PATRONS of the new Mexican restaurant, Zona Rosa, on the second floor of Number One Lan Kwai Fong, were startled recently to see a police raid arrive at the same time as their enchiladas.
Asia's finest were performing their by now monotonous task of enforcing Hong Kong's outdated, unwieldy and illogical licensing laws by checking if the restaurant was selling liquor before it got the proper documents. It is not. Instead it has set up a table by the entrance downstairs where guests can buy booze for consumption upstairs.
Zona Rosa applied for a licence last month, although it has been in business since the end of 1994, and is still waiting for the wheels of officialdom to crank the application through.
As the officers carefully checked the paperwork, however, they could as easily have asked the man who knew the place's status exactly. For Allan Zeman, Zona Rosa's owner and Lan Kwai Fong's biggest landlord, was sitting nearby, enjoying dinner in his latest venture.
Shandwick PR executive and former journalist Edward Naylor recently flew off to Colorado for a skiing holiday in Breckinridge, the resort well-heeled Americans use as an alternative to the increasingly vulgar Aspen.
Comfortably housed in a cabin owned by the family of ex-Metro Radio colleague Chris Slaughter, Naylor was looking forward to a fortnight of powder skiing. And emboldened after a tentative start, he decided to tackle a black run on the second day. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm overtook his ability and he went crashing, splitting his left collarbone in the process.