By the time I was seated, the beef for the meal was already displayed in front of me with its certificate of authenticity.

The menu for the night listed the cow’s serial number and sourcing details.

Chef Sekiguchi was finishing preparation before dinner service.

The first course was sweet corn and uni puree topped with caviar. Light, sweet, grassy, with enough salt from the caviar to keep it balanced.

Then came tempura of fuki bud, shaved bottarga and a small ball of rice. The fuki bud brought bitterness. The bottarga added salt and weight. The rice kept it from becoming too sharp.

They were also running pineapple juice made from Okinawan pineapples. I prefer pineapple juice with rum and coconut cream, but sure. Why not?

Chef Yano prepared the next course: a lean beef and white fish maki roll.

It was rolled with chives and uni, with no rice. A clean opening beef course. Light, controlled, and a better introduction than going straight into fat and smoke.

Chef Sekiguchi then prepared a nigiri with a leaner cut of Kobe beef.

There was also a loose uni nigiri as a surprise course that wasn’t on the menu. Decadent, as always.

Moving deeper into the beef dishes, with a chateaubriand grilled directly on hot charcoal, the smell of smoke filling the room.

It was sliced and served rare, with a crisp smoky crust.

An abalone course followed in a rich bonito and kombu broth. This was the useful reminder that the restaurant is still kappo, not a steak counter with Japanese garnish.

Chef Sekiguchi then prepared beef tenderloin tempura.

It was placed directly into my hand. Light crust, dense meat in the centre. Heavier than typical tempura, but that is expected when the filling is tenderloin.

Chef Yano trimmed excess fat from thin slices of sirloin before Chef Sekiguchi lightly poached the beef and then submerged it in an ice bath to stop the cooking. Controlled fat, precise cooking, very little else.

The shabu-shabu was served on a bed of ice, then covered with more crushed ice on top. Unusual presentation, but it worked. Clean, cold, fatty beef, with the traditional ponzu and chive sauce doing exactly what it should.

As a palate cleanser between mouthfuls of fatty beef, they served Nara-style somen in a hand-carved ice bowl. One of the signatures here, and a huge hit. Springy, smoky, citrusy and refreshing.

The main event was tenderloin steak, cooked medium rare and served with the traditional garnishes: wasabi, fried garlic chips, pickles and smoked salt. Only three pieces, but the fat made it extremely filling. I could barely finish the third.

Chef Sekiguchi then prepared Dragon’s Eye rice, a cultivar with extremely large grains. Sweet, fragrant, and mixed with young bamboo shoots for texture. It almost did not need the pickles and garnishes. Roasted rice tea and miso soup marked the end of the savoury courses.

Dessert was chilled loquat and muskmelon, both in peak season.

A small piece of red bean paste followed as petit four, with a final cup of tea.

Overall, Nikuya Tanaka was a massive hit. I did not know exactly what to expect going in. I expected the Japanese omakase format and had seen some of the more photogenic dishes online, but the meal was a proper celebration of beef, yet there was no single standout beef dish. The strength was the attention paid to every part of the meal, including the intermissions and accompaniments. The only reason it doesn’t have a star is because I don’t think it was open the last time the Michelin inspectors came around. I definitely expect it to get one or more next year.

Totally worth it. I can’t wait to come back again with friends. One of my best meals of the year.

Total Damage: 730 SGD/1 person

The main dining room centres on a beautiful brushed hinoki counter, which the restaurant claims is the only curved sushi counter in Singapore. The format combines sushi and kappo, with a kaiseki-like rhythm: seasonal appetisers, uni, hot dishes, premium ingredients, nigiri, soup and dessert all prepared in front of you. The room is deliberately spare. You are meant to watch the chef dance with the ingredients, not the room.

Chef Kazuhiro Hamamoto opened Hamamoto in 2021 and the restaurant presents itself as the culmination of more than 20 years of work across Kyoto, Tokyo and Singapore. Before opening Hamamoto Chef Hamamoto worked at Ki-Sho, another famous Kaiseki address in Singapore. He would be the chef who would contact suppliers late at night to secure unusual ingredients. This is consistent with how Hamamoto now markets itself: producer relationships, seasonality and ingredient timing before technique-for-show.

Hamamoto’s distinguishing angle is not a famous Tokyo parent, a celebrity import, or a dramatic room. It is Chef Hamamoto himself, his Ki-Sho history, the tiny counter, and ingredient relationships in Japan.

Down a row of historic shophouses in Tanjong Pagar, this area hosts endless restaurants, with many other standouts nearby.

Walking into the darkened. cavernous room. The lighting is particularly impressive, soft, but with specific spotlights in front of each of the seats to highlight the theatrical preparation of each course. Three chefs at their stations, with Chef Hamamoto in the middle, all preparing the mise in place for the meal ahead.

It would be a shame not to do a full experience when visit Hamamoto, and I went with the most extensive menu. The menu was a bit odd, there were definately some translation errors here, and we ended up with a few extra courses that I wasn’t expecting on the menu.

A collection of appetizers with beautiful presentation:

• Charwanmushi with diced abalone, mountain vegetables and green peas. Lots of texture in the dish, and it wasn’t all cooked together until soft. Lots of contrast between the soft egg, the spring of the abalone and crunch of the vegetables

• Sweet shrimp sashimi, on a bed of slimy seaweed

• White jack sashimi, topped with shio-koji and homemade pressed roe

Chef Hamamoto searing the piece of fish for the next dish with a brick of charcoal

Octopus sashimi from two parts of the octopus, a piece of pike conger eel Chef Hamamoto was searing earlier, and some firefly squid, just lightly touched with fire.

Spiny lobster sashimi topped with generous portions of uni, and kaluga caviar.

Grilled rockfish, in an aged vinegar sauce on a bed of rich, buttery monkfish liver. Foie gras of the sea.

Presentation of the live hairy crab to be used in the next dish.

The leg was deshelled and presented before cooking shabu shabu style.

The chef rapidly dipping the leg to just barely poach it in a broth made from the crab innards.

Served with a bit of the broth, just lightly cooked. Absolutely delicious and a highlight of the meal.

Starting the nigiri dishes, a piece of young sea bream, dramatically smoked table side.

Next, Isaki, or chicken grunt, a fish that maintains higher fat content than most other summer fish.

Moving into the tuna pieces, the chutoro, a medium fatty piece of tuna (and not cherry trout as it says on the menu).

Shimofuri otoro, an incredible piece of otoro with incredibly fine marbling. Looking more like a piece of wagyu than tuna. Slightly less fat percentage than the fat bomb of the more common jabara otoro, which is cut to highlight the fat. This cut is more balanced, and has one of the best pieces of nigiri I’ve ever had. Definitely my highlight of the night. The menu calls it “medium fatty tuna”, but there was nothing medium about this one. I’m pretty sure it was referring to the chutoro from the previous piece.

An unexpected piece of nigiri that wasn’t on the menu. What could possibly follow up the shimofuri oroto? Another cut of otoro, of course, cut parallel to highlight the heavy fat, broiled with charcoal directly before serving. A massive mouthful of fat, almost to the point of excessiveness. Without the charcoal grilling, it would’ve probably been too much. Would’ve been my highlight of the night if it wasn’t for the shimofuri piece right before it.

Starting to wind down from the fat bombs, a piece of botan-ebi, or sweet shrimp. A sweet, well-needed break from all the fattiness.

Back to the heavier, creamy dishes, a heavy scoop of uni served on nori, sourced from the northern tip of the Aomori Prefecture. Creamy and decadent, as always.

Finishing off the nigiri, and according to the menu, the meal, a piece of Nodoguro or black throat sea perch, lightly poached.

I was completely stuffed by this point, but the chefs just kept going. They showed up with a plate of incredibly well marbled beef. I wasn’t sure where we were going with this.

Lightly tapping the meat with charcoal to just char the surface slightly.

Topped with uni and we were told to roll it up into a Kobe beef-uni wrap

I thought we were done, but there was one final dish before dessert.

Tuna mince with egg yolk and pickles formed into a hand roll.

Finally, the egg custard, signifying the end of the meal, precisely positioned at the corner of the plate.

Miso soup, as it customary.

A choice of desserts, which is rare for a omakase or kaiseki meal. I was tempted by the Miyazaki mango shaved ice, but went with their signature musk melon, which was served with shaved ice. Intensely sweet and juicy.

Overall, this was probably the single best Japanese meal I’ve had in a very long time, and a contender for the best meal of the year. Hamamoto doesn’t pitch itself as just a sushi stand, but combining the best of the kaiseki and omakase formats and it shows. There is a sense of dinner and a show, watching the chefs prepare your dinner with a variety of techniques, arousing all the senses - from sight, sound, smell, touch and flavour.

If you want pure sushi hierarchy, Hamamoto may not be the cleanest benchmark because the meal gives meaningful space to cooked seasonal courses. If you want a chef-led Japanese seasonal counter in Singapore, it is squarely in the conversation. I can’t wait to return and to bring others here. Definitely come for dinner and not for lunch, it’s a lot of food and well worth the price of admission.

Total Damage: 660 SGD/1 person

It is on Level 102 of The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. It has two Michelin stars. It has a polished room, proper service, a strong wine list and the full ICC skyline performance outside the windows. The name means something close to “sky dragon pavilion”, which is about as on the nose as it gets.

The more useful story is Chef Paul Lau Ping Lui and the Hong Kong luxury hotel Cantonese tradition around him. Lau has been cooking for more than four decades, with time across Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai and the UK. His cooking sits in the classical lane: roast meats, double-boiled soups, live seafood, dim sum, tea, wine and private-room hospitality. This is the type of restaurant where the basics matter more than invention. Heat control. Knife work. Stock. Seafood timing. Roast meat. Restraint.

The Ritz-Carlton opened in 2011 and Tin Lung Heen opened with it as the flagship Chinese restaurant. It could have stayed a high-altitude novelty. Instead, it became one of the more serious hotel Cantonese rooms in Hong Kong.

The room is impressive. Double-height windows, Hong Kong spread out underneath, service moving around with that luxury hotel smoothness. It is expensive and it knows it. This is a business lunch room, a family celebration room, and a visitor’s “one proper Cantonese meal in Hong Kong” room.

We came for dim sum.

The meal started with a crispy crab roll in salted duck egg batter. Interesting idea, more novelty than classic dim sum. I think ours was a little undercooked.

The har gow was traditional, with gold flake added on top. The wrapper and shrimp were fine. The gold did nothing, as gold usually does.

The egg tarts were the classic flaky lard-crust version. Properly made.

The siu mai were massive, probably the largest I have had, topped with a big slice of shrimp or scallop. Impressive to look at, although size is not the same thing as balance.

The rice noodle roll with clams was the best of the unusual dishes. Normally this is shrimp, char siu or fried dough. Clams make sense here. Sweet, briny, and much more interesting than it sounded on paper.

There was also a steamed and pan-fried bun with uni on top. Again, unusual. Good idea in theory. The execution did not quite land.

Desserts were weaker.

The mango and pomelo sago was the best one, because mango and pomelo sago is hard not to like when the fruit is decent.

The cold red date and snow swallow jelly did not work for me.

The glutinous rice dumplings with black sesame were fine, but not memorable.

The petits fours came in a Star Ferry container, which was cute. I liked the container more than the sweets.

I may have caught Tin Lung Heen at the wrong meal. Dinner may be a better expression of what the kitchen does. The restaurant’s strengths are probably roast meats, soups, seafood and the more formal Cantonese dishes where Paul Lau’s classical background has room to show.

For dim sum, I was not particularly impressed.

The classics were competent, although a bit plain. The creative dishes were hit and miss. Desserts were the weakest part of the meal. At this price, that is a problem.

You are paying for the room, the view and the service. All three are real. I just do not think the dim sum itself justifies the premium. Frankly, I can get much better dim sum at a much lower price point. You’re paying for the view, and the service. The dinner service may be better, but I’m definately passing on the dim sum here.

Total damage: $1200 HKD/4 people.

It is the official Hong Kong outpost of Takashi Saito’s Tokyo restaurant. This is not a random luxury-hotel sushi counter borrowing a famous surname. It has real lineage, real training, and real connection to the Sushi Saito ecosystem, but it is also not the Tokyo counter. Chef Takashi Saito is not usually standing in front of you, shaping the rice, brushing the soy, and deciding whether your life has so far justified a piece of tuna.

Chef Takashi Saito founded Sushi Saito in Tokyo and turned it into one of the great modern sushi temples. The Tokyo restaurant formerly held three Michelin stars and built a reputation that sits somewhere between restaurant, private club, and myth. The Hong Kong branch was created to export that philosophy: Saito-trained chefs, Edomae technique, ultra-premium sourcing, and the same quiet seriousness around rice, temperature, ageing, seasoning, and sequence.

Sushi Saito Hong Kong opened on 2018 in the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong. It was the first overseas branch of Sushi Saito in Tokyo.

The format is familiar if you have spent too much of your life caring about sushi: a small Edomae omakase counter, around 8 seats, Japanese sourcing, careful rice, serious technique, and the sort of atmosphere where everyone pretends to be relaxed while quietly studying every movement behind the counter.

The original Hong Kong head chef was Ikuya Kobayashi. He was born in 1988, trained under Takashi Saito for roughly eight to ten years, and was described as Saito’s second-in-command in Tokyo before being sent to lead Hong Kong.

Under him, Sushi Saito Hong Kong earned two Michelin stars in the 2019 Hong Kong & Macau guide. After Hong Kong, he returned to Japan, later led 3110NZ by LDH Kitchen, and then opened Sushi Kobayashi in Ebisu.

Later, Masashi Kubota was reported as heading Sushi Saito Hong Kong after leaving Taka by Sushi Saito in Kuala Lumpur. More recent sources point to Nawata Ryosuke as executive chef, with experience in Sushi Saito’s Japan operation and the Thailand offshoot before Hong Kong. However, the chef that was preparing the meal today was none of the above.

On this visit, the chef at the head of the counter was new to me. Friendly, and incredibly professional, he took great pains to explain technique and fish, both in English and Cantonese when asked, but conservative enough not to interrupt or add commentary when he wasn’t.

We started with the house sake: clear, sweet, refreshing, and very easy to drink. Dangerous in the way good sake tends to be.

The first proper bite was bonito, seared over charcoal and served with ginger flowers and a ginger, spring onion, and soy dipping sauce. Clean smoke, bright ginger, good start.

Then came sea bream roe and milt with tender bamboo shoots and vegetables in a smoky clear broth. Gentle, savoury, and more about texture than drama.

The chef sliced trout for a light cure before the nigiri section. One of those quiet counter moments where half the pleasure is watching someone work cleanly.

A large grilled scallop followed, butterflied and tucked into nori with a little chili pepper. This was excellent. Sweet, hot, crisp from the seaweed, and gone too quickly.

The chef displaying the ingredients for the next dish - the abalone and octopus

The abalone had been braised for seven hours and came with a thick abalone liver sauce. The octopus came with fresh wasabi, fruity and sharp. The chef explained how he massages the octopus to tenderize it. This is the kind of detail I like at a counter. Not theatre for its own sake, but a glimpse into the labour behind a simple-looking plate.

The leftover abalone liver sauce was then mixed with rice, diced abalone skirt and foot, and a squeeze of fresh yuzu. Rich, sticky, saline, slightly bitter from the liver, lifted by citrus.

The Chef preparing the mise en place before moving on to the main event.

Sea bream continued the theme from earlier, brushed with soy and finished with yuzu.

Horse mackerel from Osaka Bay came with shredded shiso underneath. It was stronger, slightly fishy, and better for it. The shiso kept it in line without making it polite.

The cured trout returned as nigiri.

Then lean tuna from a 163kg fish.

Then chutoro.

The grilled otoro was the best of the tuna sequence: yuzu, salt, smoke, fat. It had that ridiculous quality where the fish almost disappears before you have finished registering it.

A seaweed interlude followed, sweet, slimy, and vinegared. Not glamorous, but useful. It reset the palate.

Striped shrimp came with tiny caviar. Sweet shrimp, little pops of salt.

The elderly sous lightly adding a bit of smoke to the nori before the uni roll.

Then an uni gunkan roll, creamy and sweet in the way good uni should be, without needing much explanation.

The clam was slightly chewy, sweet, and braised.

The sea eel was simmered, soft, fluffy, and sweet.

Then came futomaki with cucumber, egg, chives, dried gourd, shrimp, uni, minced tuna, and eel. A lot going on, but still coherent.

Grilled firefly squid followed. Barely grilled, just touched with fire. Much better than the slimy versions I’ve had in the past.

The meal closed with classic miso soup, warm and comforting.

Then signifying the end of the meal, the egg custard - smooth, dense, and velvety.

Dessert was intensely sweet mango and Japanese white strawberries. Not complicated. Did not need to be.

Overall, Sushi Saito Hong Kong is not fake Saito. The lineage is real. The training is real. The meal has enough precision, sourcing, and craft to justify taking it seriously.

The harder question is whether it justifies the price. For me, the answer depends on what you think you are buying. If you want Takashi Saito himself, this is not that. If you want a Hong Kong expression of the Saito system, executed by chefs from the broader lineage, then the restaurant makes sense.

It is expensive. It is controlled. It has the usual access games of ultra-premium sushi. But it is not empty luxury. There is substance under the brand. Under the new chef, I think Sushi Saito has improved since my last visit! Definitely worth a repeat!

Total Damage: 8200 HKD/2 people

Met up with a friend at Tango, a casual Argentinean steakhouse in Hong Kong. I've always remembered Tango for the chimichurri and not the quality of the meat, and this time was no exception. Absolutely amazing chimichurri though - the best in the city!

I expect things to pick up a bit into May and June. If things quiet down in the middle east, I may have a chance to drop by Dubai. I’m really looking forward to trying Row on 45, after the amazing experience I had at Row on 5.

Otherwise, just continuing to chill and eat my way around the world.

That same idea carries through to the room. The interior is dark, understated, and quietly expensive rather than overtly grand. On our visit, the room was filled with exactly the sort of crowd you would expect: obvious business dinners, family gatherings, and tables that looked like they had been coming here for years. It has the atmosphere of a serious Central dining room, not a showpiece destination for tourists. The effect is more controlled than flashy, which suits the food.

We decided to go with the tasting menu, which felt like the clearest way to understand the kitchen’s range.

The opening selection of appetisers set the tone neatly. There was classic char siu, suckling pig, and a crisp tofu preparation. Nothing here was trying to be clever. The point was execution, and that much was apparent from the start.

The lobster course came next, done in two ways using the two halves of the tail. One half was stir-fried with crispy garlic, green onion, and a good deal of wok hei, the kind of dish that reminds you how much flavour Cantonese cooking can build from heat, oil, and timing alone. The other half was removed from the shell and paired with asparagus and Chinese fungus, more restrained in style, allowing the sweetness of the lobster to come through more directly. It was a smart progression, showing both power and finesse with the same ingredient.

After that came a double-boiled soup of fish maw and matsutake mushroom, made using the classic Chinese low-and-slow approach that avoids diluting the broth with excess moisture. This was deeply concentrated, clear, and full of umami.

A traditional fish course followed: steamed grouper fillets, deboned for convenience, finished with blistering hot scallion oil. This is one of those Cantonese preparations that can seem almost too simple if you do not stop to think about how much precision it requires. The fish has nowhere to hide. Here, it was handled properly, delicate and clean, with the hot oil providing fragrance rather than brute force.

The wagyu beef came glazed in a sweet sauce and served with meticulously cut bok choi. Cantonese beef courses at this level often risk becoming a little predictable, but this was well judged and balanced, with enough sweetness to compliment the fattines of the beef without overwhelming it.

One of the neater dishes of the night was a traditional preparation of poached Tianjin cabbage in rich chicken broth with wolfberries. The cabbage had been carefully carved into the shape of a flower. The dish itself was elegant and soothing, and a reminder that high-end Cantonese cooking often reaches its most sophisticated expression not through extravagance, but through taking a humble ingredient and treating it with extraordinary care.

The highlight of the night came at the end of the savoury courses: a large rehydrated abalone served with fried rice in abalone sauce. This was excellent. Properly prepared abalone should be tender without losing its structure, and this one had exactly that quality, rich and deeply savoury, with the sauce carrying all the patient concentration you hope for in a dish like this. The fried rice underneath was not an afterthought either, but a useful delivery mechanism for all that sauce. If you are going to come to a place like Ying Jee Club, this is the kind of dish you want them to make for you.

Dessert was relatively traditional, a double-boiled bird’s nest followed by petit fours on the side, including water chestnut jelly and an almond biscuit. It was a gentle ending, not especially theatrical, but consistent with the measured tone of the meal.

What impressed me most about Ying Jee Club was not that any one dish was wildly inventive or shocking. In fact, that is almost the wrong way to think about the place. The strength of the restaurant lies in the consistency and care across the board. The kitchen takes traditional Cantonese forms, occasionally gives them a slight twist, and executes them with a level of discipline that very few restaurants can sustain across an entire meal.

There was no single dish that left me stunned, but there were no weak points either, and that kind of consistency is harder to pull off than a one-off signature flourish. For serious, highly accomplished Cantonese cooking with Michelin pedigree, Ying Jee Club is the real thing. Worth a return visit.

Total Damage: 4800 HKD/2 people.

I enjoyed the experience at Ying Jee Club so much, that I ended up returning for dim sum just a few days later. I was impressed again. No caviar, gold flake or foie gras here. Just simple Cantonese cooking, exceptionally well-executed, every single time.