Hong Kong, Asia's new foodie haven

Lasers dance across the Hong Kong skyline during the nightly Symphony of Lights I am stumbling aimlessly in the dark, poking the floor in front of me tentatively with a white stick and clutching a shot glass of what smells like cinnamon. The woman I had been clinging on to as we entered the pitch-black room has abandoned me having shouted ‘you have to sniff out your table’ over her shoulder as she departed into the gloom. Sniff out my table? This could be a long night.
Then I realise that the instructions have been lost in translation somewhat - a case of Chinese whispers in the dark, passed along a line of confused and rather nervous people. The game, it transpires, is to listen for a voice shouting the name of whatever you can smell in your shot glass and then head towards that voice.
I hear ‘SPICE!’ being called out some way off in the distance and try to head slowly in that direction, tapping the white stick out in front of me with every step.
I eventually stumble across my kindly (and, thankfully, very patient) waiter for the night, Julian, who instructs me to take a seat at the table beside him and await my fellow guests who are entering the room one-by-one and having a shot glass thrust into their hands.
This is wine tasting in the dark, an initially terrifying but rather fascinating experience in which you spend an hour and a half in complete darkness smelling and tasting wines served by visually-impaired waiters - the theory being that your sense of smell and taste is heightened by your lack of vision (although most of the people on our table mistake the first two white wines for red, not a good start).
We sample six wines in total and are asked to comment on their smell and taste and to guess which region the wine is from. At one point we’re given a strong acidic fruit to see how it affects the taste of the wine and then, taste buds still smarting, told to pour a powder that tastes like liquorice on to the fruit, which completely overpowers the next sip.
This is not a new concept of course - London has its own ‘Dans Le Noir’ restaurant - but Dialogue in the Dark is tapping into a new trend in Hong Kong: the boom in wine.
The city has positioned itself as the wine hub of Asia; wine imports have continued to grow since the government introduced zero wine duties in 2008 and the following year saw the launch of the first Hong Kong Wine and Dine Festival. The third event took place at the end of October and marked the beginning of a month of culinary indulgence in the form of Hong Kong Wine and Dine month.
On the opening night, wine enthusiasts were being shipped in by the busload from all across the city, brochures in one hand and complimentary engraved wine glass in the other.
Like the UK’s Taste Festivals, visitors are given tokens which they can exchange for wine and food at any of the 300 booths around the open-air site on West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade.
There was a celebratory air at the event as leading figures from the wine industry gave speeches, corks popped, meat was flambeed and some sort of glitter bomb exploded into the air.
The festival was closely followed by the Lan Kwai Fong Carnival - featuring 80 food and beer stalls, Brazilian dancers and African drummers - and the World of Food and Music at Stanley.
It seems there is no end of opportunities to treat your tastebuds in this vibrant, fast-paced city; it offers visitors a choice of more than 11,000 restaurants.
The restaurant scene is as frenetic as the city itself - eateries open and close at an alarming pace – but it boasts an impressive number of Michelin stars from the stylish L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon at the Landmark and Lung King Heen at the Four Seasons Hotel to the famous roasted Chinese goose at Yung Kee and foodies' favourite Tim’s Kitchen.
And fine dining isn’t just the reserve of the rich in Hong Kong - the city is also home to the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world - Tim Ho Wan in Kowloon.
This unassuming dim sum canteen in the Mong Kok district is owned by Mak Pui Gor, who trained as a dim sum master at Lung King Heen. The most expensive dish on the menu costs around £3 and prawn dumplings and crispy pork buns cost just 80p. Not surprisingly, you’ll have to join a very long queue - the wait time is said to be about three hours.
Lacking the stamina to spend a large part of the evening watching other diners eat perfectly steamed dim sum with my face pressed up against the window, I opt to visit its sister restaurant, which recently opened in Sham Shui Po.
The new restaurant appears to have received a rather lukewarm reception in comparison to its famous sibling: although it is full there is no queue and no hungry tourists or culinary adventurers photographing their food.
What is familiar though was the menu, which features delicate steamed shrimp dumplings, vermicelli rolls stuffed with pig’s liver, slices of pan-fried turnip cake and those famous crispy buns filled with barbecued pork.
For those in search of local flavour, a visit to the wet market is a must. My hotel, the InterContinental on the Kowloon waterfront, offers guests the chance to book foodie ‘Insider Experiences’, including a visit to the local wet market with one of the chefs from its Michelin-starred restaurant, Yan Toh Heen.
Simon Kwok, executive sous chef at the restaurant, guides me from stall to stall in the energetic marketplace, explaining the various uses of the enormous fruit and vegetables that dwarf their plastic containers.
The food is a riot of colour and includes juicy, ripe, persimmon, shocking-pink dragon fruit and vast, rotund pomelo.
Then there is the seafood - most of which is still alive or in the process of being dispatched. Boxes of crabs bound up with grasses are lined up alongside lobsters, abalone, sea whelks, and tanks of geoduck, a type of clam that looks more like a giant, bloated snail that has outgrown its shell.
Nearby, an eel writhes around in a bright orange bowl, cut in half by the butcher’s knife and trailing a stream of blood, while decapitated fish heads appear to gasp their last breath in a shallow tray.
At one stall a woman grabs a handful of frogs from a tank, stacks them one on top of the other, ties them together with twine and throws them into a tray, where they flail their legs futilely awaiting their inevitable fate.
Most of these creatures will find themselves on the menu at Kwok’s restaurant at the InterContinental, which is also home to the Michelin-starred Spoon by Alain Ducasse and Nobu.
All three restaurants offer dramatic views of Victoria Harbour, where junks and ferries criss-cross the water like lethargic ants all day long.
At night, a myriad of iridescent lights and neon signs illuminate the skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island opposite and, at 8pm, the Symphony of Lights adds to the spectacle as lasers dance across the waterfront skyline.
A new addition to this famous skyline is the recently opened five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel, which occupies the top 17 floors of the city’s International Commerce Centre (ICC) skyscraper and is the highest hotel in the world.
Teetering on the 118th floor is Ozone, a super-swanky bar whose lofty vantage point leaves me feeling a little light-headed. Even the toilet has a great view. And the hotel has added to the city’s restaurant tally with upmarket Italian and Cantonese restaurants on the 102nd floor below. Yet another remarkable venue for the culinary adventurers to surmount.