Hong Kong restaurant Otera’s impressive dessert tasting experience highlights underappreciated ingredients
- A new dessert tasting experience at Otera in Hong Kong’s North Point is a masterclass in creativity – nothing like the in-your-face creations seen on TikTok
- Founder and pastry chef Joanna Yuen has created a menu that highlights unexpected and underrated ingredients, from herbal plants to fruits
I have long felt that the TikTokification of food has created a space for excess and indulgence on another level, and it is not one that I wish to spend too long in.
Food and travel vloggers constantly post “must try” this and that, saturating our feeds with the same Instagrammable cakes and pastries from Seoul to New York.
It seemed the complete opposite of all the noise happening in the world of desserts lately – a long, slow meditative breath rather than a deranged monologue delivered at a breakneck Gen-Z cadence.
Yuen opened Otera in summer 2023, with her unique flan cakes as a flagship item, before expanding the offerings to include cookies, brioche and even mooncakes.
Customers pre-order their desserts online and can opt to collect them in person at Otera’s harbour-facing atelier, where they are invited to partake in a tea and wagashi – traditional Japanese confectionery – ritual as a token of appreciation.
Now Yuen is planning to invite customers deeper into her world. The two-hour tasting session seats up to six guests in a small but elegant space, which feels a bit like being inside a Muji catalogue.
“The unnoticed. The underappreciated. The undervalued. The silent one who sometimes make the loudest impact. This menu celebrates the humble and modest ingredients that, for many reasons, do not get recognised or mentioned, but have elevated tremendously the dishes they are a part of. I call them the unsung heroes,” writes Yuen in the introduction to the menu.
The courses are enigmatic, highlighting each “unsung” ingredient by name only: among them are herb of grace (also known as common rue), fungus, cocoa, ume plum and jyounamagashi – a traditional Japanese “petit four”.
In a nod to that, she created a banana and whisky truffle where the fruit is used in place of cream. The resulting texture is, as Yuen suggests, creamy but not creamy – an unexpected delight.
The dusting of cocoa powder could be less liberal (be prepared to make a mess of the perfect wood tabletop, and expect to use plenty of wet wipes after) but there is no denying the textbook-perfect crust and airy crumb – ideal as is, but taken to a weird and wonderful new plane thanks to the intensely savoury miso crumb and garlic butter.
As always, Yuen is in a state of constant assessment and self-improvement – and having followed her career for a number of years, I recognise her sense of motivated perfectionism that has been paying dividends.
Some things that did not work out were less about the desserts – the tea quickly cooled in its unheated glass pot, and the austere slice of Japanese melon served with an apple and olive oil jyounamagashi was not quite as ripe as it should have been.
It is a solid beginning, and by showcasing the quiet power of unsung ingredients, Otera is actually speaking volumes.
Otera’s dessert tasting is currently under development, and Yuen hopes to make it available to the public by the end of 2024.
Otera, Unit 03, 21/F, Technology Plaza, 651 King’s Rd, North Point