Hong Kong Favourites, New Obsessions and More

A city best explored by following your curiosity. My Hong Kong favourites begin with the places I return to, then lead somewhere entirely new.

My Hong Kong favourites never stay the same for long, which is exactly why I love the city. It is fast, noisy, glamorous, scruffy, sophisticated, slightly bonkers and endlessly alive. Cross Victoria Harbour for almost nothing, nose around a wet market, disappear up an anonymous staircase and end the night somewhere brand new that everyone is suddenly talking about. Tomorrow there will probably be somewhere else.

I have known Hong Kong across different periods of my life. Every time I return, the thrill is partly recognising the city I love and partly discovering what has appeared while I’ve been away.

Old Favourites, New Arrivals

The old favourites matter. The Star Ferry still gets me every time. The China Club is another: wonderfully theatrical, with dark timber, red lacquer, extraordinary art,, antiques and unmistakably Hong Kong glamour. You’ll need to find a friend, though; it’s members-only. Trattoria Fiorello is my local, and the food is so good that I keep going back. Joyce, Hong Kong’s pioneering multi-brand fashion boutique, remains dangerous territory, particularly when it comes to shoes.

Then there is the new Hong Kong: the places that become favourites almost overnight. TATE has just entered its third chapter on Lok Ku Road. Vicky Lau and Chris Shao Studio have built its new identity around ceramics, porcelain and the idea of the vessel, with food, craft and interior design speaking the same language.

Il Presidente on Duddell Street is something else entirely. Sean Dix’s late-1970s/80s Italian modernism is glamorous, confident and a little cinematic. And then night falls.

Hong Kong Favourites After Dark

Penicillin is a favourite, not simply for the drinks but for the thinking behind them. Its closed-loop approach means ingredients are fermented, preserved, repurposed and given second and third lives. Sustainability here isn’t decoration; it drives the creativity.

Lockdown is darker, moodier and more mischievous, hidden behind its wonderfully peculiar entrance. Lorenzo Antinori’s Bar Leone has become impossible to ignore. In 2025, his first independent venture became the first bar in Asia to be named No. 1 in The World’s 50 Best Bars. Now Antinori has Montana on Hollywood Road with Simone Caporale of Barcelona’s Sips: Cuban-inspired, with 1970s Miami swagger and a completely different energy.

Peridot, high in The Henderson, is dazzling. It is deliciously green, voluptuous and slightly surreal: an interior that gets you before the first drink does.

Mius changes the tempo again, with warm timber, soft curves, soaring ceilings and Shelley Tai’s philosophy of “simple things, done right”. Now Tai has Fello on Wyndham Street, its looser, more sociable sibling. It has two floors, takes no reservations and is already buzzing.

Then there is GOKAN, where Japanese thinking meets cocktails and food. And COA, now part of Hong Kong bar history without ever behaving like an institution. That is what I love about Hong Kong after dark: cerebral, glamorous, playful, tiny, theatrical, brilliantly casual, sometimes within a few streets. There is always another door to open.

The Beautiful Collision

Perhaps what fascinates me most, though, is the architecture. I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower remains my favourite Hong Kong building, its razor-sharp geometric planes slicing into the skyline. But what makes the city architecturally fascinating isn’t a collection of individual icons. It is the collision.

Glass towers beside tong lau. Colonial fragments beside super-dense housing. Temples dwarfed by skyscrapers. Bamboo scaffolding climbing twenty-first-century façades. Elevated walkways, flyovers, escalators and impossibly narrow streets all occupy the same three-dimensional city. Hong Kong doesn’t unfold politely; it is layered, compressed, improvised, sometimes rather ugly and completely compelling.

You have to look up and down, through doors and along alleys. Artisan stores, craftspeople, ceramicists, independent designers and galleries hide on upper floors. Street art appears around corners. Sheung Wan is one of my favourite places to wander precisely because there will always be a painted wall, a tiny shop or a beautiful old staircase I somehow missed the previous twenty times I walked past. Hong Kong rewards nosiness.

Take the Ding Ding

One of the best things about the city is its scale. It is compact, easy to navigate and brilliantly connected. The MTR is fast and simple, ferries stitch the harbour and islands together, and taxis are everywhere.

And then there is one of my favourite Hong Kong sounds: ding ding. The tram, or the Ding Ding, as Hongkongers affectionately call it, rattles through one of the fastest cities on earth. Slow, narrow and slightly improbable, it refuses to hurry.

I still love sitting upstairs, preferably at the front, watching Hong Kong roll towards me. That is when you notice the signs, the washing, the shopfronts, the balconies, the people, the architecture and the improbable gaps between buildings. There is always something that wasn’t there the last time you passed.

Central bleeds into Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun, while Wan Chai has its own rhythm. Across the harbour, Sham Shui Po, Jordan, Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok shift the tempo again. And then come the markets: flowers, fruit, fish, jade, fabric, birds, antiques, kitchen equipment, dried mushrooms and mysterious medicinal things I still couldn’t confidently identify. Hong Kong can be extraordinarily polished, but its street life constantly pushes back against that polish.

Perfect Dinners on Plastic Stools as a Hong Kong Favourite

And, of course, there are the cha chaan tengs, Hong Kong’s wonderfully no-nonsense local cafés. Milk tea, pineapple buns, silky scrambled eggs, macaroni soup and French toast arrive amid booth seating, Formica and fluorescent lighting. The menus seem to contain every possible combination of East and West. I love their lack of preciousness.

Food is one of Hong Kong’s great pleasures. There is Cantonese in every possible form alongside exceptional Japanese, French, Italian, Thai, Korean, Indian and almost anything else you fancy. One night you can eat somewhere impossibly polished; the next, somewhere with plastic stools. Both can be brilliant.

Art With the Harbour Outside

Hong Kong is intensely international without ever becoming anonymous. It absorbs influences from everywhere and somehow remains unmistakably itself. The art world has that same energy. Art Basel Hong Kong brings the international art circus to town, but the fun spills across the city through Art Central, galleries, installations, exhibitions, openings and parties.

M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, has become one of my favourite places in the city. I go for the art and design, certainly, but also for the architecture, its scale and that extraordinary position on the harbour. With the Hong Kong Palace Museum just along the West Kowloon waterfront, I love the pairing: contemporary visual culture, architecture, design and moving image at one; centuries of Chinese art, history and craftsmanship at the other. You can move between centuries in an afternoon.

And outside, always, is that harbour. I never tire of it. Mist, rain, neon, sun, ferries, cargo ships, towers: from Tsim Sha Tsui looking towards Hong Kong Island, from Central looking back, from a rooftop or the Star Ferry itself, it changes by the hour.

Sometimes, just join the tourists. Take an Aqua Luna harbour cruise on one of those fabulous red-sailed junks. I don’t care how touristy it sounds; it is wonderful. Go towards sunset and watch Hong Kong light up around you. It remains one of my favourite ways to see the city.

One Ferry, Another World

And then there are the islands. This may be my favourite Hong Kong trick of all. You can be surrounded by skyscrapers, traffic, people and neon, then get on a ferry. Suddenly there is sea.

Lamma. Cheung Chau. Lantau. Little beaches, fishing villages, trails disappearing over green hills and seafood beside the water. Hong Kong is mountainous and subtropical, with around 40 per cent of its land protected as country parks and special areas. There are 263 islands, always another one to discover and favourite ones to return to.

Jump on a ferry and everything changes. It can feel like popping off to a Greek island or the South of France for the day, or disappearing there for the weekend. Yet Central is still just a ferry ride away. That, for me, is one of Hong Kong’s greatest luxuries: hyper-urban one minute, almost wild the next.

Old and new. Polished and scruffy. Local and international. Mountain and metropolis. Intensity and escape. I know this city incredibly well, and somehow, wonderfully, I still don’t know it at all.

There is always another door, another ferry, another staircase, another Hong Kong. And that’s why I keep coming back. Hong Kong is not one thing. It is everything, all at once.

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