Kitchen confidential: The best Cantonese private kitchens in Hong Kong

With a culinary career that began in his teens and saw him rise to head chef at several five-star hotels, Master Huen brings more than 40 years of experience to the plate. Meanwhile, Mrs Huen orchestrates the front of house, ensuring their signature seafood dishes such as the salt and pepper mantis shrimp of gigantic proportions, arrive to the table with great fanfare.

Tucked in Lai On Lane in Sai Ying Pun, this charming establishment serves time and labour-intensive Cantonese dishes that have fallen out of favour in more commercial kitchens, as well as rare meats to test your appetite. An alum of Yung Kee, the chef works wonders with a minuscule kitchen to put out mouthwatering dishes like roasted chicken stuffed with glutinous rice, crocodile clay pot, and braised deer tendons with black pepper.

Translating to ‘moustachioed man’ in Cantonese, this frenetically decorated private kitchen in Sheung Wan was opened by an ex-triad member who switched careers after some pleading from his wife. Nowadays he puts his cleaver to more benevolent use, using it to chop up dishes like smoked soy sauce chicken and first-cut char siu. The fried lobster with milk and fish maw fried rice are also not to be missed.

Helmed by a seasoned chef with two decades of experience in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and supported by his devoted wife-turned-manager, this private kitchen is an intimate affair with only four tables, coveted by Hong Kong diners who wait up to a year for the privilege of tasting its Cantonese delicacies. Must-tries include chilled South African abalone, stir-fried crab sauce with toasted baguette, fresh lime saliva chicken, Typhoon Shelter lobster and golden crab lotus leaf rice.

When Columbia graduate Sam Lui embarked on a project to explore Chinese traditions through the lens of wok cookery, she intended it to be purely conceptual, with “Wendy's Wok World” as her alter-ego. Today, the private dinners she holds in her family home in Sheung Shui are the talk of the town, thanks to her wok skills and intriguing ambition.

Lui, one of Tatler Dining's Rising Star awardees in 2020, regularly hosts Cantonese food enthusiasts and the simply curious in banquet-style semi-outdoor dinners on the grounds of her family's soy sauce farm. Since beginning in 2018, Wendy's Wok World has evolved from a performance art project exploring notions of tradition and authenticity, into what is now a private kitchen serving vegetable-focused takes on dishes such as mapo tofu and typhoon shelter sea cucumber.

The wok master-in-training is continuing to test her limits through cooking in different environments, from residencies in New York by the invitation of the Swiss Institute, to the Baan Trok Tua Ngork heritage space in Bangkok.