Table by Sandy Keung
Ex-Financier turned Chef in Hong Kong
Table by Sandy Keung is a boutique fine-dining restaurant with a strong emphasis on sustainable practices and depurated seafood. It features unique elements like an in-house ozone depuration tank for purifying live seafood such as oysters, lobsters, and crabs, and it’s the only restaurant in Hong Kong with a resident marine biologist.
The restaurant opened its doors in 2014 in Sheung Wan. It started as a high-end spot blending Japanese, Western, and Chinese influences, focusing on high-quality, balanced ingredients with artful presentation in a simple atmosphere. In 2025, Table relocated to a new space in H Queen’s, incorporating unconventional elements like theme nights pairing dishes with music and even Lego art displays. The move aimed to refresh the experience while maintaining its core philosophy of ingredient-based, seasonal cuisine that feels uniquely “Hong Kong and Sandy’s.”
The restaurant offers bespoke set menus, such as the Signature Series, Portugal-Inspired (featuring eight courses of seafood and delicacies), and seasonal options like Hairy Crab Tasting Menus. Dishes often incorporate French influences in sauces and have been described as modern Chinese, with unconventional proteins like lamb heart and brain occasionally featured.
Executive Chef Sandy Keung is a self-taught chef who made a dramatic career pivot from finance to the culinary world. Born into a middle-class Hong Kong family, she helped her mother in the kitchen from a young age, handling prep work while her brother did not - experiences that sparked her early interest in cooking. Despite her father’s opposition to higher education for girls, her mother supported her, enabling Keung to earn a degree from St. John’s University in New York.
She trained as a CPA and began her finance career, transferring to Hong Kong in 1996. She rose up the ranks working through Vietnam and Hong Kong, cumulating in a CFO role for a publicly listed company.
After nearly a decade of private catering and guest cheffing in Vietnam and Hong Kong, Keung left finance in 2013, feeling “numb” from the repetitive nature of the work. She invested in an Australian fish farming system that evolved into her signature depuration technology, briefly opening a seafood kiosk in 2013 before launching Table the following year. Keung remains hands-on, interacting with guests, maintaining the kitchen, and expanding her portfolio - she also acquired and modernized Good BBQ, a 38-year-old takeout shop in Sai Wan Ho for affordable comfort food, with plans for more locations. Her approach blends business acumen from finance with a passion for innovation, sustainability, and creating dining experiences that are personal and unconventional.
The space is dark, with colourful artwork popping off the walls, some of which made from lego. The restaurant also prides itself on it’s massive collection of wine, stored in wine fridges lining multiple walls of the restaurant.
We arrived in the middle of hair crab season in Asia. Naturally, we went with the special hairy crab menu which featured the ingredient in nearly every dish.
A different take on the bread course, with a Chinese flavour, serving the bread with something that tasted a bit like an XO sauce, and a ginger, green onion and chive sauce. Both of which normally served with chicken, not bread.
The first course was a classic combination of ginger and carrot flavours, served with shaved asparagus, oyster and hair crab roe.
Next, a really neat hair crab, liver pate. Using oats, peanut kuzu pudding - bit of a neat combination of textures, flavours, that didn’t really work that well together.
An amazing combination of hair crab meat and roe stuffed into a morel mushroom, surrounded by a Comte cheese and potato sauce. Rich, warm and filling on a cold night!
A very innovative dish, hairy crab roe served with squid thinly sliced into “Ho Fun” noodles in a rich chicken broth. Delicious, with an interesting chewiness to the noodles.
One of my highlights of the night, and a dish that really highlighted the star ingredient, a hairy crab tagliolini topped with hairy crab roe, served with a bit of 50 year-aged vinegar. Traditionally, hairy crab is always served with aged vinegar in Shanghainese cuisine, and adapting the flavour profile with pasta was a big hit!
Yellow croaker slices, hot off the grill, in a thick hairy crab and black bean sauce. Classic Chinese flavours with an contemporary presentation. Another hit.
The biggest hit of the night, a crispy claypot rice topped with hairy crab roe, uni and sliced beetroot and chives. A very thin layer of rice, maximizing the browned crispy layer of rice touching the claypot while cooking. This was an optional supplement that was absolutely worth it. The single best dish of the night, and worth revisiting for this dish alone!
Dessert was one of the fluffiest souffles I’ve ever seen. I’m starting to keep a mental ranking of the best souffles I’ve had, and this one scores high on that list. Not as obviously “perfect” as the amazing browning and regular expansion from Les Amis, or as filling and delicious as the “Ode to Scallop” from Tate Dining Room, but this is probably one of the largest souffles I’ve ever seen, and the amount of rise that it was able to maintain without deflating is remarkable.
Overall, a great menu highlighting an ingredient I tend to find too much effort to pick myself. While nowhere near as elaborate as the hairy crab menu we did at Sezanne last year, dinner was a great hit, and worth returning next year.
Total damage 4600 HKD/2 people.