Chef Kwame Onwuachi and his fiancée Mya Allen are staying in a second floor walk-up AirBnB on Staunton Street, a couple blocks uphill from the landmark Man Mo Temple and the pricey antique shops of Hollywood Road. They’re in Hong Kong to do a dinner series with Kwame’s old friend Vincent Mui, who runs a pop-up restaurant space here called Test Kitchen.

Vincent and Kwame go way back. They met at CIA and went on the road together for the original Dinner Lab series, sharing hotel rooms and “sheds no more than 100 square feet” in what was meant to be a cross-country cooking competition. The idea was that teams of chefs would host dinners in ten different cities over the course of ten weeks, with guests scoring meals and the eventual winners getting funding to start their own restaurant. When Kwame and Vincent won, Dinner Lab moved the goal posts, and Kwame bowed out. He had already met the investor he needed at one of the early dinners, and was ready to get to work on his first solo project.

Vincent meets us at the coffee shop and we pile into his beige minivan, a literal grocery getter for the restaurant that also serves as his shuttle for visiting chefs. We head toward the waterfront. Unfortunately, Hong Kong, like a lot of cities, decided the best place to put its widest swaths of asphalt was right along the water, and so despite its harbor-side address, Test Kitchen faces enough of a snarl of highway and flyovers that it’s basically under an underpass.

Still, it’s a trendy little block on a street otherwise packed with tiny cardboard recycling sites and bric-a-brac wholesalers. There’s a co-working space / coffee shop next door, and a wine bar next to that.

Unopened, Test Kitchen is a wall of black corrugated steel, part of which is a two-story sliding door that pushes aside to reveal a bright, minimalist, concrete space with black accents and white walls. When Vincent finally got this space, after several years of running his pop-up operations out of vacant restaurants, other people’s houses, and whatever free space he could find, it was a blank, kitchen-less, slate. Now it does two seatings a night for Hong Kong’s upscale dining set, at about $125 US for a full tasting menu (however that week’s chef defines it) and more for cocktail and wine pairings from Ada Lang, former marketing guru turned sommelier and wine merchant.

First things first, despite Vincent’s repeated reassurances, Kwame checks the stock. His running joke for the day is variations on “First rule of the kitchen: Trust no one.”

The stock is still fine.

Next, he separates the oxtails from the broth. They’ve been braising over 12 hours, and look it. A few steamy masses of beautifully browned gelatin are scooped out for sampling, before the rest heads back into the combi oven to keep going till service.

Mya preps some cocktail mix for tonight’s “Navy Grog” and “Everything Criss”, both originally developed by lead bartender Zach Hoffman at Kwame's  Kith / Kin restaurant in DC's Intercontinental hotel. A bottle of rum appears. Some disappears.

We leave for lunch. Kwame wants to go to Kam’s Roast Goose, another quintessential and therefor touristy place in Central. You can guess the star dish.

Staff at Kam’s have a no-nonsense reputation, which makes sense given the hoards gathered on the sidewalk taking selfies and hovering around waiting to be called in for a table. Kwame puts our name in and we find our way to the far end of the crowd. I ask if we’ll be able to hear our number. “Don’t worry,” he reassures, “She recognizes me. Maybe it’s because I’m American.”

For all Hong Kong’s diversity, with huge numbers of immigrants from across Asia, Europe, and Oceania, it can be easy to go an entire day without seeing anyone who looks like Kwame and Mya. When I ask what that’s been like, he shrugs it off as: “The usual. Can’t get a cab.”

Later in the day, Mya can’t get a cab, so she takes an Uber, which operates in a legal gray area in the city and isn’t used anywhere near as much as in the U.S. Her driver – working off of the aforementioned shit show that is Google Maps – nearly plunges their car down a flight of stairs he mistook for a shortcut. The usual.

Kwame orders char siu, suckling pig, goose, and some noodles for the table. “Bliss,” he says. Everything is to share, and we share everything (except the bowl of noodles, which I mistake for my own and slurp accordingly). Meat, fat, and skin, glazed and roasted, served in slim strips and big chunks, follows a familiar Cantonese formula. The formula works.

Kwame’s first restaurant, Shaw Bijou, did not. He painted a target on his back with a costly tasting menu and a bravado that rubbed some people the wrong way. At 26, he was charging Minibar prices in a town with a select few Minibars. There was the upstairs members only club with Icelandic sheepskin seats, and booze lockers, and a bouncer’s list that was to be curated more for intellect and creative energy than bank account. 

The Washington Post’s Tom Sietsema started off the critical response with a brutal “First Bite” review that ended with his dinner guests going down the street for a piece of pizza to top off an unsatisfying meal. Kwame ditched the members only club idea and cut overall menu prices in half within a month of that review. After over two and a half years of planning and buildout, Shaw Bijou closed just shy of three months in business.

We take a spin through the market to pick up some limes and a few carrots for service, and then it’s back to Test Kitchen for final prep. Staff arrive. They’re interns and college students and servers on their nights off. Because Test Kitchen only opens every other week or so, Vincent is the sole full-timer in the house.

That staff transience makes family meal a get to know you affair. Tonight, Vincent lays out a series of styrofoam Chinese takeout containers from down the street, and we pass the fried rice, sweet and sour chicken, and noodles around and ask where everyone lives and what everyone really does for a living, before various meetings break out around the restaurant. FOH staff huddle with Vincent near the first floor communal table, running through the guest list and seating plan. Cooks gather round the pass to hear from Kwame. Mya pulls the bartender aside to explain where she’s stashed what grog.

When I ask Kwame what he misses about being back home in D.C., and in his own kitchen at Kith / Kin, right away he says his staff. Later that night, around mid-morning in the District, Wyclef orders breakfast at the restaurant. He's been staying at the Intercontinental, and Kwame’s staff uses their edible printer to put the singer’s face onto his own cappuccino, and pic after pic comes through on WhatsApp. He won’t show me everything they’re saying, but I assume it’s hilarious.

The first guests arrive twenty minutes before the ticketed time of 7PM. The Beastie Boys’s Girls comes on loud, and Mya laughs at Vincent, “What is this? I said like 90s, but GOOD.” He runs upstairs and pretty soon the volume’s down and Outcast’s Elevators (Me and You) is rolling slowly out the speakers.

Service is smooth. Two back to back seatings of 40 people each, all working off one set menu with very little variation makes for a relatively straightforward rhythm for the kitchen. Vincent expedites, murmuring “Service. Service.” into his headset and methodically crossing out dishes table by table with red x’s on a sheet taped to the pass.  The service bar is basically a card table with a cooler beneath it and some backup mixers stored in reach-ins nearby. 

Guests are Hong Kongers, so it’s hard to tell who’s an expat, or local, or just passing through like Kwame and Mya. There are red blazers and orange loafers. One couple brings their own bottles for corkage, and takes pictures of them on the table to show their wine friends their superior subs. A guest pigeonholes Mya to inform her that his wife isn’t really into coke, and doesn’t want him doing coke, but he has coke, and would Mya and Kwame like some coke? His wife looks on, unimpressed. Mya graciously declines.

The menu for the evening: