Fine & Fancy

No, you’re not lost.

The narrow streets and concrete buildings may not fit in with your idea of Club Lane, but the aptly named Star Street in Wanchai just east of the upscale Pacific Place is exactly where three of Hong Kong’s hottest haunts are located.

It looks like it’s three in a row for restaurant innovateur Paul Hsu, executive director of Elite Concepts, the decade-old restaurant management company that has a growing list of successful properties in Hong Kong. After setting up The American Pie in the now trendy Lan Kwai Fong area in Central that started the themed restaurant concept and bringing dining chic to Knutsford Terrace in Kowloon, Hsu has once again found an unexplored area of the bustling city to plant his unique visions of dining and clubbing.

Named for the fabled film studio that was home to Fellini and de Sica, Cinecitta offers "classic Roman cuisine–sumptuous pasta, flavorful meat and seafood dishes and distinctive wines". The first of the three Starcrest outlets to open (in October 2000), signature dishes in the sophisticated Italian restaurant include a rack of lamb with pistachio crust, spaghetti with fresh and sun-dried shrimps and a parma ham roll with mozzarella and mushrooms. Cinecitta’s desserts, especially the ones with chocolate, are enough reason to find your way through the maze of little streets.

I still don’t get the rationale behind the name One-Fifth (the missing fifth of a quart) but Hong Kong’s expat yuppies and chuppies have made it a bar of choice. Entrance is through a side street, where you are faced with a ten-meter high wall of bamboo. Up a flight of stairs and through a mood-lit, sound-proof bridge and you enter a world of texture–marble platform, heavy (really heavy!) wooden sofa-like chairs, dark oaken bar, timber inserts in the concrete floor, earth-colored hides. The sounds are as varied as the bottles on stock at One-Fifth and yes, being in Wanchai, there is a Suzie Wong drink on the bar list.

The jewel in the Star Street crown is undoubtedly Kokage, the wonder child of Elite’s Hsu and celebrity chef Bryan Nagao, who comes into his own after five years behind the stoves of the fabled Felix at The Peninsula Hong Kong. Kokage (literally, shade of a tree) was barely seven months old when it was included in the May 2002 issue of Conde Nast Traveler magazine as one of "the world’s most exciting restaurants", one of only three in Asia and the only one in Hong Kong to make the annual "Hot Tables" list.

Kokage’s main attraction is Chef Nagao’s culinary masterstrokes. "While the menu is different from what you’d expect in a Japanese restaurant, you can’t call it fusion–it’s still pure Japanese," he says of Kokage’s menu. "You can add new ingredients when they come along–like drinking sake with truffles–and still have food that’s completely Japanese in nature."

Nagao emphasizes fresh ingredients and a variety of cooking styles, such as traditional Japanese steaming and simmering, as well as western techniques like pan-frying and searing. The Los Angeles-born Japanese (who studied cooking in Hawaii) also mixes ingredients from various continents, often in surprising ways. Try gooseliver poached in sake and apple, or octopus with chili vinegar and truffle oil. How about chawan mushi (traditional Japanese custard) with suckling pig, Hibachi beef fillet with black truffle sauce, miso-glazed butterfish with taro or Green Tea Half-moon, a noodle dough ravioli filled with smoked salmon and mascarpone cheese. A far cry indeed from chahan and tempura!

Kokage’s interior design deserves some notice of its own. Concept architect Tony Chi of New York, who did many of Elite‘s other restaurants, and Noel Bernardo of EC Studios in Manila start with a mysterious red lacquered door–does it open to "Akete kudasai"?–an imposing ikebana arrangement and marble flooring juxtaposed with teak wood planks. Don’t expect paper lanterns and sakura here; what you will find is a glass-enclosed sake cellar, glass shoji screens, celadon marble columns and a wooden tatami-like panel wall dropping from the ceiling. And yet, Bernardo insists, "the key is to make the style dramatic and visually pleasing but never intimidating. You should never feel you’re walking into a design museum. It’s a neighborhood restaurant, after all." Some neighborhood restaurant–Ah Fan’s noodle house was never like this!

Another city, another neighborhood. Last May, Paul Hsu took a bold and giant step by bringing one of his concept restaurants to its rightful home. Yé Shanghai (literally, Shanghai Night) opened its doors in Xintiandi, the newly hip, historic former French Concession in Shanghai, easily Asia’s hottest new tourist and business destination.

In a carefully restored, glorious shikumen (stone gate) house, Hsu hopes to replicate the restaurant’s success at the trendy Pacific Place in Hong Kong, and perhaps even raise it to new heights. Six hand-picked chefs are pulling out all the stops to serve up "contemporary interpretations of classic dishes from Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai", like renowned Shanghainese cold appetizers such as Drunken Shrimps, Smoked Pomfret and Bean Jelly with Cucumber.

"Coming home", though, by no means indicates the end of the restaurant’s journey. "Yé Shanghai is a proven restaurant concept," says former hotelier Hsu. "Now that we’ve established our ‘Mother ship’ in Shanghai, we’re ready to take it global."

Hsu has set his sights–and his tastes–on other Asian cities, as well as farther and more distant shores. Currently, he’s got a health club and a night club in Indonesia, two restaurants (the original Yé Shanghai and La Cité) in Hong Kong’s Pacific Place, aside from the trio on Star Street and the new Shanghai restaurant (other ventures have since been sold). The question now is–where will Paul Hsu set his next table?