DIVERSITY? PERHAPS THE word was coined to describe Hong Kong?s restaurants. They number in the thousands. But they also represent a huge range of cooking styles, moods and prices. For hundreds of dollars you can eat a plate of fattened goose liver (foie gras) with sterling silver cutlery in a heavily draped gastronomic temple. For less than 20 of those same dollars you can consume a big bowl of pork ribs and spit out your bones on to a glass-topped communal table. Your choice. Your Aladdin?s cave, you might say, of palate riches to plunder. During a recent two-week tour of eating out in Hong Kong, I found both ends of the spectrum immensely attractive. Each offers a richness of experience beyond contemplation. And in the wide middle-range of restaurants, there are also gems. Ten days to spend in Hong Kong? Let me offer a few general tips and observations first about the territory?s eating places. I suppose the first thing to understand is the function of Hong Kong?s top tables. Because of its financial and commercial status, the region hosts many very wealthy businessmen. Hong Kong is also a regular stopover for highly paid overseas executives. So top dining here is often about the kind of entertaining that goes with deal-making and rewarding clients, grand gestures and even grander expenditure. Restaurants cater for this market to the hilt. How? By offering the traditional notion of superior eating ? what used to be called ?fine? dining. And because Hong Kong restaurateurs are as much ? or as little ? informed about world gastronomic trends as most people, this translates into high French cooking. In turn, that means that the most expensive of Gallic ingredients have to be prepared and served. So you?ll notice in top restaurants a plethora of foie gras and lobster dishes, smoked salmon, grain-fed beef and caviar. Irrespective of the originality and quality of the offerings they star in, these ingredients ensure that a host can say to his guests, ?Look how important you are to me. I?m prepared to spend a sackful of dollars on the world?s most expensive foodstuffs.? And they are hugely expensive, especially when you add the air-freight charges from Europe and Australia. Naturally, you don?t eat like this unless you are served in the silver-service manner. In Hong Kong?s top eateries, the cutlery gleams ? it?s actually silver or silver-plated. The table linen is of rich, thick fabrics. The waiters are dinner-suited, and in some restaurants, they prepare dishes in front of you at the table. I doubt if the latter still happens anywhere else in the world. Main courses ? entrees too, sometimes ? are brought to the table under dazzling silver cloches. A team of waiters is gathered to offer a hand each to perform a simultaneous lid lift-off. This, too, has disappeared elsewhere. Crumbs are collected by silver mini-graders wielded by your waiters, and the cheese trolley is obligatory, even if its exhibits are sometimes aged beyond their best-by dates. Yet for all the show, you might find getting your English understood something of a problem in even the best places, one of the consequences of official de-emphasising of the language in recent years. So France still rules at the very top, which is a pity because, in less wealthy markets, New World cooking has largely taken over. When Hong Kong will become aware of the change is anyone?s guess. But it will occur, in my view, only when both clientele and Hong Kong?s chefs and restaurateurs are better acquainted with the kind of kaleidoscopic culinary influences that have galvanised Australian and American cooking, say, in the past 20 years. A German executive chef I spoke to, for instance, said he had been in the region for 13 years yet never been to China. Not even Shenzhen! Several said they had every intention of getting to Australia to see what was going on, but just hadn?t got around to it. A grave consequence of this kind of insularity is that the cornucopia of ingredients used throughout Southeast Asia is mostly bypassed by Hong Kong chefs and unknown to the region?s gastronomes. For me, it was a surprise and a disappointment. Beyond their use in some national and Chinese dishes, the wide variety of chillies, eggplants, lemongrass, Thai basil, subcontinental spices and so on common elsewhere are more or less absent from Hong Kong menus. It?s a pity. Curiously, wine lists in top restaurants are the most egalitarian I?ve seen anywhere, reflecting an honest perspective on the world?s wine-making talents. Prices are high, partly because of extreme local taxes. But at even the most ferociously French of restaurants, New World bottles from the United States, Chile and Australia are listed alongside the biggest boast wines such as Petrus and other great bordeaux. At the other end of the scale, eating out in Hong Kong?s most modest restaurants is a great gourmet delight. They are never-ending in numbers and availability. (Just walk out of your hotel and try the nearest noodle shop.) Moreover, their quality overall is outstanding, mostly because Hong Kong locals use these places as a substitute for their kitchens at home. You can try noodles, simple rice dishes and, of course, dim sum, where the taste treats just keep coming ? wheeled around on trolleys or carried about in box-style alloy trays. Most places serve large varieties of ?wet? dishes, in which won tons and carbohydrate strands of various sorts and thicknesses swim in wonderful pork or chicken-based broths. It?s all huge fun, and the value for money these places offer in the world?s second most expensive city is truly astonishing. Then there is a big middle tier of restaurants that the region is possibly less well known for. In this bracket you will find excellent restaurants too numerous to mention, but also national cuisines such as Indian, Thai, Mexican, German and Australian. Perhaps diners aren?t so demanding in these places, so be choosy and carefully read the menus ? and the prices. Stephen Downes is a Melbourne-based restaurant critic. He writes weekly reviews for the Melbourne Herald Sun