Johnny Yip is not an easy man to pigeonhole. Novelist, columnist, gourmet, erstwhile radio and television presenter, opera buff, tireless traveller, and cat lover. You name it, he has something informed and interesting to say about it, in person or in print.
Walk into a restaurant anywhere in the Chinese-speaking world with Yip and you are immediately aware that you are basking in the reflected glory of a serious celebrity. So it proved when we turned up for lunch at Landau's, where he made the waitress' day.
He is accustomed to fame, having written his first bestseller at the age of 17, and with more than 300 titles to his name, every one a love story. What Barbara Cartland is to the romantic novel in English, Yip is to its Chinese counterpart.
He still has time to indulge a wide array of other interests, and one of the most passionate of these is food, a subject upon which he writes for publications in Hong Kong and overseas in both Chinese and English. He studied the new Landau's menu keenly.
Formerly an ever so slightly upmarket version of its sister establishments - the two Jimmy's Kitchen outlets - and featuring the same low lighting, heavy plush furnishings and self-consciously old-fashioned pan-European 'home cooking', Landau's now has a vogueish neo-colonial bistro atmosphere with palms, pastels, wicker chairs, sepia-tone photographs of old Hong Kong, and a much shorter menu, swapping many old favourites for the sort of fare you might expect in SoHo or Lan Kwai Fong.
We agreed that this made sense, with the Central branch of Jimmy's just across the road.
