Hong Kong Edition
  | In this week’s Hong Kong Edition, we survey the best offerings as mooncake obsession grips the city and provide an exclusive ranking by one | | | | In this week’s Hong Kong Edition, we survey the best offerings as mooncake obsession grips the city and provide an exclusive ranking by one of the pastry’s pioneers. For the Review, we make a hard pivot to heavy duty meat and check if Fireside has a rightful claim among the city’s top steakhouses. To subscribe to this weekly newsletter for free, click here. | | | | | As Hong Kong sails into September, buffeted by typhoons and rainstorms, one thought rises to the fore: Which mooncakes are worth getting this year? The compact, moon-shaped calorie bombs are a symbol of Mid-Autumn Festival sharing and community – but they’re also big business for the city’s bakeries, hotels and international food chains. Each festive season brings increasing competition between mooncake-makers to send the most indulgent fillings, prettiest packaging and wackiest variants to market. And even if you’re speedy enough to snag an early-bird offer, the sums involved can be eye watering. The Ritz-Carlton’s bird’s nest custard mooncake gift box, for example, has already sold out, even with its HK$998 ($128) price tag. At the other end of the spectrum, Pret A Manger’s moon scone gift box is just HK$58. The InterContinental hotel’s Hoi King Heen restaurant has created a punchier option in its whisky-infused chocolate mooncakes. They’re HK$408 on their own, or HK$488 with a few drams on the side. Meanwhile, Häagen-Dazs is stretching the limits of what can even be classed as a mooncake, offering its “Starry MacarMoon” box of chunky ice cream macarons for HK$488. For those shunning confectioneries entirely, Steak King is selling wagyu beef wellington mooncakes for HK$888 – less mooncake, more moo-cake.
It’s a dizzying array of options for even a seasoned mooncake enthusiast. So we got back to basics to find out who makes the best egg custard mooncake, a dependable favorite that’s a bit more popular than the traditional lotus seed paste and duck egg yolk version.  Custard interrogation. Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg And who better to be the judge than the man who actually invented the egg custard mooncake. Chef Yip Wing Wah, a 30-year veteran of the Peninsula’s Spring Moon restaurant, now works as master chef of the Imperial Patisserie bakery chain. For the test, we picked up boxes from nine bakeries and hotels. To ensure a totally blind test, we hid the packaging, scraped the branding off the crusts, and cut even chunks of each mooncake to hide under numbered plates. Chef Yip examined the color, texture, aroma and taste of each sample before giving his verdict – and he didn’t hold back.  Langham, going for gold. Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg The Langham’s mini custard with egg yolk mooncake finished first (see the full rankings below), pleasing the chef with its taste and texture. “This is not bad! It has good flavoring, it’s smooth, and the crust is acceptable,” he said. The Imperial’s offering also scored well in the blind test, Chef Yip liking that “the pastry is thin, and you can taste the saltiness of the egg.” And the Ritz-Carlton’s ‘Luna Splendor’ set rounded out the top three, even as he criticized it for its thick crust and lacking the salty egg yolk flavor.  A tasty podium finisher. Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg As for those he didn’t like so much, the pine nuts were the downfall of the Four Seasons Lung King Heen cream custard mooncake: “This is very bad. Because they’ve added pine nuts, it’s affected the custard filling. The texture doesn’t bounce, there’s no fragrant smell, the crust is thick – this I don’t need to finish!” And the Peninsula’s product also got a low score: “This crust has food coloring in it, it’s white. There’s no custard egg yolk smell, and it’s very dry.” —Tara Mulholland and Rebecca Sin (Bloomberg Intelligence)
| | Chart of the Week: Moon Shine | | | It was a tight race, with little separating the top two entries and the chef needing a second tasting to break the tie. His passion for the perfect mooncake, though, never wavered during the arduous examination. “It’s like I’m eating a salty lemon,” Chef Yip said of the Grand Hyatt’s entry. And “the pastry is too thick and hard, and the bottom is burnt and there’s food coloring in it,” he remarked on the Mandarin Oriental’s mooncake. See the full rankings below: | | Five Minutes With: Colonel Custard | | | Chef Yip created the original custard mooncake as a gift for the Peninsula’s regular clients in 1986 — and watched his creation grow from a handmade delicacy to a much-imitated sensation. Our most pressing question was, of course: What makes a good mooncake? “You can tell the quality of a mooncake based on the texture,” he says. “The custard has to be smooth, it has to smell good, it has to have a little bit of bitterness, a little bit of saltiness. You need to taste the salty egg yolk flavor, but you can’t see it. When you cut it, you can see how much it crumbles,” he says. “It’s a fine balance.”  Chef Yip Wing Wah, testing crunchiness. Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg How did you invent the custard mooncake? I started working as a dim sum chef at the Spring Moon Chinese restaurant in the Peninsula in 1986. The restaurant wanted me to make a special gift for customers to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. They had asked me to make a traditional mooncake, but that isn’t very special. So I came up with the idea to make a custard bao (bun) as a dessert. But then I thought “well, maybe I can make a custard mooncake,” I decided to change the dough, so that the crust of the mooncake would be more like a cookie, made with eggs, butter and sugar, no water – when you bake it, it smells really good because of the butter. And I added the custard filling to make it tastier and thought “oh, this is pretty good.”
How did it get popular? The mooncake was so well received that customers wanted to purchase them but we didn't have enough supply. The following year, in 1987, we decided to make more and sell them. This was the first year of selling custard mooncakes and it was so successful that year that we decided to eventually move to a factory style production to increase supply. However, we still kept the original Spring Moon custard mooncakes made inside the hotel, though there is limited supply on these as there are no preservatives in them. How have customers’ tastes changed over the years? Back when I created the recipe in 1986, it was very custardy, it crumbled very easily. I made them by hand, but when other people started making them with machines, they had to change the recipe. And people’s tastes are different to back then -- now we have significantly more flavours, we want to accommodate different tastes so everyone can enjoy the mooncake experience. When we were kids, as long as you got a mooncake you were happy. Now, people want to try new things.  Peninsula's also-ran entry. Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg What do you think about non-traditional mooncakes? All kinds of shops will make mooncakes to take part in the Mid-Autumn Festival – a chocolate shop will make chocolate ones, Western bakeries will cater to the needs of their clients. It doesn’t matter what filling it is, as long as you have that mooncake mold, you can transform it however you want, as long as it’s round like the moon. How will mooncakes change in the future? Now we are making low-sugar mooncakes, to make them healthier. Eventually someone will find a way of making mooncakes with no sugar. But it’s not so easy because you can’t just take out the sugar. The crust isn’t going to be the same texture, you’ll need to refine the recipe.
What makes Hong Kong mooncakes special? In Hong Kong, each shop has their own specialty. They’re all different, there’s more variety; overseas you won’t have as much selection. With mooncakes, it doesn’t matter where you make them, the most important thing is the spirit in which you make the mooncake, and that you use the best ingredients, and focus on the taste. | | The Review: Fun With Knives and Fire | | | There was a question on my mind when I stepped into Fireside: Is this one of the best steakhouses in Hong Kong? The bar was set high, with the Central venue not only taking the city’s top spot in the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants guide for 2025 but also ranking 50th globally. The restaurant makes a compelling case, carving out a distinct niche for itself in a city awash with meat-centric eateries.  Fireside. Photographer: Sara Hemrajani/Bloomberg Fireside is helmed by chef Jaime Ortolá, a Spaniard who draws inspiration from cooking over a wood-fired hearth. The idea is simple: strip things back to the fundamentals and let flavor and texture shine. It’s a concept that’s immediately visible on arrival. Forget white linens and hushed dining rooms. Fireside opts for sleek marble, brick walls and a terracotta-toned open kitchen where flames dance under the grill. My guest and I chose counter seats for a front-row view of the action, and the smoky aromas and crackling sounds certainly amplified the experience.  Margaret River wagyu striploin. Photographer: Sara Hemrajani/Bloomberg Our Tuesday lunch began with warm rye sourdough served with whipped butter, followed by our selections from the three-course prix fixe menu. For starters, we enjoyed a juicy beef skewer seasoned with rose harissa and a Bresaola platter. The chef added a complimentary plate of padrón peppers. Before the mains, the staff presented us with an impressive array of knives to choose from — a fun flourish (à la Buenos Aires Polo Club). Our meat picks were a 250-gram Margaret River wagyu striploin and the Iberico pork chop, which was the daily special. Both were meltingly tender and perfectly cooked. To finish, we shared a refreshing lemon sorbet and a slice of Basque style cheesecake. Our bill for two, including service, came to HK$876.  Choose your weapon. Photographer: Sara Hemrajani/Bloomberg The vibe: Effortlessly cool and lively. Ortolá leads a young kitchen, where smart black T-shirts are the uniform of choice and indie rock music plays in the background — Arctic Monkeys, Bloc Party and The Libertines were the soundtrack to our meal. The staff are passionate about what they do and keen to explain the preparation methods. Who’s next to you: The weekday lunch deal pulls in Central’s suited professional crowd. We were told dinner is a more diverse affair, with patrons lingering longer. Can you conduct a meeting here? Fireside works for celebratory occasions, like toasting a deal or team victory. The compact layout and open-plan kitchen might be distracting for formal conversations, but there is a private dining room that can be booked to host a party of eight.  Iberico pork chop. Photographer: Sara Hemrajani/Bloomberg What we’d order again: The three-course set lunch (HK$398 per person) is definitely a winner and offers excellent value for money. We left feeling very satisfied thanks to the generous portions. If I had to single out a dish from our shared courses, the flavorful Iberico pork chop was the star. Need to know: Fireside is located on the fifth floor of H Code, The Steps, 45 Pottinger Street in Central. The restaurant is open Monday to Saturday for lunch from noon to 3 p.m. and dinner from 6 p.m., closing at 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday and at 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations can be made online and by phone. —Sara Hemrajani Read our reviews of other Hong Kong restaurants with notable steak offerings: Picanhas, where Brazilian cuts take center stage, Wooloomooloo with its great views and exquisite tenderloin, and Chinese-French standout Medora. | | Here’s What Else Is In the News | | | | | | | | | Thanks for reading our newsletter. | | |
