My Hong Kong day

Fuel Espresso

Hong Kong’s corporate crowd comes to life each morning at Fuel Espresso. Queues regularly form at the smart coffee chain’s espresso bars that anchor some of the city’s premium commercial office space, such as the IFC, Landmark and Pacific Place. “The Indian beans are our uniqueness,” says Fuel Espresso’s founder Sanjay Ponnapa, a New Zealander with Indian parents who moved to Hong Kong in 2008. “They give our coffees body, sweetness and a little spice.”

Prior to getting to his IFC shop every morning, 55-year-old Ponnapa has already swum a kilometre at the neighbouring Four Seasons Hotel.He started doing morning laps while staying in Shanghai to open his first mainland Chinese outpost of Fuel. Two more in Shanghai are on the way, along with a seventh in Hong Kong. Beijing and Shenzhen are next, with Tokyo, Singapore, London and New York to come. “We’ll be disappointed if we don’t open 12 new shops in the next three years,” says Ponnapa, who first started his coffee cart in 1996 in Wellington, and used to rise at 04.30.

Hong Kong has proved a major launchpad – both professionally and personally – for Ponnapa. He met his wife, Yeonhee, at his IFC espresso bar in 2011 and now designs his life around making sure he spends enough time with her and their young daughter.

Stephanie Wong

Famed as Hong Kong is as an international finance centre, nothing gets in the way of food. Desks empty at lunchtime and many office workers head out to a restaurant; even the stock market shuts down for one hour. Stephanie Wong has experienced this lunchtime rush to secure a seat from both sides of the kitchen.

The former banker quit her job at HSBC in 2015 to enroll at a culinary school in France and pursue her dream of being a chef. This year she opened her first restaurant, Roots, in Wan Chai; she now cooks a wholesome mix of French and Cantonese cuisine for some of her former finance peers.

“Hong Kong’s lunch menus are so heavy, meaty and carb-driven,” says Wong, who uses a lot of eggs and vegetables in her dishes. “Our lunch menu was inspired by the idea of eating in a clean, healthy and balanced way.”

Prior to opening a permanent space, Wong conducted two pop-ups at Taste Kitchen, a restaurant incubator inside the government-backed art-and-design compound PMQ. The opportunity to test her menu, refine her pricing and learn the timings of running a food business paid off: Hong Kong’s F&B industry is notoriously competitive and Wong used her own capital to open her restaurant.

Wong arrives at Roots at 11.00 and lunch is her first meal of the day. She usually sits down to eat with her team at 11.30, right before the first diners arrive at 12.00. Sous-chef Polly So’s staff meals consist of ingredients left over from that morning’s lunchtime prep. Shared dishes tend to be homestyle Cantonese. On this occasion it’s a soup of Chinese courgette, luffa melon, corn, dried prawns and scallops and spring onion, which will be served over rice. “Sometimes these dishes actually develop into menu items,” says Wong as she watches several saucepans bubble – and listens to her stomach rumble.

Charlene Dawes

“Drinking is a way to connect people,” says Charlene Dawes, sounding more like a technology entrepreneur than the founder of a handful of Hong Kong’s best bars. The owner of Tastings Group is seated among the after-work crowd at The Envoy, a cocktail bar she opened in 2014. As the sun begins to set, her outdoor “platform” – at the top of the Pottinger Hotel in Central – begins to fill up.

The 40-year-old is toasting to a decade spent in the drinks business. She came to drinking late, getting into wine in her twenties courtesy of her parents and several formative moments in Hong Kong, Sydney and Napa. A trip to a whiskey bar in Hokkaido turned her on to the brown stuff. “Whiskey is the one drink I can have by myself at home,” says Dawes, who even created her own blend for her wedding.

A desire to make whiskey-based cocktails led Dawes to team up with Hong Kong barman Antonio Lai. The award-winning Quinary opened in 2010 and the pair have been shaking up the drinking scene ever since with bars and lounges, such as Origins, VEA and Room 309. Draftland, a cocktails-on-tap bar in Soho, opened earlier this year. “Antonio’s approach to cocktails was so refreshing,” says Dawes, who let Lai become the face of the group. “He is about flavour, not about alcohol, and he opened my eyes to a lot of things.”