The first thing you notice about the fish at @estro.hk is the jolt: a bright-green fig emulsion cut with enough fish sauce to make your head spin. It carries a pearlescent cod, cooked to the brink so it flakes on command, and it’ll haunt you. The second is how the curves of this dish — as in the slender ribbons of zucchini, stacked atop each other, gracefully wrought into an tilde — mimics the room, as if you’re in Elven cottage inhabited by a Neapolitan grandma who runs errands with her Bugatti, bartered her Impressionist-era Dali for the choicest truffles, and couldn’t care less if her ragu is traditional.
Estro’s chef, Antimo Maria Merone, is behind this thoughtful and deftly-executed menu, filled with cerebral dishes like the cod. And the restaurant is designed not by some worldly, renegade grandma but by the architect, André Fu. Instead of paying upwards of $1,000 (USD) for a hotel room designed by him (no shade), diners here — myself included, a month ago — get at least two hours designed for both pleasure and appetite.
A reasonably priced meal (lunch from $75 USD; dinner from $215) may open with king crab under slivered cucumber and a cold emulsion resonant with lime. But the first dishes that make your heart race, besides the fish, are the pasta courses. The first one is a twirl of linguine cloaked in a potent arugula pesto, crowned with tiny cubes of raw tuna — a la ‘al tonno,’ only sharper — and the second is bottoni, which are silky, miniature discs the size of macarons, paired with fried artichokes and a heady pecorino sauce. It stands tall among the best pasta dishes I’ve had all year, until the next one arrives: the ragu, which has the long-labored depth and a kind of bitterness that invites you in, much like the duck entree. This, too, gently re-introduces bitterness without it thrashing at you. The skin of the duck could be rendered a little more, and yes, dessert sends slivered, slightly underripe peaches.
But the sweets still triumph, the curves hold, and so does the vogue-ish Neapolitan accent. It trails you out the door, which is how you know you’ll return.
