Many luxury hotels in the city still include endangered marine species on their seafood menus - and it's not just shark's fin soup, a conservation group says.
The Hong Kong Shark Foundation found that 80 per cent of local luxury hotels were offering three to five types of endangered sea life on their menus, according to a survey of the hotels' publicly available food lists conducted between July and September.
Bertha Lo-Hofford, the foundation's programme director, said most of this sea life was consumed by Hongkongers attending banquets rather than by tourists. She urged the hotels to find environmentally friendly food alternatives.
'It's not just about the hotels removing shark's fin soup from their menus because there are so many other endangered species - and [the list] changes all the time,' she said.
'What is more important is for hotels to have a policy that requires seafood to be procured in a way that does not affect marine life - ideally from a fish hatchery.'
For the study, the foundation checked whether 167 restaurants of 44 high-end hotels were serving any of 10 threatened types of fish listed by global conservation body WWF as seafood to avoid eating.
These were the orange roughy, monkfish, humphead wrasse, Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, swordfish, freshwater eel, tropical prawn or shrimp, camouflage grouper and members of the shark family.