(Photo illustration by Los Angeles Times)
Michelin-starred goose under $50? 10 must-try Hong Kong restaurants
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For those of us raised on the great Chinese restaurants of L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley, a visit to Hong Kong can feel familiar. Here you can eat at the restaurant that originated milk tea and popularized the pork-chop bun. Or go on an egg tart crawl at one excellent bakery after another and discover just how flaky the pastry can get. But even an experienced SGV eater can be blown away by the variety, depth and sophistication of the restaurant scene. Not only because of the history of the region’s cuisine, which of course goes back centuries, but for the way a new generation of chefs — including some who have returned to Hong Kong after cooking abroad — are bringing their own modern perspectives to classic recipes and creating new dishes that could very well become classics in the decades to come.
Use the guide below as a starting point for your own explorations in a city with thousands of wonderful places to eat.
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Bakehouse
Chinese Bakery $
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Hong Kong egg tart debates can get heated — all the better for doing your own egg tart crawl to sample everything from Tai Cheong Bakery’s classic shortcrust with the familiar glossy, lemon-yellow custard to Hashtag B’s viral flower-petal-shaped puff pastry creations with a rainbow range of fillings (intensely green pandan, for instance, or the intriguing three-layer Earl Grey custard tart with a brown sugar mochi base and milk foam top). One essential stop is Bakehouse, which was controversial for two key reasons when Swiss-raised baker Grégoire Michaud opened the first of a now eight-shop chain in 2013. The outer crust uses a sourdough base rather than shortcrust or puff pastry, and the custard top shows its caramelized spots in the style of a Portuguese-influenced Macau tart. (Though Macau-style tarts are available all over the city.) I lined up at the Causeway Bay location, not far from Hysan Place mall — which itself is worth a visit for its sprawling, multi-floor Eslite international bookstore, where you might find an author reading underway or a pop-up design shop. As you wait, watch the tarts and other sourdough breads and pastries being made (try the flaky sausage roll), and at the end, find your reward: a warm-from-the-oven tart with a richly complex crust.
Bakehouse - 16 Kai Chiu Road, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Bakehouse - 16 Kai Chiu Road, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
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Ho Lee Fook
Chinese $$$
At first glance, the speakeasy vibes and expat-heavy clientele may lead you to believe that the cheekily named Ho Lee Fook is mostly a hip nightlife spot for cocktails and drinking snacks. Then you taste the food. Razor clams topped with glass noodles redolent of aged garlic and bright spring onions. A perfectly formed prawn-and-abalone siu mai. A smoked and crisp-skinned “three yellow chicken,” the tender flesh so flavorful and beautifully golden it might be the best you’ve ever eaten. It quickly becomes clear that a world-class team of chefs is at work. ArChan Chan, born in Hong Kong with career-making years at the stove in Melbourne and Singapore, returned home in 2021 to lead the kitchen at Ho Lee Fook. She has huge respect for tradition (recently she opened Peng Leng Jeng as an homage to Hong Kong’s disappearing food stalls) even as she brings her own sense of inventiveness to what Chinese food can be. Consider that her dessert menu comes with a warning that she does not serve “traditional Cantonese desserts” but meal endings that are “fun, quirky, delicious and inspired by the spirit of new Hong Kong.” One example: tofu gelato and longan granita with dates and goji berries on a base of white fungus. And for those who want tradition over creativity? The menu includes an offer to take customers to the tong shui po stall across the street, where the owner has been making the sweet soups for more than 50 years.
3-5 Elgin St., SoHo, Hong Kong
3-5 Elgin St., SoHo, Hong Kong
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Kwan Kee Claypot Rice
Chinese $
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(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
Despite the many exciting high-end restaurants that garner Michelin and World’s 50 Best attention, some of Hong Kong’s best eating is in more egalitarian places where you often wait in line for a spot at a table you might share with other diners. At Kwan Kee Claypot Rice, two of us were seated with three Hong Kong students who showed us how to rinse our chopsticks and bowls in hot tea before the sizzling pots of rice arrived straight from the hot stove. I ordered my clay pot dish with white eel, pork and liver sausage and an egg. After drizzling the rice with the restaurant’s specially flavored soy sauce, I dug in. The sausage, with just the right amount of funk, was a terrific counterpoint to the eel — surf and turf at its best — with the egg yolk bringing everything together and a few slices of red chile to heat things up. My reward at the end: crisp, beautifully charred crust from the bottom of the rice pot.
Shop 1, GF, Wo Yick Mansion, 263 Queen’s Road West, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
Shop 1, GF, Wo Yick Mansion, 263 Queen’s Road West, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong
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Lamma Rainbow Seafood Restaurant
Chinese $$$
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
A perfect day-trip destination that’s just a 30- to 40-minute public ferry ride from Central to the fishing village Sok Kwu Wan, Lamma Rainbow Seafood Restaurant is the largest in a row of waterfront fish spots. Writer Jennifer Che of the website Tiny Urban Kitchen helped us navigate the massive menu, making sure we didn’t miss two key specialties: scallops topped with garlic vermicelli and salt-and-pepper squilla, or mantis prawns, the size of langoustines. Whole fish, crab and clams also appear on most of the tables. After, Che took us to the local Mango King outpost for mochi filled with juicy, ripe mango. Then we set off on a walk with incredible views along the so-called Family Trail, stopping for a bowl of silky tofu fa at the outdoor stand Kin Hing Ah Por Tofu Fa (also called Tofu Garden) underneath a giant banyan tree before we reached the villages around the Yung Shue Wan pier on the opposite side of the island.
Lama Rainbow Seafood Restaurant - No. 23-27, First St., Sok Kwu Wan, Lamma Island, Hong Kong
Lama Rainbow Seafood Restaurant - No. 23-27, First St., Sok Kwu Wan, Lamma Island, Hong Kong
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Lan Fong Yuen Tsim Sha Tsui
Chinese $
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A fine place to stop for a milk tea-centered breakfast or lunch after exploring the labyrinth of African, Indian and other international shops and food stalls inside Chungking Mansions — one of the last remaining film locations in Wong Kar-wai’s iconic “Chungking Express,” where Brigitte Lin’s drug-dealing retired actor is seen conducting her business in a blond wig, trenchcoat and sunglasses. Lan Fong Yuen, in the basement of Heath Mall (which is technically part of Chungking Mansions but has a separate street entrance), has its own historic pedigree. Late founder Lam Muk-ho is credited with originating silk-stocking milk tea (it’s strained through a long cloth filter), and possibly yuenyeung (milk tea mixed with coffee), at the still-operating Gage Street stall he opened in Central in 1952. He’s also said to have popularized the thick-cut Hong Kong-style French toast and pork-chop buns so familiar in our own San Gabriel Valley cafes, as well as “lo-ding” instant noodle dishes, especially the chicken-chop version. The Tsim Sha Tsui location opened in 2009 but has an older diner aesthetic that attracts tourists and locals who line up for the scene and affordable Hong Kong comfort food.
Heath Mall basement, Shop No. S09, Chungking Mansions, 44 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Heath Mall basement, Shop No. S09, Chungking Mansions, 44 Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong
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Spring Moon at the Peninsula
Chinese $$$
Radish or turnip puffs are among the most difficult pastries a chef can master, as complex in their layering as a croissant but even smaller in size. Here in Southern California, we have access to very good radish pastries (try them at Paradise Dynasty). But the Peninsula Hotel’s Spring Moon, which some credit with creating XO sauce, brings Michelin-starred excellence to this dim sum specialty. The delicacy of the turnip puff’s layers was a revelation. During cold-weather months, Spring Moon offers snake soup with abalone, and there is an elegant version of pig trotters with ginger and sweet vinegar. But, of course, it’s the seafood dumplings you won’t want to miss from this high-level kitchen turning out some of the world’s most luxurious dim sum.
1/F, The Peninsula Hong Kong, Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong
1/F, The Peninsula Hong Kong, Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong
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VEA
French-Chinese $$$$
You sit in full view of the kitchen action at VEA, where the vibe is more relaxed than at chef Vicky Cheng’s other acclaimed restaurant, Wing, which is devoted to evolved Chinese fine dining and located one floor down the office tower elevator. Yet VEA’s chefs are just as ambitious. This is where Cheng made his reputation in Hong Kong, combining his French chef skills with the memories and flavors of his Chinese identity. A humble piece of braised daikon is showered with a pile of black truffle threads atop a trembling egg yolk. A beautifully cooked piece of mackerel, the skin lightly grilled, is paired with persimmon and caviar cured six months in Paris for VEA. And early on, a sabayon-filled egg is presented, looking at first glance like a classic French dish, except the velvety cream is delicately flavored with salted fish and bits of bok choy, a reference to one of Cheng’s favorite love songs playing from a music box hidden beneath the egg. You unfurl a tiny scroll with the lyrics to the George Lam tune : “As long as I’m with you, even salted fish and bok choy would taste so good.”
30F, The Wellington, 198 Wellington St., Central, Hong Kong
30F, The Wellington, 198 Wellington St., Central, Hong Kong
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Wing
Chinese $$$$
The crackle of paper-thin pastry under a razor-sharp cleaver as a tableside chef slices a golden fried spring roll in half is just one sign that you are about to eat something extraordinary. There is also the sight of the otherworldly creature — a sea cucumber — displayed on a platter in its dried state before it has undergone a multiday blooming and braising process prior to filling the spring roll in front of you. You bite into the delicate wrapper and find that the sea cucumber has been transformed into something that on one level resembles braised pork belly but also has its own lusciousness. This is just one of the not-to-miss dishes Vicky Cheng created at Wing with the goal of recontexualizing Chinese cuisine for a new generation. Born in Hong Kong, Cheng grew up in Canada and came of age as a chef in North America, learning the intricacies of French cuisine at Toronto and New York restaurants, including Daniel with chef Daniel Boulud. But it’s his own artistry and sense of showmanship that he reveals in, say, sugarcane-smoked, dry-aged pigeon, which dramatically appears on a flower-strewn bed of hay-like sugarcane fibers, or “crystal” preserved eggs presented like golden jewels with chile-flecked oysters, or ribbons of marinated eggplant woven into braids. No wonder the World’s 50 Best group placed Wing at No. 11 on its most recent global ranking and at No. 2 on its list of Asia’s best restaurants.
29F, The Wellington, 198 Wellington St., Central, Hong Kong
29F, The Wellington, 198 Wellington St., Central, Hong Kong
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Yardbird
Japanese Yakitori $$$
Many food lovers outside of Hong Kong know Yardbird from chef Matt Abergel’s James Beard Award-winning cookbook, the striking “Chicken and Charcoal,” centered on the restaurant’s devotion to yakitori, cocktails and anti-cool design. Neither Abergel nor co-founder Lindsay Jang is Japanese — they came to Hong Kong from Canada — but they’ve achieved huge respect for the sense of craftsmanship they bring to yakitori while also making the restaurant one of the hottest nightlife spots in the international city.
154-158 Wing Lok St., Winsome House, G/F, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
154-158 Wing Lok St., Winsome House, G/F, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
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Yat Lok
Chinese
(Laurie Ochoa/Los Angeles Times)
Hong Kong is a goose town. So much so that two of the city’s many excellent goose restaurants — Yat Lok and Kam’s Roast Goose — have Michelin one-star status. At Yat Lok, don’t expect Michelin-level fine-dining ambience. You wait in line for a seat and will likely share a table with other goose aficionados. Do expect a gorgeous mahogany crisp-skinned bird with deeply flavored flesh that will make you wish there was a Yat Lok in your hometown. Once a spot opens up, service is fast and you can have rice or noodles in a long-simmered broth. Half a bird is perfect for two. And in U.S. dollars it will only set you back about $47. Not bad at all for a Michelin-starred restaurant.
G/F, Conwell House, 34-38 Stanley St., Central, Hong Kong
G/F, Conwell House, 34-38 Stanley St., Central, Hong Kong
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