Montana
Hollywood Road · SoHo
Shuffle
Lan Kwai Fong · Central
The Big Buddha
Lantau · Ngong Ping
Hong Kong is its own little world.
There is an absurd amount of geography packed into a tiny place. Victoria Harbour cuts straight through the middle of it. Skyscrapers climb until the mountains stop them. Jungle comes down almost to the backs of apartment blocks. Then there are bays, peninsulas, hundreds of islands, sleepy waterfront towns and beaches good enough that, if somebody dropped you into Deep Water Bay without context, Hong Kong would not be your first guess.
And in the middle of all that is one of the coolest cities in the world.
Hong Kong is fast, rich, international, extremely good at eating and completely obsessed with making limited space do more than it reasonably should. Restaurants are six floors up. Malls become pedestrian routes. Train stations disappear underneath office towers. A racetrack sits under apartment buildings. Ferries leave Central for island towns that feel like separate little countries and are still just normal parts of Hong Kong.
That is the thing that keeps getting better the longer you look. The obvious Hong Kong, Victoria Harbour, the towers, the lights, is already spectacular.
Then you realize how much else is hiding behind it.
Hong Kong makes getting around almost unfairly easy. The MTR is fast, clean, obvious and so tightly stitched into the city that you can disappear underground in Central and come back up inside a mall, an office tower or three connected buildings away from where you thought you were. Use it constantly.
Just don’t use it for everything.
Cross Victoria Harbour on the at least once. The boats are little green-and-white workhorses, with wooden benches and the skyline visible through the open sides. The crossing only takes a few minutes, but it is one of the rare moments when you get far enough away from Hong Kong to actually see the shape of it: Kowloon behind you, the towers of the island ahead, mountains sitting immediately behind them.
Then do the deliberately ridiculous version. Take on your first night. The huge red sails, dark wooden boat and all that light reflecting off the harbour are completely theatrical, which is exactly why it works. Do it early, before you know which tower is which and before the skyline has become familiar. Hong Kong looks fucking fantastic from the water.
And on the island, take the when you have nowhere urgent to be. Go upstairs and get the front seat if you can. The thing is narrow, double-decker and slow enough that you are suddenly looking straight into second-floor windows and shop signs instead of passing underneath everything. Wan Chai rolls into Causeway Bay one block at a time from up there.
The MTR is how you get around Hong Kong.
The ferry and the are how you start seeing it.
Wan Chai is a good place to understand what Hong Kong does with space because almost nothing stays neatly in its lane. Walk Johnston Road and Queen’s Road East and you get old shopfronts under towers, wet-market streets, little restaurants, bars, offices and traffic all jammed together without any particular interest in matching.
This is also a very good place to eat lunch. is tiny, bright and basically built around the reason you are there: lacquered roast goose hanging in the window and being chopped to order. If you want the goose, go to Kam’s. is around the corner by the Blue House, in a small, loud room doing intensely flavored Thai noodles and street food. gives you another completely different lunch without really leaving Wan Chai.
After that, take the east.
Go upstairs. Front seat if you can get it.
Wan Chai turns into Causeway Bay slowly enough that you can actually watch the city get louder. Then suddenly you are surrounded by SOGO, Lee Theatre, Fashion Walk, Pearl City, LOG-ON, DON DON DONKI, department stores, cosmetics, sneakers, little restaurants several floors above the street, signs on top of signs and an absolutely stupid number of people.
Causeway Bay is fun precisely because there is almost too much of it. Go into things. Take elevators. Walk through malls you had no intention of visiting. DON DON DONKI at some unreasonable hour is as valid a Hong Kong experience as anything else on this page.
If you keep going east, in Quarry Bay is worth the detour. It is actually five connected residential blocks, but standing inside the courtyard that distinction stops mattering. You look up and almost the entire sky has been replaced by windows, balconies and air conditioners. It is huge, cramped and genuinely nuts to stand inside.
Then go back toward Central, where Hong Kong stops pretending the ground floor is especially important.
This is one of my favorite things about the city. A mall might just be the easiest route across a block. A footbridge takes you through an office building. The MTR disappears underneath everything. The restaurant you are looking for is on the sixth floor of a building whose entrance looks like absolutely nothing. Sometimes you realize you have crossed several streets without really being outside.
Central is expensive towers and banks, obviously, but it gets much better once you start moving sideways through it.
is an easy place to enter the mess. From there, catch the Mid-Levels Escalator and use it completely incorrectly. Get on for a bit, see something interesting, get off, walk down a side street, come back somewhere else. The escalator climbs straight through the neighborhood, with streets cutting across it at every level and bars, restaurants and little shops appearing beside you as you go.
is worth properly stopping for. It is the old Central Police Station, magistracy and Victoria Prison complex, so suddenly in the middle of all those towers you get courtyards, heavy old masonry buildings and actual space around you. Then you can spill back out onto , through , down , up , into or west toward .
Do not turn that into a route you need to complete. Central is much better when you keep changing your mind.
Hong Kong Island makes much more sense once you stop expecting every interesting thing to announce itself from the pavement.
Cross the harbour and Hong Kong changes character almost immediately.
is the strange clean-slate version of it: broad promenades, huge pieces of new architecture and actual open sky along reclaimed waterfront where almost nothing feels cramped. sits there like a massive dark slab facing the harbour, with galleries inside and one of the best views back toward Hong Kong Island outside. Give the museum real time, but even if you are not in a museum mood, walk the waterfront.
Keep moving east toward and Kowloon gets much shinier.
is luxury retail pushed into complete excess: marble, gold, art, enormous interiors, expensive shops and the harbour right outside. next door does the huge, immaculate new-generation Hong Kong hotel thing very well; downstairs is all dark wood, low light, serious cocktails and live jazz.
Then there is , sitting across the road looking completely unbothered by any of this. The green Rolls-Royces lined up outside are exactly the sort of unnecessary detail Hong Kong is very good at.
Go upstairs to for Philippe Starck interiors, silver surfaces, huge windows and the city laid out below you. Or stay with the harbour for dinner at , high above , with Northern Chinese food, Peking duck and Victoria Harbour filling the windows.
Then walk a few minutes inland and let the whole thing fall apart.
That contrast is one of the best things about Kowloon: it keeps changing before you have had time to decide what version you were in.
Head north and gets much louder. Signs project over the street, buses squeeze through crowds, shops climb upstairs, and entire stretches start organizing themselves around one thing. is exactly what it sounds like. mixes trainers, clothes, market stalls and people into a long, messy strip that feels much more like everyday Kowloon than the waterfront you just left.
is worth stopping for because shengjian bao are one of those foods that are almost impossible to eat calmly. They come out with crisp fried bottoms and soft tops, full of hot broth and pork inside. Bite them like an idiot and you will burn yourself. Give them a second.
Keep going south toward and and the scale drops again. Neon and fluorescent signs hang over narrow streets, market stalls take over the pavement, little restaurants stay bright and busy late, and suddenly Kowloon feels much closer to the ground. Temple Street is not subtle or pristine. That is exactly why it is fun.
And when your feet are completely fucked, is down in a Nathan Road basement, all dark wood, low light and slightly theatrical old-Shanghai styling, doing proper foot reflexology and massage until late. At that point it feels less like a wellness appointment than emergency maintenance.
Dinner is not the end of the night
Dinner is where Hong Kong being a global city gets very obvious.
The city is packed with people who know food, eat out constantly and have an insane amount of choice, so restaurants have to be good. And they can be good at almost anything.
Around Central and Sheung Wan alone, is grilling the whole chicken over binchotan (thighs, wings, skin, neck, meatball, the bits that actually make yakitori interesting) in a loud room where the food is much more serious than the setting ever tries to look. is a few minutes away doing the dark, late-night izakaya version of dinner: sake, charcoal, small plates, low light. is Vietnamese, tiny, loud and basically attached to Peel Street once the crowd spills outside.
And that can just as easily turn into , where the room is chandeliers, deep red carpet and white tablecloths while the food is full of dried chillies, Sichuan pepper and properly aggressive heat. Or , which commits completely to the Paris-bistro thing: burgundy banquettes, bow-tied captains, pâté, sole meunière, steak frites. Or , where the pasta, truffles, wine and service are operating at a completely different level again.
That is normal here.
has blistered Neapolitan pizza coming out of a domed oven. is the burger option: smashed patties, fries and milkshakes in a bright American diner. turns Italian-American food into a giant red-sauce production with tuxedos, vodka rigatoni and portions designed to defeat you.
Hong Kong does not make you choose between eating “Hong Kong food” and eating well. The city is too international, too demanding and too obsessed with restaurants for that distinction to be very useful.
Around six the office crowd comes out and suddenly the streets around Wyndham, , and are full. The bars are packed, people are standing outside with drinks, everyone is walking somewhere, and the whole area gets loud very quickly.
Have a martini at . It is tiny, dark and usually rammed, and the burger is genuinely worth ordering. is nearby if you want something warmer and more relaxed: Roman food, very good cocktails, people outside waiting for a table. is the one for the more obsessive cocktail stuff; is darker and smaller.
But the street is half the point here. is steep and narrow and once the bars fill up everyone just spills outside. makes perfect sense in the middle of it because it is fried chicken, pizza, drinks and loud music rather than some precious cocktail experience.
Then keeps going uphill and is right below it, louder and much more chaotic. You can move between all of this on foot in minutes.
And if you want the complete opposite, in Tsim Sha Tsui is an old dark-wood jazz pub with beer, live music and none of the polished Central thing.
is tiny and absolutely packed once the night gets going. A few steep streets in Central, bars stacked on top of each other, people drinking outside, queues across the pavement, club entrances disappearing downstairs. It starts with the after-work crowd and by midnight the whole area is rammed.
is the old Hong Kong institution: glossy, dressed-up, tables, bottles, people who have been going for years and people very clearly there to be seen. is the techno version of the city: small room, proper sound system, no photos, everyone there for the music. is the Chinese megaclub version: big EDM, huge production, VIP tables, bottles everywhere. is worth seeing even if the music is secondary: dark, theatrical, full of ironwork, with thousands of butterflies hanging over the room.
Late enough, the options get even better.
is on the ninth floor, takes cash only, and makes momos that are genuinely some of the best food on the planet. Take the lift up, make sure you have cash, order too many.
If there are still a few of you and you want to keep sitting around, at three in the morning is excellent: boiling broth, meat, noodles, sauces, everyone looking progressively worse under very bright lights.
And in Causeway Bay goes until 5 a.m. That one is for when the night is actually over: little booth, bowl of tonkotsu ramen, nobody needs to speak.
Back in Central, does shawarma, kebabs and hummus late, and is there when all you want is a slice.
The south side of Hong Kong Island is where the geography starts getting stupid.
You can leave Central, go over the mountain and fifteen minutes later be at , with green slopes dropping straight into the water and a beach that could quite easily be in Thailand. The city has not slowly faded away on the journey there. It has basically disappeared behind the hill.
is small and simple. Sand, water, trees, almost nothing trying to turn it into a destination. is upstairs in the beach building, looking straight out over the bay: Thai food, cold drinks, swim, eat, go back down.
A few minutes farther along the coast is , bigger and much more built-up: a broad crescent of sand, expensive apartment buildings climbing the slopes behind it and The Pulse sitting directly on the beach.
Keep going and Stanley is a proper waterfront town. There is a market folded into the streets behind the shore, a long promenade full of places to eat and drink, boats in the bay and beaches on either side. Come for lunch and give it the afternoon.
Shek O feels farther away again. The road winds around the southeastern edge of the island and eventually drops into a low-rise village between green hills and a wide crescent beach. This is the one that feels almost Riviera: houses right behind the sand, rocky headlands at either end, the South China Sea in front of you. is right on the beach, so lunch can happen with the water right there.
Pick one and give it the day. if you want the beach closest to the city. Stanley if you want a town to wander around. Shek O if you want to disappear a little farther.
Half an hour from Central and you can be getting off a ferry in Yung Shue Wan, where there are no cars, the lanes are barely wide enough for anything bigger than a bicycle, boats are tied up along the waterfront and the green hills start almost immediately behind the village.
That is . Walk through Yung Shue Wan, eat something, keep going until the houses thin out and the path starts following the coast. There are little beaches and bays along the way, and none of it feels remotely connected to the skyscrapers you were looking at half an hour earlier. is right on the waterfront in Yung Shue Wan, with a terrace facing the boats and food coming off the charcoal grill.
is different. It is denser, louder and much more of a little town. You come off the ferry into a harbour full of fishing boats, then straight into narrow streets packed with bicycles, seafood shops, bakeries, temples and houses. Rent a bike, eat whatever looks good, cut through the middle of town and eventually you hit Tung Wan Beach on the other side. It is small enough that you can spend the day moving between harbour, beach, food and hills without needing much of a plan.
And then there is , which is not an island at all. It is a town on the eastern side of the New Territories, and once you get there the city breaks into water, green headlands, coves, beaches and little islands offshore. The waterfront is full of boats and seafood restaurants, and this is where you go when you want to get properly out onto the coast.
The thing to understand is that , and are not some separate “nature escape” bolted onto Hong Kong.
People live there. Ferries and buses go there normally. You can spend the morning in Central, have lunch by a harbour full of fishing boats, swim, walk through jungle and still be back in the city that night.
Do not schedule Hong Kong to death.
Book the restaurants you really care about and anything that genuinely needs a reservation. Leave the rest loose. This is a city where you take the tram because it is going roughly the right way, see a street from upstairs that looks interesting and get off. You go into a building for one thing and find three restaurants on the floors above it. You stop for one drink on Peel Street and two hours later everyone is in Lan Kwai Fong. You cross the harbour for lunch and stay in Kowloon until midnight.
That happens constantly here because everything is so close together and so much of the city is hidden until you are actually moving through it.
Take elevators when you do not quite know what is upstairs. Walk into the mall instead of around it. Get on the ferry. Go down the side street. If somewhere looks packed, look at what everyone is eating. If the tram is going somewhere you have not seen yet, stay on it a few more stops.
And if the plan for four in the afternoon is clearly worse than whatever is happening in front of you, change the plan.