While Alvy’s does have the vibe of a New York neighborhood bar, it’s unlikely diners will find a Sichuan peppercorn pizza or char siu latkes in the five boroughs. Nonetheless, Alvy’s sourdough pizzas and wide range of craft beers — one of the owners is also behind Young Master Ales, one of the city’s most exciting craft beer breweries — have Hongkongers wishing Alvy’s was in their neighborhood.

Award-winning chef Vicky Lau has moved her small fine-dining restaurant into a more spacious location further west. Her background in graphic design is still a central theme. The interiors feature an elegant take on millennial pink, and the tasting menu–only offerings retain their focus on aesthetics, while increasingly drawing from the chef’s Chinese heritage, as with the “Ode to Chiu Chow Classic,” a delicate dish of foie gras royale and goose marinated with five spice, per Chaozhou (a city in Guangdong) tradition.

International heavyweight Frantzén’s Kitchen is a casual outpost of the venerable Restaurant Frantzén in Stockholm. Here, chef Jim Löfdahl serves a a more decadent — yet modern — style of cooking and offers a new perspective to local diners for whom Nordic cuisine only meant light and vegetal.

For a long time, Hongkongers associated Vietnamese food with pho, but a new breed of restaurants like Cô Thành are changing that by offering dishes like bun bo Hue, a pork and beef noodle soup from Central Vietnam, and bun mam, a preserved fish and shrimp soup, to their menus. To learn the ins and outs of Vietnamese cuisine, the owners of Cô Thành apprenticed with Nguyen Thi Thành, aka the Lunch Lady, the street stall vendor who became an international celebrity after appearing in Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. The restaurant is even named after her, as Cô Thành translates to Madam Thanh. But when dining at Cô Thành be prepared to wait — lunchtime queues are almost a fixture here.

Less than a year after opening its first Asian outpost in Singapore, this legendary New York City bar has taken up residence in Hong Kong. The choice of location is bold — although once the epitome of Hong Kong nightlife, Lan Kwai Fong is better known these days for its rowdy pubs and tourist bars. But at Employees Only, well-crafted cocktails with carefully chosen ingredients — such as the EO Gimlet, made with house-made cordial, or the Fraise Sauvage, featuring wild strawberries and Tahitian vanilla — offer a welcome respite for cocktail lovers in this corner of town.

One of Hong Kong’s most important French restaurants has welcomed new chef de cuisine Guillaume Galliot, who was previously at the two-Michelin-starred Tasting Room in Macau. Galliot is known for injecting Asian flavors into modern French cuisine, like his version of laksa with crab, confit egg, leeks, hazelnuts, and sudachi (a Japanese lime-like citrus).

He may have been awarded a lifetime achievement award earlier this year by Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, but Umberto Bombana, who is best known for 8½ Otto e Mezzo, the only three-Michelin-starred Italian restaurant outside of Italy, isn’t resting on his laurels. Octavium is a smaller and more casual affair with short prix fixe menus that change constantly with the seasons. Expect dishes like marinated raw Japanese snapper with mandarin orange and roasted veal with trombetta squash and watercress.

“Do you have an appointment?” the hostess in a lab coat asks when guests step into Dr. Fern’s — but only if they have opened the correct door. As its name suggests, this is a gin-focused bar with more than 250 varieties on the menu. If it’s all too overwhelming, the “doctor” can help guests find the right gin-based libation. And since it’s decked out in whimsical floral wallpaper and Victorian-style furniture, Dr. Fern’s Gin Parlour is also a popular place for afternoon tea, served with a G&T, of course.

Agustin Balbi, Hong Kong Tatler’s Best New Chef 2016, has moved from modern French cooking to French-leaning Japanese cuisine, which seems to be a natural progression for him as an alum of several modern Tokyo restaurants, such as the fabled RyuGin. Under the direction of Hideaki Matsuo, of three-Michelin starred Kashiwaya, Balbi heads up Haku on a day-to-day basis and has created a menu of Kappo-style cuisine, including tartare of chu-toro and beef topped with caviar and served with rice tuiles or Hokkaido sea urchin served on thick slices of toasted brioche.

The winds of Vietnam continue to blow through Hong Kong, and one of the strongest contenders for the city’s best banh mi thit (aka banh mi) is Le Petit Saigon, a quaint takeout counter located next to sister restaurant Le Garcon Saigon, a Vietnamese grill bistro that opened back in 2015. Chef Bao La travels to Ho Chi Minh City constantly and has modeled his sandwich after his favorite banh mi there: with a thick smear of pork liver and finished off with a dash of Maggi sauce.

A decently priced plate of pasta cannot be taken for granted in Hong Kong, so when Pici, which makes its own fresh pastas on-site daily, appeared on the scene, queues started forming immediately. It also helps that it’s located on one of the cutest cul-de-sacs in Wan Chai.