“I cannot go to any restaurant in the city where there isn’t somebody that used to work in Amber. I cannot go incognito in Hong Kong,” Richard Ekkebus proudly declares. And for good reason: the culinary director of the Landmark Mandarin Oriental has, over an impressive 18-year span, steered the food and beverage programme of the luxury hotel towards becoming one of the most formidable restaurant portfolios in the city, with Amber, the forward-thinking French fine-dining flagship restaurant, as its crown jewel.
Indeed, for the sheer number of progenies that have trained and “graduated” from the school of Ekkebus, Amber can be counted in the same breath as other lauded incubators of culinary talent from around the world, such as Per Se and Eleven Madison Park in New York, London’s The Ledbury and Le Gavroche, and French temples of haute cuisine like L’Arpège and Maison Troisgros.
“We were never trying to fit the mould of French restaurants,” says Ekkebus. “And that has attracted a particular type of people, in my opinion; people that want to be able to think for
