Hong Kong high life
Andrew Bain picks his way through a bewildering selection to discover some of the city’s best dining experiences.
At last count, hungry Hong Kong tipped the scales at around 13,000 restaurants. To dine or drink here is to face a mystifying smorgasbord of ever-changing options, with experiences as varied as menus.
In the heart of Central, I’m lunching in the company of about US$20 million of artwork, a fairly typical representation of the walls inside Duddell’s at any one time.
This Ilse Crawford-designed restaurant opened three years ago, and is part-owned by one of Hong Kong’s largest art collectors, creating a Michelin-starred restaurant that’s also a high-end, ever-changing gallery space.
There’s fine dining downstairs, but a surprisingly unpretentious and eclectic salon for casual eating upstairs.
The salon is designed to resemble an art collector’s residence, with cane chairs, bright banquettes and a manor-like library with a wall of book shelving.
The menu is classic Cantonese with a few contemporary twists, such as dinnertime dim sum, and the food is a simple mix of ingredients – such as asparagus with mushroom and black truffle – that produces big flavours.
One street north of Duddell’s, Arcane is the newest venture from Australian Michelin-starred chef Shane Osborn.
Unsigned from the street, Arcane fills a small, almost officelike space on the third floor.
The restaurant seats just 36, with additional tables on an outdoor terrace where Osborn grows vegetables and herbs for the kitchen.
Stepping out from the elevator, I’m greeted by a wall of wine bottles that forms Arcane’s 1200-bottle cellar. Behind the cellar, Osborn anchors the open kitchen, where a few bar stools allow diners to converse with the chefs.
The menu is short – half a dozen starters and mains – and the food is light and rich, with the wagyu sirloin as soft as fairy floss this night.
There are two vastly different dining experiences at the Monogamous Chinese and Grassroots Pantry.
Hidden beneath SoHo’s outdoor escalators, the Monogamous Chinese is a finedining Chinese restaurant where the nostalgia is as thick as blackbean sauce.
Huge red lanterns hang from the ceiling and the walls are filled with propaganda-style art, dominated by a giant portrait of Mao made from business cards.
Chef Shizh Hoi Ping has created a menu of classic Chinese tastes – Sichuan spices, Peking duck, fried ice cream – to create a feed as tastefully retro as the decor.
After dinner, an array of bars beckons. Across the street from Duddell’s, Foxglove is an ubercool bar designed like a first-class airline cabin from the 1950s. Wait staff wear 50s-style aircraft attendant uniforms, the cocktail and spirit list stretches to 30 pages, and jazz bands further cool up the night.
The whole scene is so smooth and sultry – like stepping into a pick-up scene from a James Bond movie – it has the ability to make you feel more elegant than you might really be.
For beer drinkers, the Ale Project is Hong Kong in a pint glass. The city has around 13 craft breweries, and the Ale Project is virtually a cellar door for the industry.
The Mong Kok bar has a changing list of eight local beers on tap (plus selected imported beers), revealing local brewers’ penchant for unusual and interesting flavours – the likes of a Sichuan porter with peppercorns, a stout brewed with coffee beans, and a witbier with chrysanthemum buds, coriander seeds and white pepper.
There’s a communal, beer-halltype feel around the bar’s long benches, and you can get a nearfull spectrum of flavours with a six-beer tasting paddle.
Rooftop bars might be a Hong Kong staple, but Fu Lu Shou has altered the experience. Sitting atop a seven-storey commercial building, the small bar feels more like a cavern sunk within the surrounding high rises of SoHo.
It’s an unusual and fascinating perspective, but more unusual still is the entry procedure.
On busy Hollywood Rd, the bar is unsigned and entry is so exclusive you must call ahead to get a secret access code for the door before grinding upstairs inside a clunky graffitied lift.