“It is unpredictable at the moment but despite restaurants being closed at 6pm, my days are still long. We are all starting a bit earlier and from around 5:30pm, I switch to help on Go, our delivery platform. More often than not I get in the car and run deliveries until around 10pm,” says Hussain, whose restaurants include Belon, Ho Lee Fook and New Punjab Club. So if the boss is flexible, are the staff expected to be too?

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“For us, we have always had a team culture where we feel it is essential [to be flexible]. No matter where in the company you work you have a good grasp of front-of-house operations, as this is where the guests are and the proverbial magic happens,” continues Hussain. “So even the office teams have had basic service training. We did need to do some refresher sessions, but on the whole the teams have been very flexible and happy to plug the gaps as they appear. Right now it is all hands on deck. For Go, they do everything from packing bags, delivering orders, answering the phones and tracking orders on the back-end.”

With lunch time being the main dine-in event around town right now, Mark says that has not been too different for them. “It has not been too much of an adjustment for us as, especially at the premium end, lunch has always been equally as important as dinner to us. We find lunches are often not social occasions but business, so guests can be a little less forgiving and harder to please.”

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The Gourmet Dining Group, which has Michelin-star restaurants Epure and Arbor as well as the Dalloyau cafes, are only offering delivery from their Dalloyau outlets, and not their fine dining establishments. “Chef Eric Raty thinks Arbor's cuisine is best to be enjoyed fresh inside the restaurant, as he puts presentation and temperature into consideration when he designs a dish, while these elements also have a great impact on the taste and texture of the food,” says Timothy Chan, Gourmet Dining Group's head of operations and service. “Therefore, so far we are not providing take-out or delivery service in Arbor.”

Instead, the group has extended lunch hours at Arbor and Epure, until 3.30pm, and are offering an afternoon tasting menu in the Epure lounge area.

“Meanwhile, we also open on Sunday for lunch, so that we can cater to more guests who want to enjoy Chef Eric's Nordic-Japanese cuisine,” says Chan. “Our staff is very supportive and trying to maximise business opportunities under all these restrictions and circumstances.”

Fine dining chefs have had to adjust to serving top-notch dishes that travel. Chef Oli Marlow of Roganic Hong Kong says, “It is very different, but like most challenges in restaurants we enjoy them and try to adapt and become the best that we possibly can be as quick as possible.

“We have had to be smart with what ingredients we can use as you can’t guarantee items will be held steady when being delivered. Even though we transport in a refrigerated van we are always cautious in sending raw fish and shellfish just so we can eliminate any dangers that it may bring with it. Items such as cakes and confit meat we find are best types of dishes that are suited to this type of service,” continues Marlow. But even though they can’t offer the in-dining special service right now there is a fun element in their takeaway offerings.

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“So in the UK and in Hong Kong we give recipe cards with instructions as well as a video online on YouTube, that you can scan with a QR code, so that you can cook along with one of the chefs. We feel this makes it a bit more fun and takes away some of the fear factor some guests have when trying to recreate restaurant food at home,” says Marlow.

When it comes to what restaurants can take forward from this experience post-Covid-19, Hussain says, “We will definitely keep the cross-department shifts, it is something we have always done but to a lesser extent and it has really helped bring the team together. Plus we have always been agile, which gets harder as you get bigger, but we have really seen the importance of agility to be successful in this climate. This is something we will keep going forward as I do not see restaurants going back to how things were for a very long time.”

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