Celebrity Cuisine

Celebrity Cuisine is on the first floor of the Lan Kwai Fong hotel in the Central District of Hong Kong. Its chef Cheng Kam Fu cooks traditional Cantonese food, and is noted for his poultry cooking. He was private chef to a business magnate before opening Celebrity Cuisine in 2007. By Hong Kong standards the restaurant is unusually small, seating just 40 diners at any one time. There are two dining rooms, one with windows and a smaller, windowless one, with furry purple wallpaper and a grey carpet. I arrived early and was shown to what was clearly the worst table in the entire restaurant, a small table in a corner of the windowless room, the solitary chair facing inwards against the wall. If there had been a dining table in The Blair Witch Project, this would have been it.

I had been recommended the stuffed duck, so tried to order that, but was told this was only available if ordered in advance (it did not say this on the menu). I had a pair of shrimp steamed dumplings. These were larger dim sum than usual, the prawns cooked OK but the dumpling itself was rather heavy in texture compared to many such dumplings I have eaten elsewhere, a much clumsier dumpling than you would get at somewhere like Lung King Heen (12/20). Gai lan with garlic was pleasant but was cooked a little long, and the shoots were not the young, tender ones that one might have hoped for (13/20). Fried chicken arrived with XO sauce, and this was the best dish. The chicken was carefully cooked, the skin quite tasty, though at the end of the day this was just a roast chicken of ordinary standard, a pale relation of the top quality chickens that can be found in France (14/20).

Service was dismal. The dishes arrived with lengthy gaps, and from ordering it took 75 minutes for my chicken to turn up, although I had been the very first diner in the restaurant. The room that I was sitting in frequently had no waiter, so getting fresh tea or a plate cleared was a lengthy affair. The bill came to HK$ 427 (£35) for just these three dishes and jasmine tea, which although it was brought without my requesting it was charged for. Even the XO sauce with the chicken, seemingly part of the dish, incurred an extra charge. A service charge was levied, which was wise since it is hard to imagine anyone voluntarily tipping for service like this. Clearly a lone diner is not an ideal scenario for Cantonese food, as one can only try a few things, and this place is supposed to offer good duck (which as I discovered too late had to be ordered in advance). But I can only write about what I tried, and what I tried was simply not very good. The two Michelin star rating in 2012 is incomprehensible based on this meal.