Hong Kong’s Amber moves up in annual list of world's 100 best restaurants

In its fourth year on Restaurant magazine’s annual list of the world’s best restaurants, The Landmark hotel’s Amber moved from no 36 to no 24. It was the only Hong Kong establishment among the elite top 50, and the new position made it the list’s fourth-highest ranked restaurant in Asia.

But while the judges clearly favoured Dutch-born chef and culinary director Richard Ekkebus’s French fare, they did not hold the rest of the city’s offerings in the same esteem. All of the four Hong Kong restaurants on the top 100 list were there last year, including Lung King Heen, now at 66; Caprice, now at 85 and BO Innovation, now at 97.

The Danish restaurant Noma, headed by chef-owner Rene Redzepi, 36, topped the increasingly influential list as the world’s best restauarant, taking the position from Spain’s El Cellar de Can Roca, which slipped back to second. Noma had earned the top spot in 2010 through 2012, with its menu of original dishes such as sea urchin toast, beef tartar and ants, and pear and kale.

The entry on Amber described Ekkebus’s food as “fundamentally French, but also modern, imaginative and tinged with influences he has picked up over his globe-trotting career.” Ekkebus, who has run Amber since 2005, has also worked in Holland, France, Mauritius and Barbados.

Restaurant praised his cuisine as “successfully playing on Hong Kong’s position as an east-west crossroads, as a trading hub and a former British colony.” And it singled out his “sea urchin in lobster jelly, with cauliflower, caviar and crispy seaweed waffle” as a favourite.

But while the British magazine’s list, which started in 2002, rises in influence to rival the long-established Michelin Guide, it has also gained criticism locally for being unimaginative.