In Hong Kong’s full of life meals scene, you’ll discover every little thing from avenue meals to high quality eating.
Look across the bustling streets of any main district, and it’s the hawker stalls that may instantly fill your periphery. Wander a little bit additional, and also you’ll discover higher-end institutions tucked into tall buildings, all of which provide a appeal of their very own.
It doesn’t actually come as a shock when folks say they booked a visit to Hong Kong simply to eat, as a result of everybody has a dish they’d kill to style proper on its soil — whether or not it’s egg tarts or char siu.
The underside line is that the Aromatic Harbour isn’t known as a culinary capital for no purpose.
Meet Alvin Leung and Aven Lau, the cooks behind two of Hong Kong’s Michelin-starred eating places: Bo Innovation and Épure. Regardless of their contrasting philosophies within the kitchen, the pair finds similarities in bringing Hong Kong’s eating scene to new heights.
Alvin Leung sees alternatives for elevation in simplicity
On the core of Alvin Leung’s world is with the ability to stand out from the get-go. That’s the way it’s all the time been for the acclaimed 64-year-old chef, who’s on the helm of Wan Chai’s Cafe Bau and the two-Michelin-starred Bo Innovation within the Central district, amongst others.
“No. I’m nonetheless an consideration seeker,” the MasterChef Canada decide instantly answered when requested if his personal views on meals have modified over time.
“I prefer to be distinctive. I love to do issues that no one has accomplished, go to locations no one has gone. So, even in my TV reveals, I love to do one thing that’s most likely much less mainstream. That’s all the time been my character, simply to be totally different. I don’t suppose that has modified,” he continued.
It wasn’t obscure what Leung was speaking about. Throughout the 2025 Hong Kong Wine & Dine Pageant, below Bo Innovation, he lined up a menu of reimagined variations of Hong Kong’s most iconic dishes, which actually drove his level residence and have become a fairly obtrusive indication of his roots as an engineer by career.
Simply take the Molecular X-treme Xiao Lengthy Bao for instance. Taking over the colours of vivid crimson and pink, it’s completely spherical and easy, freed from the creases the soup dumpling normally has. Nevertheless it nonetheless provides you the basic xiao lengthy bao expertise anybody would search for: whenever you take a chew off the sting of the wrapper, a small wave of sizzling broth washes over your mouth earlier than you get to the bits of floor pork.
There’s additionally the Lao Po Bing (spouse cake), which is usually spherical, flat, and full of wintermelon filling. Leung’s model, nonetheless, merges the trendy with the normal. He deconstructs the cake and provides two new layers to the combination: a scoop of ice cream and a skinny meringue disc. The underside layers, which function your entire dish’s basis, keep true to the chewy filling and ordinary flaky texture of the famed dessert.
These dishes nonetheless style acquainted on the finish of the day, simply offered in methods you wouldn’t consider. Maybe it’s the London-born chef’s means of maintaining with the dynamic culinary business whereas nonetheless paying homage to the classics folks love.
Leung believes the latter is precisely why folks ought to come to Hong Kong within the first place.
“No,” Leung replied when requested if there’s any facet of the native delicacies he feels must be highlighted extra. “I feel now we have such a spread in Hong Kong. We cowl each facet around the globe. I actually suppose that folks, once they come to Hong Kong, ought to try to go for one thing distinctive to [it].”
Aven Lau: In between cultures
For Aven Lau, in the meantime, intersections appear to be a significant a part of his physique of labor in additional methods than one.
The Singaporean chef runs the present on the one-Michelin-starred Épure, the place he cooks modern French meals at Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbourfront. All these totally different cultures and cuisines have basically turn out to be part of who he’s as a chef, along with his Singaporean id laying the groundwork for all of it and Hong Kong serving because the backdrop for his culinary development.
Traces of his adolescence have even discovered their means again to a later level in his timeline as an expert chef. Years in the past, Lau considered recreating a quail dish he tried when he was eating out along with his household throughout his youth, exhibiting that it’s the mundane, fleeting experiences we frequently bear in mind most.
“I didn’t develop up in a household the place they had been very targeted on meals. Like, we had been simply consuming at street-side stalls. There was as soon as, my mother and father determined to have a good time, and so they introduced me to this Center Jap restaurant. They usually ordered this smoked hen. At that age, that was one of the best hen I had as a result of it was the primary time I tasted one thing that smoky. So, that made me wish to recreate a poultry dish,” he informed Rappler.
Lau pressured, although, that yearly, he cooks in another way. What he created three years in the past probably gained’t be the identical factor he’ll prepare dinner three extra years down the road. He attested that he isn’t one to observe developments however is as an alternative all the time seeking to evolve.
It’s a paradox, actually — what’s going to by no means change with Lau is his chase for fixed transformation.
“I feel that’s crucial, it’s that fixed evolution. Should you’re not evolving, you’re caught prior to now, proper? I feel the entire level about [being] a chef is about discovering your individual id,” he mentioned.
And it’s mirrored in what he serves at Épure.
Considered one of these is the aged rice duck “a l’orange” with aged tangerine peel and timut pepper, which has turn out to be a staple on the institution. These geese are sourced from China’s Guangdong province and baked within the oven till the pores and skin turns into crispy. The timut pepper sauce is then poured over the slices of duck to even all of it out.
However what actually ties all of it collectively are the oranges being swapped out for tangerines. This, Lau mentioned, provides the French dish a definite Asian aptitude.
The chocolate soufflé tart, in the meantime, is gentle, fluffy, and has the very stage of excellent bitterness you’ll search for in any cacao-based dessert after having a collection of savory mains.
Whereas Épure is a French restaurant on paper, Lau nonetheless makes it some extent to include semblances of his personal lived experiences into no matter he cooks within the kitchen, permitting him to create dishes he can actually name his personal.
All of it circles again to what he deems vital as a chef: discovering your individual id.
Each these cooks are serving to push Hong Kong’s eating scene ahead in their very own methods — Leung doing in order he will get a thrill out of refashioning classics, and Lau following swimsuit as he injects components from his personal heritage into French delicacies. It’s no marvel, then, how Hong Kong earned its status as a famend culinary vacation spot. – Rappler.com
