At some point, you’ll move past the stuffy decor at @restaurant_petrus , a restaurant on the 56th floor of the Island Shangri-La, in Hong Kong. The views are sweeping, but so is Uwe Opocensky’s cooking. A recent carte-blanche lunch featured easy-listening dishes with a studied degree of reinvention: tomato salad with a quenelle of near-frozen burrata and bright pesto; sweet white asparagus with blood-orange sabayon; uniformly-pink baby lamb from the Pyrenees, atop a glossy sauce accompanied by soft artichoke and a meld of peas that held their snap. A tad less daring than the menu from a year prior, but no less gratifying.

In this day and age, nostalgia sells — especially if served at a Supreme Court house with all the fixings intact, inclusive of a trapdoor where prisoners would emerge from their cell and a perch where judges sporting powdered wigs admonish you from above. This is @themagistracyhongkong , where the chef Alwyn Williams, aptly, holds court and renders food that I remember well from his days cooking at the Westbury Hotel, in London. There are clever concessions to terroir: a more curry-forward dressed crab over crumpet; the use of Cantonese chicken in a puff-pastry — a play on pot pie; and steamed cod. But my favorite is his glorious, unadulterated sticky toffee pudding, followed by the ‘family’ salad (puffed grains, frisbee, apple, sultanas), which reminded me why sweeter salads can really work.

My trip ended unceremoniously with dinner at @ando.hkg , an underrated gem run by a humble, unassuming, wildly-talented chef in Agustin Balbi and an ace of a sommelier, Carlito Chiu. Not because the food wasn’t up to par — quite the opposite — but because I was near comatose midway through dinner from food-poisoning (unrelated meal). While the slide photo is of a beautiful morel, Balbi’s best dish is his least photogenic: arroz caldoso, a brothy rice dish made with Yumeprika rice and Spanish baby squid. I’ll be back.
🙏 @geoffreywu for paving the way.

🍽️ Mar ‘25