While Hong Kong s restaurant industry adjusts to convoluted new government regulations, chef Shane Osborn is already looking ahead with the announcement of The Arcane Collective, a new restaurant group that his original claim to fame, Arcane, and sister restaurant Cornerstone will fall under as well as a third restaurant expected to open in Landmark later this summer.
Styled as a collection of independently-minded restaurants , The Arcane Collective will incorporate several principles formulated over Arcane s six years of operation. These include unpretentious, ingredient-driven cuisine, a forward-looking culture, socially and environmentally-aware conduct, empowering talent and championing creativity.
The main dining room at Arcane (Photo: Courtesy of Arcane)
It has been over a year of Covid-19 in Hong Kong and it can sometimes feel hard to remember what life was like before the pandemic. But, with the vaccine rollout currently forging ahead, there is hope that those times aren’t lost forever, and that we won’t be eternally stuck in a world of Zoom meetings, social distancing and face masks.
Luckily, we live in a city where we have multiple vaccine brands available to us and the process is quick and free of charge. The vaccines are exciting for us, and with summer approaching and low Covid-19 numbers being reported, it s given us all hope that Hong Kong is finally on the road to recovery. One day soon, we’ll find ourselves doing what we were doing just two years ago.
In Macau, fine dining lovers looking for a plant-based approach will adore
Yí’s Vegetarian Tasting Menu. The regional Chinese restaurant, located in Morpheus at City of Dreams, only offers ten-course seasonal degustation menus, and although changing frequently, the culinary delights included on recent vegetarian versions include gluten puff tartelette with seaweed caviar, bird’s nest with white fungus and bamboo pith, and roasted eggplant with yellow bean paste.
Singapore
Singapore has a reasonable range of vegan and vegetarian restaurants, but when it comes to fine dining, head to
Alma by Juan Amador where chef Haikal Johari brings Asian influences, particularly from Japan, to his modern-European dishes. With a three-, four- or five-course vegetarian menu available at lunchtime, Johari also offers vegetarian options for his 5 Act Découverte menu, as well as his 7 Act Adventure menu. The latter focuses on a cornucopia of enticing Japanese vegetal delights, from Tochigo st
On 12 April 2021, Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced a preliminary road map for the easing of social distancing regulations for restaurants and inbound travellers in a bid to encourage higher uptake of vaccinations. At the time of writing, only 10 per cent of Hong Kong’s population have been vaccinated, a figure far behind the target of 70 per cent to achieve herd immunity. The new proposed rules targeting the restaurant industry are set into three stages, with varying levels of social distancing dependent on how many staff and customers have been vaccinated; restaurants that adhere to the lowest tier, where all staff have received at least one vaccine dose, will be able to seat up to six people per table and operate until midnight. The government have also doubled down on mandating restaurants use the LeaveHomeSafe app rather than offering a paper form option. In The Industry’s first op-ed, chef-owner Shane Osborn from Arcane and Cornerstone lays his thoughts bare about the pr