I don’t know when Caprice turned.

Twenty years ago, it opened with great fanfare in a tall room with crystal chandeliers that draped like tents, framing wide views of the harbor. The team came from Le Cinq, and the chef Vincent Thierry maintained the polish of Philippe Legendre’s kitchen, whose cooking, as I remember from the year prior, in Paris, was colorless but precise. You’d notice the tight haircuts; the way servers move briskly, with confidence; and the longstanding captain plucked from Gaddi’s. The food was classical yet thoughtful.

Not much on the surface has changed over my half-dozen visits. The dining room still shimmers. So do the gastrotourists pocketing another three-star and those influencers patiently photographing themselves before the food. But my meals there began to fade, and at one point, lunch was tended by unkempt server ferrying visibly flawed dishes, like prematurely carved venison hemorrhaging its juices onto the plate.

Those episodes kept me away until others insisted that the latest chef had found his stride. There’s verve again, they said. Go! So I returned, searching for the Caprice that once moved me.

It never arrived, but there are flickers of craft. The first of it from a $400 (USD) menu appears after a ferry of wan crowd-pleasers — an unremarkable beef tartare and a clean, if blandly austere, slab of foie terrine, with a muted fruit marmalade hijacked by black pepper — and it’s a consommé with enthralling depth, warm with ginger, coriander and timut pepper, that may have overtaken the lean sweetness of the red mullet, but still felt alive. Sadly, the denouement begins with flawlessly-cooked lamb undone by nondescript, mushy celtuce and an over-reduced jus, followed by a promised millefeuille that ate like a dense, day-old napoleon.

Caprice doesn’t have a true analog in Hong Kong; the closest is Singapore’s Les Amis. And while the latter unfairly bludgeons diners with caviar, the soul of its simpler dishes isn’t lost, and a meal there on their best day doesn’t veer far from a well-established, old-school Parisian eatery.

If Paris is the promise, this one feels like the postcard. Beautiful, glossy, and stamped long ago. Less