The new H Queen's restaurant cuts through the noise to offer a confidently rendered menu with a strong identity
Like in any industry, there is a yawning spectrum of characters and archetypes when it comes to the galaxy of chefs. There are the philosophers and social activists, who use their sphere of influence to bring the conversation beyond the borders of the meals they create. There’s the all-round good nut, the amicable chef’s chef who charms those around them with their candid nature. There are the iconoclasts, who blaze their path within their universe of fire-and-knives, pushing the bar higher each time with their unconventional thinking. And, of course, there are those who wear their celebrity chef badge like an oversized (and quite possibly fake) Rolex, with a jaw-dropping amount of ego to match.
This all goes to say that, in a world where there is so much self-promotion, glad-handing and the smoke-and-mirrors of marketing speak, it can be easy to forget about those who simply strive for their best, quietly and behind-the-scenes.
But there’s no forgetting Arbor, one of the new restaurants taking residence in the luxury high rise H Queen’s (also home to Le Comptoir's Ecriture and Virgilio Martinez’s future opening, Ichu Peru), helmed by chef Eric Raty, a young Finnish chef. He first came to Hong Kong in 2014 to work with Gray Kunz at Café Gray Deluxe, yet the first time I tried Raty’s own original cooking was not until last year, and it was a dish eaten off a paper plate in the middle of a food festival. He was tasked to serve a creation that spoke of Hong Kong and I, with a few other judges, deemed his Brittany diver scallop with XO emulsion and Amalfi lemon to be the unanimous winner. The chef also went on to participate in the 2018 edition of the San Pellegrino’s Young Chef award, presenting a signature dish of glazed veal sweetbread with langoustine XO, crisped chicken skin and lemon thyme.
He may not have won the championship but, at Arbor, his poetic compositions and affinity for Asian ingredients fashioned into modish, Nordic-tinged presentations demonstrate a serious level of skill that demands attention. The chef has designed a menu that skips effortlessly through a pristine list of ingredients, like pebbles across a still lake: oysters, langoustine, wild sea bass, forest mushrooms, A4 wagyu, French peaches. So what, you might wonder. Plenty of fancy tasting menu joints to burn money at around town, so why this one?