It’s taken a while, but Hong Kong is now at peak three-yellow chicken.

The prized local bird wasn’t on my mind on a Friday evening, when I scanned the bar menu of a clubby, decorated hotel-restaurant and found a $75 charcuterie plate and wagyu burger for $130 (both USD). Instead, my mind went to @leela.hkg ‘s bone marrow and beef cheek biryani. I remembered it from months ago, during my first meal there — the ‘dum’ seal broken with the surgical hand of someone who probably deboned Dover sole for a living, unleashing a plume sharp with clove and curry leaf; the cross-section of the bone, as broad as a pig’s snout; the appealingly chewy rice, dewy with the supremely rich marrow; and the spices that cut through it all. It’s the kind of dish that convulses you with pleasure and commands you to travel across the city just to have it, as I did earlier tonight. Arriving at Leela, though, and learning of a new, large format tandoori-spiced three-yellow chicken rice changed this jaded but (still) wide-eyed critic’s mind. “I hope you have nothing planned tomorrow,” James, the manager, tells me as I pine. “But yes, it’s very good.”

Before the dish arrives, a server presents a plump bird that had been wet-brined, hung for hours, slow-roasted, brushed with masala spices, then roasted again. It’s beastly but beautiful, with a reddish, lacquered tandoori hue, burnished at the tips; and freckled with chives. Then it’s whisked away, where it gets a final roast before the bird is carved and served on a floral-patterned cake stand. The dish comes with a side (a gloriously indulgent rice, much like the biryani, with meaty Yunnan porcini, which I mistook for chicken liver), as well as an aside: “Can you finish it?”

If it at first it seems like a dare, it won’t be on once you find yourself prying smoky, fatty but well-rendered skin from (impeccably moist) flesh, not stopping until the bones are clean and untethered. You don’t conquer the bird so much as surrender to it, and in this city, that may be the only winning move. Less