Private kitchens are the perfect way to sample five-star cuisine without the painful paychecks. We check out three of the best in Hong Kong, including a Creole kitchen, a rustic French retreat and a fiery Shanghainese hideaway.
There’s a real sense of adventure when dining in a private kitchen, reservation numbers are passed on with a wink and a nudge and after a confused wander through the city’s backstreets, you find yourself eating in someone’s glorified living room. But in a city where commerce takes priority over history and family-run businesses are knocked down in the name of development, private kitchens provide a sense of history and culture protected from the neon lights and mass-produced cuisine of our main-stream dining scene.
Da Ping Huo
L/G Hilltop Plaza, 49 Hollywood Road, Central,
Tel: 2559 1317
Dinner is HK$250 per head, cash only
Da Ping Huo has the intimate atmosphere of an art fanatic’s living room. Paintings and Chinese memorabilia scatter the walls and five rustic tables are crammed into the tiny, softly lit room. You can hear the clanging of pots over the soft strains of Shanghainese opera in the small kitchen, where owner Wang Hai’s wife, Wong Siu King, cooks the beautiful Sichuan food as Wang Hai animatedly buzzes from table to table. There is no menu and the cuisine is prepared from recipes handed down through the family for generations. In true Sichuan style, most dishes are a sinus-clearing, eye-watering culinary inferno, bursting with flavour. Multiple dishes are brought out in a haphazard manner after a consultation with Wang Hai and if he finds you crying into your napkin and sweating half your body weight, you will be brought a cooling cucumber and sesame seed salad, but if you’re challenging him to test your taste buds, you will be brought a sizzling hotplate of blackened chicken on a bed of fiery chilies, which would render even hardest chili-nut into a blithering, sweating mess. All diners arrive at 8.30 pm and try the dishes together, so tables banter with Wang Hai and each other about each dish, constantly giving feedback until everyone is satisfied. At the end of this culinary adventure, Wong Siu King emerges from the kitchen, smoothes down her apron and graces diners with a five-minute performance of perfectly pitched Shanghainese opera, which moves everyone to an awe-struck silence.
Le Blanc
6/F, 83 Wan Chai Road,Wan Chai?
Tel: 3428 5824
Le Blanc is a tiny French private kitchen on the sixth floor of an office block down a dingy market alleyway in Wan Chai. Like, Da Ping Huo, the obscure location only adds to the drama when you emerge from a rickety old lift into a small dining room decorated like a French country barn with huge velvet curtains sectioning off each table allowing you a perfectly private dining experience. The French food served here is near world-class and five- or nine-course menus are available from HK$350 to HK$580 per person. Given the quality of the menus, which feature everything from foie gras to decadent platters of hearty French cheeses, this is incredible value for money and a similar meal in a big hotel would cost almost three times as much before you have even looked at the wine list.
Magnolia
G/F, Shop 5, 17, Po Yan Street,
Sheung Wan
Tel: 2530 9880
www.magnolia.hk
A Creole private kitchen, which offers a unique dinner-party style dining experience. Diners are welcomed right into the kitchen, where there is a small open plan seating area where they can watch the chefs hard at work as they enjoy canapes and drinks. They are then shown up to one of three intimate dining rooms with long tables of 16 to 20, which can either be entirely booked out by one group, or if you arrive in a two, you sit with other people at the table, creating the perfect atmosphere in which to create a brand new set of friends. The food is a hearty combination of ribs, gumbo and mashed potato, which is all served family-style by the vivacious owner, Lori Granito, further encouraging interaction amongst guests. It’s like attending a dinner party thrown by a Southern American “mom,” without needing an invite and has perfectly tapped into the market of newly arrived expatriates.
Many of the city's best independent restaurants started out as private kitchens. For a taste of how private kitchens can evolve into Hong Kong institutions, check out our reviews of Tribute and Bo Innovation.
