Make no mistake—of course you’ll be paying heftily. There is no a la carte here, with the eight-course seasonal menu priced at HK$1,488 and the nine-course signature menu (with a Kaluga caviar course) priced at HK$1,888. Lunch is offered, from HK$488 for three courses. 

The sumptuous banquettes, fine art and terribly expensive crystal candleholders are testament to an upper level of luxury—an effect that is countered with the deployment of millennial pink for the walls and a buzzing wine bar. (Oenophiles should regard the expertly curated wine programme courtesy of wine director Sebastien Allano. The list features over 1,600 bottles at the higher end of the spectrum, but a four-glass wine pairing at HK$680 is reasonably priced given the quality of the pours.)

Staff are extremely well put together, with the occasional arched eyebrow and milk-and-honey tones as they describe the creations in front of you. Ask them about the seemingly innocuous cauliflower, beautifully charred and imbued with light curry spices, and they’ll be able to tell you, with no little hint of pride, that the chef sourced it locally from an organic Hong Kong farm.

Soft, warm bread with whipped butters whirled with smoked bonito and seaweed, is a hint towards the Asian inflection that punctuates the menu. To start, beautiful, cool tongues of Hokkaido uni atop cornflower and sourdough crackers are slashed with the mouth-puckering sharpness of sea buckthorn. The next dish is the Kaluga caviar, but it is lost in the cloud of creamy foam and little fan of fresh scallops. 

You’ll find classic preparations with confident updates: tart umeboshi coulis and fresh cherries are used, for example, to complement a tiny, intensely rich serving of fudgy foie gras parfait—it’s the kind of combination you might imagine a precocious child from Crazy Rich Asians having in their brioche sandwiches, instead of peanut butter and jelly between slabs of Wonderbread.

The dance of flavours as the meal advanced was what impressed me the most, considering a tasting menu of this length runs the risk of tiring the palate. There was spice from the aforementioned cauliflower dish, and then a more of a tom yum profile from an invigorating fish broth lifted with lemongrass and chilli, to complement a tranche of wild sea bass, cooked à point. Blue lobster, which doesn’t enjoy being messed with, was matched with an intensely moreish combination of a buttered sweetcorn peppered with mentaiko.

A too-sweet yuzu-scented sweet potato paired with beautifully cooked A4 wagyu, and forgettable rounds of slightly overcooked Iberico pork were minor lulls in the meal. In fact, we were more confused by the odd choice of ambient music—Amazing Grace will never be an appropriate tune for dinner, and the synthesiser tracks that gave us flashbacks of the karaoke room were at odds with the direction and calibre of the restaurant.

Perhaps it wouldn’t come as a surprise that Raty once spent the best part of three years working as a pastry chef at the three-Michelin starred Restaurant Aqua at the Ritz-Carlton Wolfsburg. His signature soy milk dessert here is a love letter to the humble, much beloved and ubiquitous Asian ingredient, resulting in soy milk ice cream served with crispy yuba bean curd skins baked with honey and butter, set on a bed of salted egg yolk and white chocolate, and with pristine Japanese black beans cooked and glazed with Kowloon Soy Sauce Company soy sauce. Like everything else, it was understated but not mundane.

While not without its niggles, the culinary experience at Arbor is solid, elegant and sophisticated without the dullness of traditional fine dining. There is something to be said about cutting through the noise to let talent speak for itself.

Arbor, 25/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central, Central, Hong Kong; +852 3185 8388

A dinner for two including wine pairing amounts to HK$4500

Rating: 4.5/5 

How we rate
Each of our reviewers score restaurants based on four main criteria: setting, food, service, and drinks, taking into account more than 35 different points of reference including manners of staff, usefulness of the wine list, and whether or not the restaurant makes an effort to be environmentally aware. 5/5 indicates an exceptional experience; 4-4.5/5 is excellent; 3-3.5/5 is good to very good; and 2.5/5 or lower is average to below average. Before visiting a restaurant, the reviewers will book using a pseudonym and do not make themselves known to restaurant staff, in order to experience the venue as a regular guest—if this is not possible, or if we are recognised, we will indicate this in the review.