Food Review: Ronin in Central

You have to be in the right mood to eat at Ronin. Don't go there if you're feeling unsociable. It's impossible to ignore your neighbours when you're sitting next to them at the bar, and there's no way to avoid interacting with the friendly staff, who give advice about what you're ordering.

We dismissed some of the staff's comments, as when one of them told us we had ordered too much, but we listened to other nuggets of wisdom, like when a staff member told us his favourite dishes.

The atmosphere is cool to the point of being intimidating. The name of the restaurant isn't on the blue door, which slides open to reveal a long, dark space. The staff are young, hip, and enthusiastic, rather like their counterparts at sister restaurant, Yardbird.

The menu is marked with the date because it changes frequently, and has dishes categorised as "raw", "smaller" (which aren't that small) and "bigger". It's a very tempting selection - we had a difficult time narrowing down what to order. In the end, there wasn't anything we disliked.

There were some small quibbles: the briny, creamy uni with fresh nori and aonori panko (HK$200) had a little too much of the latter two ingredients, so we were glad we didn't take the advice of the server and mix it all up.

The chunks of lightly fried Spanish mackerel (HK$140), with a white ponzu dressing, were a little difficult to eat with the other ingredients (tomato, mizuna sprouts and sliced red onion). But that was more down to the fact that we had only been given chopsticks to use.