New Restaurants Opening in Hong Kong 2026: The Running List

Aqua Restaurant Group's all-day Japanese dining concept has arrived at Tai Kwun, the heritage police station complex in Central that has become one of Hong Kong's most interesting food and cultural destinations. Shiro Central takes a contemporary, relaxed approach to Japanese cuisine — think izakaya-lite rather than formal kaiseki — with a menu that runs from morning coffee and Japanese breakfasts through to evening cocktails and small plates. The Tai Kwun setting, with its colonial-era stone buildings, gives Shiro Central a visual context that its cooking doesn't need to compete with.

A contemporary Korean eatery in TST focused on the three protein pillars of Korean BBQ: seafood, beef, and pork, prepared with the careful sourcing that the best Korean restaurants apply to their ingredients. The communal setting and shared table format is correctly executed — this is Korean hospitality as it should feel, not as it often does when transplanted outside Korea. The banchan selection is above average. Worth knowing for groups of four or more who want the full Korean communal experience.

This is the opening I was most curious about when Vicky Lau announced it. Lau — the chef behind Tate Dining Room, one of Hong Kong's most celebrated and distinctly personal fine dining experiences — has opened something unexpected: Jija, a Chinese bistro celebrating the flavours of Yunnan and Guizhou province, at the new Kimpton Hotel in TST. Where Tate is refined and minimalist, Jija is vibrant and grounded — the sour, smoky, fermented flavours of the Chinese Southwest, presented with Lau's characteristic care about provenance and technique. The crossing mushroom hotpot and the pickled vegetable dishes particularly impressed me. This is what a Hong Kong chef making something genuinely personal looks like.

The creative pasta concept that opened on Gough Street in February has been generating genuine word-of-mouth, which on Gough Street — one of Hong Kong's most reliably interesting food streets — means something. The menu is built around homemade pasta with East-meets-West combinations: Wagyu bolognese with just enough restraint not to feel gimmicky, seafood brown butter tomato rigatoni that earns the combination. The room is small and fills quickly; booking is advised for evenings. Good value for Central.

Daniel Boulud — the Lyon-born, New York-based chef who operates some of the most acclaimed French restaurants in the world — has arrived in Hong Kong with Terrace Boulud, a sophisticated brasserie atop Landmark Prince's in partnership with Mandarin Oriental. The rooftop terrace element gives the restaurant one of Central's best outdoor settings; the cooking is the French brasserie canon executed at the highest level — proper steak tartare, sole meunière, roasted chicken, crème brûlée done with the kind of care that makes you understand why these dishes became classics in the first place. This is, unambiguously, one of 2026's most important openings.

Ramenya Shima, founded in Tokyo in 2020 by Hiroshi Morishima, has made its first venture outside Japan in Causeway Bay. The ramen here is distinctive: a rich, clear tonkotsu-adjacent broth with a depth that suggests more hours of cooking than most Hong Kong ramen operations dedicate to the process. The noodle texture is calibrated carefully — firm but not al dente in the Italian sense, which is a different thing entirely. This is a genuine Tokyo ramen institution, not a franchise operation with a Japanese name, and the quality reflects that difference. Queues should be expected.

GYU+bar's custom-built lava-rock kiln is either a gimmick or a genuinely useful cooking tool, depending on your view of high-end Japanese-French hybrid cooking. Having eaten there twice in March, I'll say this: the kiln produces a consistent, even heat that suits the signature beef preparations in a way that a conventional grill doesn't replicate. The menu is short and confident — the beef is the point, the Japanese-French framing is handled with enough restraint that it doesn't feel like a branding exercise. The wine list is genuinely good for a meat-focused restaurant. Expensive, but earned.

Spanish chef Edgard Sanuy Barahona's Lola Maria opened on Hollywood Road in March after a quiet February soft opening. The cooking is Spanish in the honest sense — not modernist, not deconstructed, not "Spanish-inspired" — but the actual food of Spain's taverna culture: good jamón, proper tortilla española, slow-cooked pork dishes, and a wine list that takes Spain's less-fashionable regions as seriously as its famous ones. The Hollywood Road location puts it in direct conversation with its art gallery and antiques dealer neighbours, which seems appropriate for a restaurant this firmly grounded in a specific culture.

dragon-i reopened on March 12 in a new chapter for one of Hong Kong's most storied entertainment venues. The original dragon-i, which opened in 2003, was for over a decade the address in Central — combining Chinese aesthetics with a nightlife and restaurant concept that defined how Hong Kong entertained itself at the height of its pre-2008 confidence. The 2026 reimagining takes the essential DNA — the aesthetic, the ambition, the sense that the room is for people who want an evening rather than just a meal — and updates it for a different Hong Kong. Whether it recaptures the cultural moment the original occupied is a question only time answers.

The udon here is cut and cooked to order — a detail that matters more than it might sound. The noodles have a silkiness combined with chew that only comes from properly rested dough and immediate cooking, rather than the pre-cut-and-held approach that most udon restaurants outside Japan use for convenience. The broth is clean and deeply dashi-forward. The menu is short and focused: this is a restaurant that knows what it is and does it with commitment. Recommended specifically at lunch when the turnover keeps the broth at its freshest.