View from the Top

Hopewell Centre’s revolving restaurant gets a much-needed makeover, becoming View 62 by PACO RONCERO. christina ko dines in

THE INFLUX OF celebrity-chef-helmed restaurants has been considerable in recent years, outpaced only by establishments boasting the presence of these maestros’ protégés, albeit sometimes self-proclaimed. Spanish chef Paco Roncero is both – the one-time apprentice to Ferran Adrià is now a star in his own right, and his new restaurant, View 62 by Paco Roncero, is a celebration both of what elBulli once represented in the culinary industry, and Roncero’s own honed skills since emerging from that institution.

Just as his mentor has renounced the term molecular gastronomy, Roncero too eschews the designation, preferring to call his creations “nouvelle cuisine”. At this point, probably, the chefs should just drop the pedantics and concentrate on what they’re good at – food. And Adrià has clearly taught Roncero well, because the food, whether due to or in spite of the theatrics, is the stuff that’s really worth writing about.

That, and perhaps the view for which the restaurant is named. A classic revolving restaurant situated on the 62nd floor of Hopewell Centre, it offers supremely photo-worthy vistas of Hong Kong and Kowloon, the vantage point changing at every second as the venue continues its revolution, completed in something over an hour (one revolution used to take 66 minutes, giving rise to the name of the previous restaurant to occupy the space, R66). Allow your gaze to linger too long in one spot and you might get a bit dizzy, but concentrate on the food, and that ever-changing landscape becomes only a secondary diversion.

The dinner menu at View 62 is offered in four incarnations: two set dinner menus and two tasting menus, though truly, if you’re going to make the trip, it’s the latter option you should choose. I go for the full shebang, the $1,800-a-pop, 16-course extravaganza, which will push the envelope on scientific cuisine just as it tests the boundaries of my stomach capacity – not always guaranteed when it comes to multi-course menus and overly artistic chefs. The first seven courses are pretty much bite-sized, with no intention whatsoever of fulfilling the appetite, rather whetting it instead with tickles of taste and texture.

Course one is Frozen Gin Fizz, a shot of hot cream and cold gin, to wake tongue and palate with the jarring juxtaposition of temperatures. The aperitif is followed by a crunchy boat-shaped cracker filled with greens and accompanied by what appears to be a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. An energetic squirt proves it to be olive oil butter, the opening oeuvre in Roncero’s showcase of skill with olive oil, for which he has come to be known. Other standouts in the opening acts include the caramelised pork skin, two squiggles of crunchiness no bigger than potato chips; and the rhubarb with black pepper that’s speckled with brown sugar so that layers of honey, tart and spice titillate together.

For me, the tapas section of the menu is both the most inventive and the most successfully executed. The XXI Century Omelet is served in a Martini glass, a savoury parfait of sautéed onions topped with egg sabayon and a final layer of potato foam. One dig of your spoon to the bottom reveals a journey of flavours, each one more crowd-pleasing than the next, a creamy, light concoction I’d take over a real martini any day.

The Carbonara Egg Nest is also egg-themed, a hard-boiled egg on a curious nest of vermicelli, covered when it reaches the table with two sides of a cracked “shell” that seem to be forged from white chocolate. It’s all engineered in classic trompe l’oeil fashion: the “egg” is actually made of cheese (the yolk, however, is real), the “vermicelli” is a noodle made from beef consommé, and the “shell” is hatched from bacon cream, producing a carbonara to the taste bud, if not in form. The problem with such dishes is that the integrity of the creation occasionally becomes lost in the mechanics – and in this case, it’s the ratio of ingredients that suffers. A ball of Parmesan the size of an egg is inevitably going to overwhelm all its bedfellows, though its taste is light enough; the shell and nest seem to lose importance in comparison, though it is those two elements that bring the dish harmony. (My quick solution, simply, is to not eat all the cheese…)

The salmon with deconstructed tartar sauce is comparatively boring in concept, but preferable in execution. Two bite-sized pieces of fish cooked at 40 degrees Celsius are served with olive-oil caviar, dots of garlic mayonnaise and cream foam. What advances in science it took to concentrate olive oil into a few dots of caviar I do not know, but they are certainly welcome – the mini explosions of concentrated flavor elevate a typical barely-cooked salmon dish to new levels.

The trio of mains – lobster with olive-oil soup and pink grapefruit, Chilean sea bass with green-bean sauce and Iberico air, and beef shank with potato purée and black olive oil – are more substantial than you’d expect, considering you have 13 other courses to plough through.

Roncero’s repeated rendering of olive oil in different formats never seems to tire, and this diluted version, cut with the searing sour of pink grapefruit and dressed liberally with chunks of lobster, is a new and welcome interpretation. The sea bass is also ably staged, on a bed of julienned green beans and decorated with Iberico foam from 60-month aged ham, but the question that still begs answering is why a seasoned chef and culinary trend-setter would choose such an ecologically sensitive specimen of fish to mar his canvas. The waiter claims this dish to be his favourite, but I prefer the more diplomatic beef shank, so tender it can be sliced with the edge of a fork, and juicy enough it needs no trick of chemistry or aesthetics to make it a worthy part of this menu.

The duet of desserts includes an orange sorbet with Arbequina olive oil – a fruitier varietal suited to desserts – passion fruit and Pedro Ximénez reduction, and a chocolate coulant nitro. They aren’t the best part of the meal, but they are an apt summary of what we’ve seen at work: the first demonstrates the versatility and dexterity Roncero has with olive oil (the choice of ingredient seems almost incidental – the point is really how the chef can mould a single item to fit his many needs), the second exhibits the use of modern technology to transform simple cuisine into a live show. The chocolate is my preferred of the two, an almost ice-creamy finish trapped in a hard exterior, a tandem of consistencies seamlessly attached.

The petits fours are worth leaving room for, an innocuous quartet of itsy-bitsy bonbons like a series of mini miracles – in particular the gummy candy infused with what must be pop rocks, a party in your mouth that you just can’t stop.

When Ferran Adrià stopped by Hong Kong last year to speak at a conference hosted by the Spanish Tourism Board, Roncero was the perfect understudy, allowing his mentor a stage to speak and take questions, while he gave cooking demonstrations. Arguably, playing second fiddle to the man deemed Greatest Chef in the World isn’t all that bad a deal. But that final snap, crackle and pop of today’s meal is the perfect reminder that Roncero’s got enough sizzle all of his own to be a success in his own right.