Plate to Palate | Restaurant review: Ippoh, Central - Japanese; book well ahead

I don't normally do lunch reviews, but when I called in the beginning of October for a reservation at Ippoh, I was told that dinner was booked until January. Even for lunch, the earliest free spot was more than a month away.

There are two lunch menus: HK$480 or HK$1,100 (at dinner, they are HK$900, HK$1,200 or HK$1,500). After waiting so long to eat there, we decided to taste as much as we could.

The restaurant — eight seats around the tempura counter, and a table for four— seems austere at first glance, but the details are beautiful: enamel knobs on the door to the toilet, a gorgeous exhaust hood — etched with sakura blossoms — over the deep fryer.

If you're going to serve only one type of food, it has to be good, and the tempura here is excellent (the original Ippoh is in Osaka, and dates back more than 100 years).

After our starters — a delicious salad with dried seaweed, and a cool onsen egg with mackerel jelly and yuzu zest, the parade of tempura items started coming out.