Four-hands dinners and pop-ups in Hong Kong are back as chefs reconnect and share their passions

From multiple-Michelin-star hookups to brands coming together and old friends reuniting, Hong Kong restaurants are seeing a lot of culinary collaborations

Barry Quek was joined by ex-colleague Jeffrey Downs for two nights at Whey, while French chefs Guillaume Galliot and Christophe Hay teamed up at Caprice

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Four-hands dinners and pop-up events are back on the menu in Hong Kong. Burger & Lobster head chef Raja Karunanethi (left) and Ozone sous chef Jerry Tsui hold a pop-up event in Ozone, at The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Published: 11:45am, 14 Mar 2023Updated: 12:07pm, 15 Mar 2023

The ending in recent weeks of the requirement to wear face masks in Hong Kong and the scrapping of Covid-19 pandemic testing requirements for travellers once they arrive in the city has made it feel like it is getting back to its old self.

This sentiment is shared by many chefs in Hong Kong, as seen in an explosion of restaurant pop-ups and four-hands collaboration dinners, some hosted with old friends.

Chef Barry Quek of Whey in Hong Kong and Jeffrey Downs from Taipei’s Holt held a collaborative dinner at Whey on February 27 and 28. They met nine years ago, when they both worked at In de Wulf, a Michelin-star restaurant in the rural town of Dranouter in Belgium (closed in 2015).

“A lot of the ingredients on the menu there were foraged from the local area,” says Downs. “It was normal for Barry and me to be out in the swamp, in the middle of the day, covered in mud and looking for something like wild reed mace.”

Chef Jeffrey Downs (left) of Holt in Taipei, working with chef Barry Quek of Whey in Hong Kong. Photo: Whey

“Remember the time the Land Rover got stuck?” Quek says. “We were out looking for wild vegetables, and the road was really muddy from the rain the day before, and our wheel got stuck in a ditch.”