The First Chinese Kitchen to Reach Three Stars in 2009, on Two Since 2023
Chan Yan-tak's Cantonese room on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons still cooks the dim sum that made its name — but the third star has been gone since 2023, and the reasons show up on the plate.
A trolley does not arrive. Nothing arrives on a trolley here. The har gau lands on a small white plate, four pieces, the pleats sharp enough to count, the prawn inside still snapping. This is the version of dim sum the room was built for — kitchen-plated, cart-free, one order at a time — and it is the reason a lunch booking here takes about a month to secure.
Chan Yan-tak's kitchen on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons was the first Chinese restaurant anywhere to hold three Michelin stars, from 2009 through 2022. Since 2023 it has held two. The demotion is the frame the room now sits inside, and it is the frame the cooking has to answer.
Still the best dim sum lunch in the building, and no longer the best Cantonese dinner in Hong Kong.
Editorial Deep
The har gau and the siu mai are the argument for coming. The wrappers are thin enough to see the filling through, the prawn is sweet and firm, and the pork-and-shrimp dumpling tastes of both rather than of the seasoning holding them together. The double-boiled soup that follows is the second argument — a clear broth carrying whatever the day's ingredients demand, drunk from a lidded cup, and one of the few soups in the city that reads as a course rather than a preamble.
Conversation works at a normal volume across a four-top, and works at a slightly lifted one across a six. The room absorbs sound rather than bouncing it — carpet underfoot, upholstered chairs, spacing between tables that most Hong Kong dining rooms cannot afford to give up. A four-year-old at the next table is audible; a business lunch two tables over is not.
The booking page presents four routes — phone (+852 3196 8882), email, the Reserve button on the Four Seasons Hong Kong site, and OpenTable — and implies they are interchangeable. They are not. Weekend dinners fill several weeks out and lunch dim sum takes about a month to lock down, so the practical route is OpenTable for the calendar view, or the Four Seasons Reserve button if you want the hotel's booker to hold a specific window. Phone works for the same-week miracle that occasionally opens up on a cancellation. Email is the slowest of the four.
The cheapest visit that still counts as eating here is a weekday dim sum lunch for one, ordered tightly — har gau, siu mai, a double-boiled soup, tea — and it will still clear the per-person lunch minimum before service. That is the visit to send someone on. It is also the visit that most clearly justifies the price, because the dim sum is where the kitchen's technique is legible in every bite rather than spread across a longer, more diluted meal.
A return makes sense once the kitchen either restores something it lost with the third star in 2023 or stops charging as if it still had it. The dim sum service does not need the return condition — it earns a repeat annually on its own merits, and a visitor with a month of notice should book it. The dinner does.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Har gau, siu mai, the double-boiled soup of the day, and — if the budget stretches — the wok-fried sea cucumber with shrimp paste
“Still the best dim sum lunch in the building; no longer the best Cantonese dinner in Hong Kong.”
Book the lunch a month out and order tight around dim sum, soup and goose — that is where the kitchen's technique still reads. For dinner at this bill, Duddell's is the better Cantonese room in Central right now, and the case for eating here after dark rests on the harbour rather than the plate.
The Verdict
