Page 69 - Hong_Kong_&_Macau's_Best_Restaurants_English_edition

as ever. Ekkebus has pared down slightly,
decreasing the menu options from six main
courses to four, showcasing the very best—
the Miyazaki wagyu is heftily priced, but
second-to-none, the beef’s natural umami
enhanced by the addition of dried red
onion skin and seaweed powder. A meal
at Amber is often atop the list for many
visitors, but remains firmly a favourite among
Hongkongers as well.
While the level of Chinese cookery is high
in this city, we implore you to cross over once
again to Macau, where Tam Kwok-fung’s Jade
Dragon (page 117) remains one of the region’s
best restaurants for modern Cantonese
cuisine. As one of the most long-standing
members of the Top 20 list, the team have
proven time and time again that remaining
consistent while also challenging the status
quo are skills they possess. From delicate dim
sum to roasted meats imbued with lychee
wood smoke, Tam’s gastronomic offerings are
deeply informed by decades of knowledge
and experience of one of the world’s greatest
culinary traditions.
Similarly, an inspiring experience can be
found at Golden Flower (page 117), another
long-standing Top 20 awardee that continues
to impress with its profound execution
of highly intricate and obscure regional
Chinese cuisine. Liu Guozhu’s dramatic Wynn
Macau restaurant is a paean to China’s great
gastronomic traditions, focusing on imperial
Tan cuisine and its extremely labour-intensive
preparations; traditional Cantonese, Sichuan
and Shandong dishes are also respectfully
rendered to great effect.
Spending time to perfect age-honoured
recipes also plays out at our final Top 20
entrant, which appears on the list for the first
time. The tiny Wan Chai restaurant Samsen
(page 83) surprised us with its immense
dedication to something as simple as a bowl
of soup noodles. Adam Cliff, a dedicated
disciple of Thai cookery for 15 years, spent
a whole year tweaking his recipe for the
restaurant’s signature wagyu beef noodles—a
labour-intensive dish that sees his team
making the pig’s blood-enriched broth every
day from scratch, simmering each batch for
at least two to three hours. Despite being a
casual, no-reservations restaurant with paper
place mats and a drinks list that is more lager
than Lafite, it’s living proof that the definition
of great dining is no longer so rigid—and
thank goodness for that.

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