In Hong Kong, city of 14,000 restaurants, pop-up dinners thrive as world’s top chefs lure foodies eager for new tastes

You might think city’s diners were spoilt for choice already, but a proliferation of guest-chef appearances, and a venue dedicated solely to pop-up dining, has shown there’s a healthy appetite for new tastes and experiences

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Test Kitchen in Sai Ying Pun hosts up to two pop-ups a month to the delight of local diners. Photo: Pak Chung and Marco Mak

Published: 9:00pm, 3 Aug 2017Updated: 9:00pm, 3 Aug 2017

In the past 12 months you could have eaten dishes created by Icelandic hipsters, dined on exquisite cooking from some of Europe’s most celebrated chefs, or feasted on a dried alpaca heart cooked by a Peruvian chef who featured on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.

All of that was made possible in Hong Kong through the continued growth of pop-up restaurants, in which visiting chefs show diners ingredients, techniques and creative dishes that are making waves in other parts of the world.

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A pop-up can be hard to define. For some, it’s any form of dining experience that temporarily materialises; for others, it signifies a short-term residency by a renowned chef who cooks alongside an established local chef. What’s clear is that, regardless of the parameters, pop-ups are here to stay, and that Hong Kong – despite having 14,000 restaurants of its own serving both Chinese fare and a vast range of international cuisines – has embraced them with enthusiasm.

Test Kitchen founder Vincent Mui (second from left) has been bringing chefs from around the world to Hong Kong since 2015. Photo: Pak Chung and Marco Mak

Test Kitchen in Sai Ying Pun, a fast-gentrifying neighbourhood at the western end of Hong Kong Island, was one of Hong Kong’s first pop-up dining venues. CEO Vincent Mui, once a young cook in New York, began the initiative in 2015 and it has quickly grown in reputation to become one of the city’s hottest tickets.

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“I was in New York at culinary school, and working as a stagiaire in a couple of restaurants. At one of them I met a chef Kwame Onwuachi, who gave me the opportunity to travel with him for three months, popping up in a new city every week where we’d serve up to 200 people.” he says.