Feast or Famine | The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t stopped new restaurants opening in Hong Kong, even as others close down for good
- Restaurants have always come and gone in Hong Kong, for a variety of reasons, but the health emergency brought the shutters down on many
- However, throughout the pandemic new restaurants have continued to open, their owners believing Hongkongers will still want to eat out no matter what
This week is the first anniversary of something that I did with the greatest reluctance: I stopped writing restaurant reviews for this newspaper.
A year ago, we were deep into the Covid-19 pandemic, although I didn’t think we realised at the time that the situation would last so long. But the streets of Hong Kong were empty – people weren’t going out to eat or shop, even though the government hadn’t yet imposed dining restrictions. Restaurants, especially the smaller places, were closing at a rapid clip.
What sealed my decision to stop doing reviews was when I visited a Soho restaurant on a Saturday, and, when I called the place three days later to arrange a photo shoot, I was told that they were closing for good. They decided to scale back operations to concentrate on keeping their other, more established, restaurants open. (They succeeded, fortunately.)
We attributed the openings of many of these places to the fact that the ball was already rolling for them – their owners/operators had been working on them since before the start of the pandemic and they were so far along they couldn’t just stop. But even now, new places are opening, and their owners must have started planning them in the midst of the pandemic, knowing full well that the situation wouldn’t be ending soon. Their owners have faith in Hong Kong’s future, at least as far as dining is concerned.