Yellow Door Kitchen

Yellow Door Kitchen is the kind of eatery that attracts gourmets. For one thing, it is owned by local art critic Lau Kin-wai, who introduced home-cooking to the Hong Kong dining scene 12 years ago.

Then there is the sophisticated and unusual way the tiny restaurant - tucked away on the sixth floor of a residential building in Central - operates. For lunch, it provides an inexpensive array of Sichuan dishes on an a la carte menu. In the evenings Helen Chiang, the grand-niece of former Taiwanese leader Chiang Kai-shek, takes the reins to serve Shanghainese set meals at $220 per person.

Being spicy-food aficionados, we opted for a Sichuan lunch and started off with Sichuan chicken in mixed sauce ($58), which the waitress recommended as the most unusual on the menu. However, the dish was far from extraordinary. The bird was tough and bland, while the topping - a creative mixture of chilli oil, vinegar, sugar and soy sauce - was spicy but failed to save the dish from mediocrity.

To our delight, everything improved from there. We loved the pork dumplings ($45). Arriving in six pieces, they were in a bowl of chilli oil that infused a pungent flavour into the filling. But the highlight was in the wrappings, which had the most tender texture imaginable.

The steamed perch ($88) was a fish lover's ambrosia. It seemed more than enough for two people but it was delightfully fresh and we managed to finish it. The shredded garlic, ginger and a rich bean paste made a scrumptious dressing, though it was slightly on the salty side.

Determined to push our pungency boundary, we went for the home-made bean curd ($58). It was 'a very, very hot dish', according to the waitress. Perhaps my companion and I had atypical palates, but it came across as just moderately spicy and was too oily though the bean curd was melt-in-the-mouth perfection.