Classic Hong Kong restaurants: Spring Moon at The Peninsula

Spring Moon, The Peninsula Hong Kong’s Cantonese restaurant, might be almost 27 years old, but it’s a mere baby compared to the hotel, which is celebrating its 85th anniversary this year.

Florian Trento, group executive chef of The Peninsula Hotels, arrived one year after Spring Moon’s opening. “The location was a bank before, and we even found some window bars,” he says.

For a hotel with such deep roots in Hong Kong, it may surprise some that it took them so long to open a Chinese restaurant.

In fact, Chinese food had always been available, although it was once served by Gaddi’s, which is now the hotel’s finedining French restaurant. In the archives, there’s a menu from 1954 and it looks like a coffee shop menu,” Trento says.

“They served everything, including Chinese food.”

The opening of Spring Moon in 1986 was motivated simply by the reasoning that a Hong Kong hotel should have a Chinese, or more precisely, a Cantonese restaurant. To that end, dim sum and fresh seafood have always been their signatures, as has speciality tea.

In Cantonese, the act of eating a meal of dim sum is called yum cha, which translates literally to “drink tea”. Ironically, many modern Chinese restaurants have left tea by the wayside, choosing to serve inexpensive, below-par brews instead. Spring Moon has gone in the opposite direction, and has even employed dedicated tea masters. “In the West, there are sommeliers, so it makes sense in Chinese cuisine to have tea masters,” Trento says.