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Profile | Hong Kong Hokkien restaurant Ming Pavilion was his idea. David Yip on shining a light on food he ‘once looked down on’
- A restaurant in Hong Kong’s Island Shangri-La hotel, Ming Pavilion was slated to serve Yunnan food, but project consultant David Yip had other ideas
- He talks about why he pushed for a Fujian restaurant, opening it on a tight timeline, and changing attitudes towards Chinese regional cuisines
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“You know what they all said behind my back? That it would be impossible to do this in four months,” laughs David Yip. “I proved them wrong.”
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We’re sitting in the dining room of Ming Pavilion at the Island Shangri-La hotel in Admiralty, Hong Kong, a world away from the concrete sprawl of the city several floors below.
Yip is sitting comfortably on one of the pale-jade-coloured sofas that curve around the edges of the sunlit space, which has a tropical aesthetic; rattan chairs and plush carpets are layered upon beige and brown tiled floors, above which hang wide bamboo light fixtures.
It may not look like it, but this is a restaurant dedicated to Hokkien food from southeast China’s Fujian province. Despite it being a major regional cuisine of China, it is a category that has historically been under-represented, not just in Hong Kong, but around the world.
In fact, Ming Pavilion wasn’t envisioned to be a Hokkien restaurant at first – Yip shares that, before he was drafted in to help rejuvenate the space situated on the hotel’s eighth floor, it was all set to launch as a Yunnan restaurant designed to appeal to Hongkongers’ love of that spicy, pungent Chinese cuisine.
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Yip, who splits his time mostly between Hong Kong and Singapore, was dining with the hotel’s owners when they revealed their plans.
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