Before the first bite at @vea_hk , there are warnings.

Dinner will take three hours, there will be coriander, and raw shellfish will appear. A server works through these disclaimers and asides, landing somewhere between hospitality and a preflight announcement, as Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” drifts through the room and cooks move through the open kitchen. Then comes the treasure box: fish maw as broad as a small stingray and a 28-head abalone, brandished as supplements at prices (breathtakingly) commensurate with their rarity. By then, the point has more or less been made, even if very little food has arrived.

For nearly a decade, the chef Vicky Cheng has given ingredients prized in Chinese cooking the treatment French kitchens reserve for their own trophies. At Wing, one floor below, he begins with Chinese cooking and opens outward. At VEA, the direction is reversed. Here is caviar and truffle, certainly, along with Périgueux, bisque, velouté and beurre blanc; there’s also preserved turnip, sea cucumber, fish maw, angelica root.

VEA is best when there’s a bit of discord; when luxury, as in caviar, is paired with vegetal accents like Taiwanese water bamboo, lily bulb and coconut; or when the sauce that gilds Pyrenees lamb is tinctured with just enough angelica root that it stops short of Auntie’s dispensary. Better still was crisp-skinned, mi-cuit flounder with a broth approaching velouté — and, crucially, bitterness. Then came the vaunted sea cucumber, slippery and gelatinous — a texture that French haute cuisine might ordinarily seek in a quenelle — over a sauce that follows the logic of an Américaine, whatever crab or lobster is best that day reduced into something indecently rich. A steamed bun follows for a scarpetta that felt deeply satisfying.

Missteps are rare. Kombu-aging intensified a prawn’s sweetness but left it mealy, while the kiwi pushed its sweetness too far. A bok-choy beignet arrived lukewarm and oily. And two pastries — one carrying asparagus, another carrots — were soggy. VEA has become extraordinarily good at making potentially difficult things easy to love. I occasionally wished it made me work a little harder. Less