Opened by Max Levy in 2016, the restaurant served Japanese-inspired food with a devil-may-care ethos
After five years on the Hong Kong restaurant scene, Okra is closing. The restaurant's final service will be on July 3, 2021, while the upstairs omakase space will operate until July 31. The announcement was made on Tuesday morning, with chef-patron Max Levy and wife Izaskun Levy citing the pressures of the pandemic, and a desire to take a post-wedding sabbatical as motivating factors for the closure.
"I started working on this project back in 2011, and it's just been non-stop since then," Levy tells Tatler Dining. "With everything that compounded over the last year and a half, it's time to take a break—and unfortunately, [Okra] is not the type of restaurant that we can just take off for a couple of months."
From now until July 3, the ground-floor izakaya will operate as normal; following its closure, Levy will focus his energies on the omakase offering upstairs from July 5 to 31, with bookings opening on June 10 on a first come, first served basis.
Okra opened in 2016 in the neighbourhood of Sai Ying Pun, in a four-storey building owned by the Sam Shui Natives Association. It was a continuation of Levy's Beijing restaurant, Okra 1949, which served modern Japanese cooking influenced by the foodscape of the Chinese capital. The New Orleans native sought to continue that ethos at Okra's Hong Kong outpost, while immersing himself in the intricacies of local Cantonese cuisine.
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"I originally came here with a kind of purpose or goal, and coming down here [from Beijing] I just noticed that there seemed to be this very hungry market for food and beverage in general, and there was room to try and do something unique. When I opened the original Okra in Beijing, the goal was not to just open a Japanese restaurant but to open something that told not only my story, but a story about Japanese food in Beijing and how that evolves."
At Okra Hong Kong, Levy quickly established a reputation for inventive, genre-crossing interpretations of traditional Japanese gastronomy, and as a first-mover in techniques such as dry-aged sashimi and in-house curing and fermentation. Straying far from the well-trodden route of Edomae-style sushi, Levy's omakase courses demonstrated the chef's deep knowledge of Japan's culinary traditions in creations like chawanmushi with carabinero prawn and the titular okra, and roasted shirako with magnolia leaf and yuzu kosho.
Meanwhile, his elevated izakaya fare took numerous liberties, often with tongue-in-cheek humour, mixing and matching his New Orleans roots with Hong Kong's produce as evidenced by dishes like Hokkaido sea urchin with shiitake mushroom and fish maw aspic, and the El Pollo Loco giant fried chicken sando.
Levy also distinguished himself as one of Hong Kong's foremost advocates of sake, marking each year with a trip to Japan to oversee the brewing of Okra's own house sake at a small-batch brewery, based on that year's character of the Chinese zodiac. More recently, the sake list became the purview of wife and sake sommelier Izaskun Levy, whose unique selection of natural, unpasteurised sake often centred around obscure bottles exclusive to the restaurant.
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