Mott 32 in Hong Kong was recommended to me by a friend. He usually makes great recommendations. And this was another home run.
Without his recommendation, I would have probably skipped this restaurant as it is part of a group and sounded too pretentious. And the name is just confusing: it is supposedly the address of the first Chinese-owned convenience store in New York. But why this name if the company is from Hong Kong? Ok, to honor the emigrants that showed the kind of business acumen that will make Hong Kong great… but it seems a very loose connection. And that “originated 1891” in the logo is totally misleading… the restaurant opened in Hong Kong in 2014.
The company that started Mott 32 in Hong Kong has successfully opened branches in Las Vegas, New York and Vancouver (and there is one coming soon in Bangkok at the time of writing… they seem to be on a roll) so it has become an international brand.
The visit
The restaurant is located in the basement of the Standard Chartered Bank building in Central.
You need to climb the stairs and enter the bank building.
On the left inside you will find the reception of the restaurant (probably the guy in the picture will have finished to look at his phone by then). You will need to take an escalator down and…
…descend an additional spiral staircase. You are in the bedrock of Hong Kong!
Someones says that the dining room used to be a vault, others say that it used to be a more mundane storage room. Either way, the environment is remarkable: the main dining room has high ceiling and a octagonal shape. Here and there references to New York City as the name would suggest.
They have a very extensive menu of Cantonese dishes prepared with fancy ingredients. Their signature dishes are the Applewood smoked Peking duck (advance order necessary, 825 HKD) and the honey glazed pork, which I did not have, but everything I ordered was extremely good.
Both the dim sum menu and the full menu were available.
I was there at noon, the room got filled pretty quickly. I had a reservation made by email and the process was painless. No deposit or other nonsense required.
Their choice for still water.
My first dish was crispy roasted pork belly. Man, I like this dish and this was perfectly executed. Every bite was succulent and crispy at the same time. I did not feel the need to use the accompanying mustard.
Then I ventured in some dim sum dishes. The first was a turnip cake with a lightly spicy chili sauce. The turnip cake is a vastly underrated dim sum dish, this was excellent with and without the sauce.
Then there was some theatrics with the lobster Har Gow. This was a huge dumpling that came with a sinister eyedropper containing lobster oil to be used to add the oil as one would see fit.
The next dish perfectly illustrates Mott’s philosophy. Take a Cantonese classic and re-engineer it with fashionable Western ingredients. This siu mai was filled not with the regular run-of-the-mill pork, but with iberico pork (speaking of being fashionable), but also with a soft quail egg and with black truffle. The combination of the three was really good; an effective transformation.
My main dish was the smoked black cod. For a moment a thought to be at the Ultraviolet table as the dish was served covered to leave the smoke (cigar?) lingering around. The sauce was not too sweet and helped stressing the cod’s flavor.
I did not find anything attractive in the dessert list.
The check
Total check was 869 HKD (110 USD) that places Mott 32 in the blog’s category of the luxury dining establishments. A place for bankers, even if most of the customers on the day of my visit looked like tourists from Mainland China particularly interested in the instagrammable properties of the food.
I am not sure what an expert in Cantonese cuisine would have to say, but for a Western palate like mine Mott 32 did a good job in re-creating Cantonese classics with the use of internationally-acclaimed ingredients. Is it worth the hefty price? Well, that’s debatable, but I can think of worse places where to spend this kind of money for a lunch or dinner in Hong Kong.
Where in Hong Kong:
4-4A Des Voeux Road Central, Central.
Check the website for menus and reservation.