Amber held two Michelin stars for sixteen consecutive years before receiving its third in 2025. The Green Star arrived in 2022 and has not left. Chef Richard Ekkebus closed the restaurant in 2019, eliminated dairy and gluten entirely, and reopened it as a different argument — one that French haute cuisine has been needing someone to make for decades. Three stars and a conscience, on the seventh floor of Central.

First, The Ceiling


Four thousand golden rods hang above sixty diners on the seventh floor of Central.


The entrance to Amber is on the seventh floor of The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, in the heart of Central's financial and luxury retail district — a hotel embedded in a shopping complex, on a floor where two other Michelin-starred restaurants also operate, in one of the most concentrated and cosmopolitan square miles in the world. None of this prepares you for the room. Designed by Adam Tihany of New York — first in 2005, then reimagined in the same collaboration in 2019 — the dining room is built around a ceiling installation of several thousand bronze and gold rods suspended from above, creating a canopy that at different times of day, and from different angles of the room, reads as a forest of falling light. At night the rods radiate a warm gold glow across the walnut panelling and the sixty seats below, producing the specific quality of amber light that gave the restaurant its name. You look up and the ceiling is the first thing the room makes its argument with.


That argument — the specific aesthetic position of the room — was updated in 2019, when Ekkebus closed the restaurant for four months and rebuilt it from the kitchen outward. The original Amber had expressed a masculine elegance: white tablecloths, ornate chandeliers, the confident formality of a room that knew what fine dining looked like. The new Amber, which Tihany describes as light, curvaceous, and less formal than its predecessor, replaced white linen with bare wood, removed the chandeliers in favour of the rod ceiling, and introduced curved walls in warm champagne tones, organic sculptures inspired by the urban landscape of Hong Kong, and an intimate semi-circular wine bar — Somm — adjacent to the dining room. The transformation was total. The room communicates something different now: not the authority of established haute cuisine, but the confidence of a kitchen that has chosen to rewrite the rules rather than inherit them.


The restaurant serves no more than sixty diners per service. The team numbers seventy-two. The ratio — more than one staff member per guest — is not an operational luxury but a statement about the quality of attention the experience requires. Amber does not feel crowded when fully booked, which it always is. The soaring ceilings, the natural materials, the calibrated lighting, and the specific spacing between tables all work toward the same end: to create, inside a hotel at the commercial heart of one of the most pressured cities in the world, a space that feels genuinely apart from it.

The Moment Everything Changed


In 2019 Ekkebus closed the restaurant and eliminated dairy and gluten entirely.


The decision that defines Amber's current identity — and that separates it from every other three-star restaurant in Hong Kong — was made over a period of years and executed in a single act of institutional courage. Ekkebus had been moving the cooking away from the heaviest conventions of French haute cuisine gradually across the preceding decade: reducing butter quantities, experimenting with plant-based replacements for cream and milk, shifting the centre of gravity of each plate toward the ingredient itself rather than the sauce surrounding it. But it was the act of putting the numbers on a tray that crystallised what the kitchen needed to do.


He measured the total quantity of butter, cream, and milk used across a complete Amber tasting menu. He placed the equivalent raw quantities on a tray and showed it to his team. The question he asked was direct: if you were shown this tray before the meal, would you still want to eat it? The unanimous answer was no. The restaurant closed in late 2018. When it reopened in May 2019, the menu contained no dairy, no gluten, and no refined sugar — fifty new dishes, rebuilt from the foundation of French technique without its most convenient and most relied-upon enriching agents. The kitchen spent four months finding alternatives for every preparation that butter and cream had made possible: cauliflower braised in coconut oil and deglazed in almond milk; linseed oil used where a cream sauce would have been; soy, rice, grain, and nut milks standing in for every dairy application; fermentation and seaweed replacing salt's blunter applications.


"Restaurant comes from the French word restorer, which means to maintain. We eat to maintain our form, our energy. Fine dining has missed the point — it has stood for overeating and expanding the waistline, and we need to change that. Indulgence can be something different."

RICHARD EKKEBUS, CULINARY DIRECTOR, AMBER


The result of the four months of development was not a compromise between the cooking Amber had always done and a restricted ingredient list. It was, in Ekkebus's own assessment, better cooking: flavour profiles more distinctive and more individual than dairy enrichment had allowed, ingredients that could be tasted for what they were rather than through a cream-softened medium, and a dining experience that left guests feeling energised rather than satiated into inaction. The third Michelin star, which arrived in 2025 after sixteen years at two, was the Guide's formal agreement with this assessment. The Green Star — awarded since 2022 for the kitchen's commitment to sustainability, which extends across the hotel's entire operation — was the recognition of everything that preceded the cooking itself.

THe Chef


Dutch. Trained under Gagnaire, Passard and Savoy. In Hong Kong since 2005. Not leaving.


Richard Ekkebus was born in the Netherlands and began his formal culinary training there under Michelin-starred chefs Hans Snijders and Robert Kranenborg. He won the prestigious Golden Chefs Hat for Young Chef of the Year while still in the Netherlands — an early signal of the specific combination of technical ambition and competitive seriousness that would define his career. He left the country at seventeen and has not returned to live there since.


The European formation that followed the Netherlands was one of the most intensive available in the 1990s: Pierre Gagnaire, whose kitchen in Saint-Étienne and then Paris was rethinking the relationship between French classicism and creative licence; Alain Passard at L'Arpège, who would eventually remove meat from his menu entirely and make vegetables the primary subject of three-star French cooking; Guy Savoy, whose Paris restaurant maintained a different register — generosity, abundance, the refined pleasures of classical preparation executed at the highest standard. The three kitchens are not a coherent ideological programme but they produced, in the person who worked through all three of them, a chef with a wide range of reference and a formed sense of what French cooking could be beyond its most conservative expressions.


  • (Netherlands) Snijders and Kranenborg, Golden Chefs Hat — The foundation: classical training under two Michelin-starred kitchens in his home country. The early signal of ambition and precision. Left at seventeen for France and has not looked back.


  • (Paris) Pierre Gagnaire — The kitchen that was systematically dismantling the conventions of classical French cooking and rebuilding them according to a more personal, more combinatory logic. The education in what French cooking could be when it refused to remain inside its own received categories.


  • (Paris) Alain Passard, L'Arpège — The chef who would eventually redirect his three-star restaurant entirely toward vegetables, who made the quality of the ingredient the primary subject rather than the technique applied to it. The sensibility that anticipates everything Ekkebus would later do with dairy-free cooking: less obscuring the ingredient, more presenting it.


  • (Paris) Guy Savoy — The counter-education: generous, classical, technically immaculate, the pleasures of French cuisine fully expressed rather than deconstructed. The understanding of what the tradition can do at its best, which provides the necessary reference for any subsequent departure from it.


  • (Mauritius / Barbados) Royal Palm Hotel · Sandy Lane —  Executive chef roles in luxury hotel contexts, building the operational experience and the sourcing networks — across both hemispheres, across the full range of tropical and European ingredients — that a hotel restaurant of Amber's complexity requires. The global ingredient literacy that gives the Amber menu its specific reach.


  • (Hong Kong) Amber, 2005-present — The two decades in which everything accumulated becomes something singular. The Dutch chef who left the Netherlands at seventeen, trained in Paris, cooked in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, arrived in the crossroads of East and West, and built a case — across twenty years and three Michelin stars — for what French cooking can be when it takes its ingredients as seriously as its technique.


Ekkebus has described Hong Kong as the city where he has spent more of his life than anywhere else — more than the Netherlands, more than France, more than anywhere the formation took him. His relationship with the city is not the expatriate relationship of a chef who arrived to cook for a foreign audience in a foreign place. He describes Cantonese food as the best cuisine in the world. He has spent two decades sourcing from the farms, fishermen, and producers of the South China Sea region and the wider Asian world. The cooking at Amber is French in its technique and global in its ingredient intelligence, and the specific perspective that has emerged from those two decades in this specific city — the crossroads between East and West that Hong Kong uniquely is — is irreducible to any category but the one the restaurant occupies alone.

The Cuisine


French technique, no dairy, no gluten — and a sourcing philosophy that changes the argument.


The menu at Amber is not vegetarian, and it is not attempting to be. It remains a French tasting menu built around the finest available produce — seafood, poultry, meat, fungi, vegetables — treated with the classical and post-classical French techniques that Ekkebus's formation provided. What changed in 2019 is not the ambition or the structure of the cooking but its medium: the enriching agents through which French haute cuisine has traditionally worked — butter, cream, milk — are gone, replaced by plant-based alternatives that have been developed, tested, and refined over years until they do what butter and cream did without requiring what butter and cream require in their production.


The practical outcomes of this are twofold and both unexpected. First, the cooking is technically more demanding: producing the specific richness and textural complexity of a French tasting menu without dairy requires more creativity, more knowledge of alternative ingredients, and more precision in their application than simply reaching for the butter pot. Every sauce, every emulsion, every cream, every enriched preparation has had to be rebuilt. The intellectual difficulty of the constraint has produced, in the kitchen's best dishes, a specificity and originality that the dairy-supplemented versions did not always achieve. Second, the cooking is lighter: guests who have eaten at Amber both before and after 2019 consistently describe the post-dairy version as leaving them energised rather than heavy, and as producing a clarity of individual flavour — each ingredient tasted for what it distinctly is — that the richer medium obscured.


The sourcing that underlies the menu operates according to a consistent philosophy: the best available produce, sought globally but prioritising the region, harvested at peak quality, used with the reverence that the best produce commands. The aka uni (red sea urchin) comes from Hokkaido. The blue lobster comes from Brittany. The amadai (tilefish) is line-caught in Japan and delivered the same day. The Ping Yuen chicken is a heritage breed from local Hong Kong farms. Tasmanian truffles appear in season. The menu changes seasonally, with ingredients rotated in and out as their optimal window arrives and passes. The kitchen sources within 500 kilometres of Hong Kong where possible and extends globally when the specific quality required cannot be found closer. No ingredient is present by convention or habit. Every ingredient is present because it is the best available expression of what that position in the meal requires.

The Menu


The dishes — what arrives and what each one has to say for itself.


The menu changes seasonally. The following represent the preparations that most consistently define an Amber experience — the courses that appear across different menus and different seasons as the clearest expressions of the kitchen's philosophy.


The Signature — Hokkaido aka uni, lobster jelly, cauliflower, Schrenki-Dauricus caviar, seaweed waffle — the dish that has been on the menu since 2005


The sea urchin dish is Amber's most celebrated and most discussed single preparation — present in some form since the restaurant opened, surviving the dairy-free relaunch in a rebuilt version that Ekkebus argues is better than the original. The current iteration: a cauliflower mousse made without dairy (cauliflower braised in coconut oil, deglazed in almond milk, combined with whipped soy cream) topped with the intensely briny, creamy aka uni from Hokkaido, a clear lobster jelly, a quenelle of Schrenki-Dauricus caviar, and a seaweed waffle that provides the crisp textural counterpoint the richness of everything above it requires. Each component has its own distinct character; the dish is the argument that they make together. It is the first statement of what the kitchen believes about the relationship between luxury ingredient and intelligent restraint.


The Local — Aka amadai — tilefish, line-caught in Japan, delivered the same day, served with bouillabaisse


The amadai preparation is the course that most directly demonstrates Ekkebus's position at the intersection of French technique and Asian ingredient intelligence. The tilefish — line-caught off the Japanese coast and transported to Hong Kong within the same day — is served with a bouillabaisse sauce of classical French authority, the Provençal seafood broth whose specific depth of flavour requires both the fish stock base and the specific seasoning that the French tradition has developed for it over centuries. The Michelin inspector who visited found the kitchen invited guests into the kitchen for this course in the full-experience menu — a detail that communicates the kitchen's confidence in the preparation and its desire to make the sourcing and the skill visible rather than invisible. A painted representation of the amadai was on the kitchen wall. The fish matters to the kitchen. The kitchen wants the guest to know that.


The Heritage — Ping Yuen chicken — local heritage breed, roasted, served with tarragon mousse and chicken jus


The Ping Yuen chicken is a heritage breed sourced from local Hong Kong farms — a specific decision in a tasting menu whose other proteins travel from Japan and Brittany and Tasmania, that grounds the menu in its local geography and demonstrates the sourcing philosophy's commitment to proximity as well as quality. The preparation is classical in its structure: the chicken roasted to the specific point at which the skin crisps and the flesh retains its moisture, served with a mousse flavoured with tarragon — the aromatic herb that the French kitchen has always understood as the natural partner of good poultry — and a chicken jus of the depth that the breed's specific quality makes possible. The dish communicates, without ceremony, that this is a kitchen that takes the chicken as seriously as the sea urchin.


The Brittany — Blue lobster from Brittany — one of the world's most intensely flavoured crustaceans, prepared in the French tradition


The Breton blue lobster (homard bleu) is among the most prized crustaceans in the world of French cooking — a species whose slower growth in the cold waters of the Brittany coast produces a density of flavour and a firmness of texture that the warmer-water varieties cannot match. Ekkebus sources it seasonally and builds preparations around it that use the dairy-free principles without the lobster feeling in any way deprived of the richness the ingredient deserves. The specific preparation varies seasonally, but the fundamental argument remains consistent: a lobster of this quality, treated with French technique and the specific plant-based enrichments the kitchen has developed, needs nothing else. The restraint is not a limitation. It is the correct frame for a very good thing.


The Game — Game and seasonal protein — the meat course that changes with the European hunting season


Amber's meat course tracks the European hunting calendar with a fidelity that reflects both Ekkebus's classical French training and the specific quality of game that the continent's northern forests produce in autumn and winter. Roe deer, venison, pigeon, and the seasonal French game birds appear in their proper seasons — not as gestures toward European provenance but because these are the specific proteins at their peak in these months and because the French culinary tradition has developed the preparations that suit them more fully than any other. The foie gras preparations that have been part of Amber's history since its opening appear in various configurations; the kitchen's approach to this most controversial of luxury ingredients reflects Ekkebus's continued engagement with the ethical dimensions of ingredient sourcing, even for products whose culinary logic is difficult to dispute.


The Ferment — The fermented preparations — jars of house-made ferments visible in the kitchen, integrated throughout the menu


One of the details noted by the Michelin inspector who visited Amber after the third star was awarded was the view from the kitchen pass: jars of fermented ingredients and seasonings, meticulously labelled and organised, visible from the table set up for the full-experience kitchen visit. Fermentation is the technique that replaced salt as the primary seasoning agent in the dairy-free kitchen — a deeper, more complex, more ingredient-specific way of adding the depth and the umami that salt and acid provide more bluntly. Lacto-fermented broths, fermented condiments, fermented sauces and seasoning components appear throughout the menu in preparations that demonstrate the kitchen's mastery of a technique that has required years to develop. The fermentation programme is one of the most visible signs of how seriously the kitchen has rebuilt its toolkit since 2019.


The Kitchen — The full experience — the course served in the kitchen itself, available on the extended menu


The full-experience menu at Amber includes a course served in the kitchen itself: guests are invited through the dining room and along a corridor decorated with photographs of Ekkebus alongside the chefs whose kitchens made him — into the kitchen, where they stand at a high table around the pass while a course is served directly in the room where it was cooked. The Michelin inspector describes the energy of the young kitchen team, the organisation of the fermentation jars, the painted amadai on the wall, and the specific electricity of a team operating at three-star level in plain sight. The kitchen course is available specifically on the extended menu and should be chosen for a first visit: it changes the relationship between the guest and the cooking from reception to something closer to participation, and the cooking at this level warrants that proximity.


The Dessert — Dairy-free pastry — the most technically demanding element of the kitchen's philosophical commitment


French pastry without butter, cream, or gluten is the most technically demanding consequence of the 2019 relaunch, and the one most likely to produce scepticism in advance and surprise on delivery. The pastry programme at Amber has been rebuilt using agave, maple, honey, and raw sugar in place of refined sugar; puffed rice, rice flour, and other gluten-free bases in place of wheat; and plant-based fats and emulsifiers in place of butter and cream. Puffed rice with sake lees sorbet and textures of raspberry; milk tea parfait layered with coffee cream (made without dairy); the specific bitterness of dark chocolate as the menu's final note — these are the preparations that demonstrate most clearly that constraint, correctly applied, produces specificity rather than deprivation. Guests who expect the dessert course to be the weakest element of the dairy-free meal are consistently the most surprised.

Things Worth Knowing


The details that make this the most intellectually distinctive three-star in Hong Kong.


Three Stars Since 2025 — Sixteen Years at Two Before That


Amber received two Michelin stars in the Guide's inaugural 2009 Hong Kong and Macau edition and held them for sixteen consecutive years before the third star arrived in 2025. The sixteen years at two stars is not a story of a restaurant that came close and never got there — it is a story of a restaurant that spent sixteen years building the argument that would eventually compel the Guide to move. The dairy-free relaunch of 2019 was the decisive development: the third star is the formal recognition of what that relaunch produced. The Green Star, held since 2022, is the recognition of everything the kitchen does before the cooking begins.


The Green Star Is the Third Star's Equal, Not Its Footnote


The Michelin Green Star, held by Amber since 2022, recognises restaurants that are leading the way in sustainable gastronomy — not simply sourcing responsibly but actively setting an example that the industry can follow. For Amber, this recognition covers the dairy-free kitchen, the elimination of gluten and refined sugar, the reduction of meat as the menu's primary protein, the sourcing within 500 kilometres of Hong Kong where possible, the use of sustainably harvested seafood and Fair Trade agricultural commodities, the introduction of an anaerobic digester system to process food waste, the replacement of single-use plastics across the restaurant, and the hotel-wide sustainability programme that Ekkebus leads as Director of Culinary Operations. The Green Star is not a secondary achievement. It is the context without which the three stars are incomplete.


The Seventh Floor Holds Eight Michelin Stars in Total


The seventh floor of The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong contains three Michelin-starred restaurants: Amber (three stars), Sushi Shikon (three stars, directly opposite), and Kappo Rin (one star). The total of eight stars on a single hotel floor is, as the hotel notes, an extraordinary concentration of recognised culinary excellence — and is worth understanding as context for what kind of environment Amber operates within. Sushi Shikon brings the precision of Edomae sushi to the same floor where Amber operates its dairy-free French tasting menu. The contrast between the two three-star restaurants on the same floor — different traditions, different philosophical orientations, the same standard — is itself an argument about what Hong Kong is as a gastronomic city.


The Full Experience Menu — Book It, Including the Kitchen Course


Amber offers multiple menu lengths. The full experience menu — the extended tasting progression that includes the kitchen course — is the version that communicates everything the restaurant is trying to do. The kitchen course, in which guests are invited to the pass to receive a preparation directly in the room where it was made, changes the nature of the evening in ways that cannot be fully described in advance and must be experienced to be understood. For a first visit, there is no reason to choose a shorter menu. The full experience is not an exhausting quantity of food — the dairy-free kitchen keeps the menu lighter than its course count might suggest — and it includes the specific element that makes Amber distinctive from every other tasting-menu restaurant in the city.


The Food Will Not Make You Feel Heavy — This Is Intentional and Remarkable


The most practically surprising characteristic of a meal at Amber for first-time visitors familiar with French haute cuisine is how they feel when it ends: energised rather than satiated, clear-headed rather than dulled by richness, and genuinely ready to continue an evening rather than in need of immediate horizontal rest. This is not an accident of portion size — the menu is substantial and the courses are generously composed. It is the direct consequence of the dairy-free kitchen's primary practical achievement: a tasting menu that delivers the full sensory complexity and pleasure of French fine dining without the physiological afterweight that butter and cream produce. Ekkebus set out specifically to change this. He succeeded. Arrive expecting to feel good when it's over.


The Somm Wine Bar Is Adjacent — Arrive Early and Use It


The 2019 redesign added Somm — a semi-circular wine bar adjacent to the dining room, with dark wood and a rich red palette that deliberately contrasts with the warmer, lighter tones of Amber itself. Arriving thirty minutes before the reservation to drink at Somm is the correct way to begin an Amber evening: the space allows a transition from the city outside to the specific atmosphere of the restaurant, a glass of champagne or white Burgundy provides the appropriate introduction to the palate, and the proximity to the dining room means the transition when the table is ready is smooth rather than abrupt. Somm is also available after dinner for wines by the glass across a serious and well-curated list.


Dietary Requirements Are Fully Accommodated — Including Vegan and Vegetarian


The dairy-free and gluten-free foundations of the Amber menu make it, unusually for a three-star restaurant, substantially accommodating to a wide range of dietary requirements. A full vegetarian tasting menu is available alongside the main progression. Vegan adaptations are possible with advance communication. Guests with genuine allergies should communicate them when booking and confirm at the table — the kitchen's practice of building menus from scratch rather than adapting a fixed programme makes genuine accommodation more feasible than at restaurants where the menu is set and substitutions represent departures from an established sequence. The specific combination of French three-star execution and dairy-free cooking is itself a demonstration that dietary philosophy and gastronomic ambition are not in opposition.


Central Is the City's Most Accessible District — No Excuse Not to Explore Before


The Landmark Mandarin Oriental is at the absolute geographic and commercial centre of Hong Kong Island, surrounded by the IFC Mall, Chater Garden, the HSBC headquarters by Norman Foster, and the elevated walkway system that connects the Central district's major buildings above street level. The Star Ferry terminal is a ten-minute walk. The Peak Tram is fifteen minutes on foot. Lan Kwai Fong, the concentrated bar and restaurant district, is five minutes. Coming for an Amber dinner and arriving thirty minutes early to walk the elevated walkways, visit the Chater Garden, or have a drink in the Mandarin Oriental's Clipper Lounge is the correct approach to the evening — the restaurant is at the heart of the most interesting neighbourhood in Hong Kong, and using the city before sitting down does the meal a service.

The place


Central — and what it means to cook French food at the crossroads of East and West.


The Central district of Hong Kong Island is, by most measures, the most concentrated expression of global financial and cultural capital in Asia. The towers of the International Finance Centre and Exchange Square define the harbour skyline alongside Jardine House and the HSBC Building — Norman Foster's structural poem of exposed tubes and suspension, completed in 1985 and still one of the most technically and aesthetically extraordinary office buildings in the world. The elevated walkway system that connects the major buildings of Central and Admiralty allows movement between a dozen blocks of the district without descending to street level — a response to the density and climate of the city that has created, incidentally, a continuous public space of considerable sociological interest, used daily by migrant workers on their days off as a network of outdoor rooms above the city's streets.


Queen's Road Central, where The Landmark stands, is the commercial heart of this district — luxury retail at street level, financial institutions above, the hotel embedded in the shopping complex in a configuration that makes complete sense only in Hong Kong, where the concentration of wealth and the concentration of commercial activity in the same square metres is not a tension but a fact of the city's organisation. The Landmark itself is a retail and hotel complex whose tenants include most of the world's significant luxury brands and whose hotel, The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, occupies a position at its heart that the building's architecture both supports and obscures: you have to know it is there to find it, which is one of the ways that the hotel communicates its own quality of attention.


Ekkebus has been specific and repeated in his description of Hong Kong as the ideal location for the cooking he does at Amber. The city is the crossroads between East and West in a way that no other city quite matches: the British colonial history overlaid on Chinese culture, the concentration of global trade routes that makes the best produce of multiple hemispheres available with a logistical efficiency that no single-continent city can rival, and the specific Cantonese culinary culture — which Ekkebus describes as the world's best — that provides a daily, living education in what the best ingredients properly treated can achieve. The amadai from Japan, the blue lobster from Brittany, the Ping Yuen chicken from the New Territories: these are the ingredients of a kitchen that has been positioned, geographically and philosophically, to use everything the world offers. The city makes the menu possible, and the menu is the city's argument made edible.

Before You Arrive


Everything practical, plainly told


  • Address: 7/F, The Landmark Mandarin Oriental, 15 Queen's Road Central, Central, Hong Kong. The hotel is inside The Landmark shopping complex — enter via the Landmark atrium (accessible from Queen's Road Central or Pedder Street) and take the lifts to the seventh floor. The Landmark MTR station (exit E) connects directly to the complex underground. The entrance to the hotel is clearly marked from the atrium but the first visit benefits from arriving a few minutes early to orient.


  • Getting There: MTR: Central station or Landmark station (exit E on the Central-to-Admiralty walkway) — both connect directly to The Landmark complex. Taxi from Tsim Sha Tsui: approximately 15–20 minutes via the Cross-Harbour Tunnel. Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central Pier, then a 10-minute walk. From the Peak Tram: a 15-minute downhill walk through the Central-Mid-Levels escalator system. No car is necessary; the MTR is the most reliable approach for punctuality.


  • Reservations: The restaurant manages its own bookings through the Mandarin Oriental website and by phone (+852 2132 0066). Amber is one of the most sought-after reservations in Hong Kong — book at minimum four to six weeks in advance for weekends, two to three weeks for weekdays. International visitors can also access reservations through concierge networks and booking services. Communicate dietary requirements, menu length preference, and the request for the kitchen course (full experience) at the time of booking. Confirm the reservation 48 hours before arrival.


  • Opening Hours: Lunch: Monday to Friday, 12:00–14:30. Dinner: Monday to Saturday, 18:30–22:00. Closed Sunday. Note: the Michelin Guide entry as of mid-2026 indicates the restaurant may be temporarily closed — confirm current opening status and hours directly with the hotel before booking, as Amber has undergone periodic temporary closures for refurbishment and relaunches.


  • The Menu: Multiple tasting menu lengths available, including a full experience menu that incorporates the kitchen course. A vegetarian tasting menu is available alongside the standard progression. All menus are dairy-free and gluten-free. Vegan adaptation available with advance notice. The menu changes seasonally. Prix fixe dinner menus are approximately HK$1,600–2,600 per person depending on the number of courses selected; confirm current pricing when booking.


  • Payment: All major credit cards accepted. Budget approximately HK$1,800–2,500 per person for dinner with wine pairing; HK$1,200–1,600 without. Wine pairing is available and recommended — the sommelier programme is serious, with a list that extends across Champagne, Burgundy, and the broader French canon alongside wines from the natural and biodynamic producers that align with the kitchen's sustainability philosophy. Lunch is considerably more accessible in price.


  • Dress Code: Smart casual to formal. The room's post-2019 aesthetic is warmer and more approachable than the original Amber, and the dress code reflects this: jackets are not required but are entirely appropriate, and the specific character of the occasion warrants clothes that communicate some understanding of where you are. The Mandarin Oriental clientele tends toward business-smart at lunch and elevated casual to formal at dinner. Casual clothing (shorts, sportswear, casual trainers) is out of register with what the restaurant and the experience are.


  • Language: English is the primary language of service, spoken fluently by a team that is international in composition and specifically trained in explaining the dairy-free philosophy, the sourcing of each ingredient, and the preparation of each course. Guests who ask questions will receive substantive and engaged answers — the kitchen's philosophy is transparent by design and the service team is equipped to communicate it. Cantonese and Mandarin service is also available.


  • Combining with Hong Kong: An Amber dinner anchors a day in Central. Before: the HSBC Building exterior; the Tai Kwun heritage arts centre in the former Central Police Station compound (a ten-minute walk); the elevated walkway system to Admiralty; the Chater Garden. After: Lan Kwai Fong for drinks if the evening warrants continuation; the Star Ferry back to Kowloon for the harbour crossing at night. The following morning: the Peak Tram and Victoria Peak for the definitive Hong Kong skyline view before 9am, when the crowds have not yet arrived.
Things Worth Knowing Before You go


The notes that belong in no other section


  • Book the full experience menu and request the kitchen course — this is the version of Amber that justifies the evening — The full experience menu, with its kitchen course in which guests are invited to the pass, is the version of Amber that communicates everything the restaurant is doing and why. The kitchen course is not theatrical — it is the logical consequence of a kitchen whose philosophy is transparent and whose team operates at a level of precision and collective seriousness that deserves to be witnessed. Guests who choose a shorter menu to manage cost or caution often describe, having spoken with guests who chose the full experience, that they made the wrong decision. Book the full experience. The kitchen course is the meal's most memorable element for many visitors, and it is available only on this menu.


  • Arrive with curiosity about the dairy-free philosophy, not scepticism — the food will answer the scepticism before you can — Visitors who arrive at Amber already persuaded that a three-star French menu without butter and cream must be a diminished version of the real thing will have their position corrected during the sea urchin course and dismantled entirely by dessert. The practical argument for the dairy-free kitchen — that it produces cleaner flavours, more energised guests, and more specifically distinct preparations — is not a theoretical position. It is the lived experience of eating at the restaurant. Arrive open to the possibility that the constraint has produced something the unconstrained version could not. The meal will do the rest of the arguing.


  • Use Somm before dinner and after — the wine bar is one of the best spaces on the floor — The semi-circular wine bar adjacent to Amber is not an overflow waiting area for guests whose tables are not ready. It is a designed destination with a serious list, a specific aesthetic (dark wood and rich red, deliberately contrasting with the warmer Amber dining room), and a quality of attention from the sommelier team that reflects the kitchen's standards. Arriving thirty minutes before the reservation and drinking well at Somm is the correct way to begin; returning after dinner for a glass of something from the natural wine selection or the Champagne list is the correct way to extend it. The evening at Amber benefits from a slower pace than the reservation alone provides.


  • Pay attention to the fermented preparations — they are the most technically distinctive element of the post-2019 kitchen — The jars of fermented ingredients visible in the kitchen during the kitchen course visit are not props or decorative elements. They represent the practical backbone of the dairy-free kitchen's flavour programme: the house-made ferments — lacto-fermented broths, fermented seasoning components, fermented condiments — that replaced salt's blunter applications and provide the depth and complexity that butter and cream achieved through different means. Guests who identify the ferment notes in various preparations during the meal — the specific acidity and depth that fermentation produces, distinct from the acid brightness of vinegar and the roundness of cream — are receiving the meal's most technically significant dimension. It rewards attention.


  • The sea urchin is the meal's first real statement — receive it as such — The aka uni with lobster jelly, cauliflower, and caviar is Amber's most celebrated single preparation and has been, in various forms, the restaurant's signature since 2005. Its survival and transformation across the dairy-free relaunch — rebuilding the cauliflower base entirely without cream, developing the whipped soy cream that replaced it — is the most concentrated single expression of the kitchen's philosophical argument. The dish is present on every menu in some form. Knowing its history, and understanding that the version you are receiving in 2026 is the product of twenty years of continuous refinement and one complete rebuilding, allows you to receive it as the statement it is rather than simply as an excellent first course.


  • The Green Stars matters — understand what it represents before you eat — The Michelin Green Star, held by Amber since 2022, is not a secondary recognition that accompanies the main stars and can be treated as background. It is the formal acknowledgment of a programme of change that has been building for a decade: the elimination of dairy and gluten, the sourcing philosophy that prioritises proximity and sustainability, the anaerobic digester and the plastic reduction programme, the hotel-wide food waste management that Ekkebus leads as Director of Culinary Operations. Arriving at Amber understanding that the kitchen is making an argument about the future of fine dining — not just the pleasure of the present meal — changes the relationship between the guest and what the kitchen sends. The food earns the Green Star. The Green Star frames the food.


  • This restaurant is best understood as a position, not as a restaurant — A restaurant is a place where food is prepared and served. Amber is also that, and it is three Michelin stars, and it is a team of seventy-two serving sixty guests per service. But the specific thing that makes Amber unlike every other three-star restaurant in Hong Kong is that it is a deliberate intellectual and ethical position, argued through the medium of French haute cuisine, about what fine dining should be, what it owes the people who eat it, and what it owes the planet that provides its ingredients. Ekkebus has been making this argument since before the Guide gave him the stars to make it from. The third star is the recognition. The food is the argument. Arriving as a guest at this restaurant requires, as it does at every restaurant that is truly serious, the willingness to receive the argument it is making. Amber's is worth receiving.

Why This Restaurant


What Amber actually is


In a city with seven three-Michelin-star restaurants — Cantonese banquets, Edomae sushi, classical French, modern European, and the specific hybrid territory that Hong Kong uniquely produces — Amber occupies a position that none of the others claim. It is the only restaurant on the three-star list that has also earned the Green Star. It is the only restaurant in Hong Kong's starred world that has undertaken the kind of wholesale institutional reinvention that the 2019 relaunch represents. And it is the only three-star French restaurant in the city whose defining characteristic is not the quality of its butter sauce but the specific intelligence of its argument against it.


The sixteen years at two stars that preceded the third were not a failure to reach the top but a demonstration of the standard the Guide requires before it moves. Two stars for sixteen consecutive years in one of the world's most competitive dining cities is not a consolation. It is a record of a restaurant operating, year after year, at a level that the most demanding assessors in the most demanding context judged to be exceptional. The third star, when it arrived, was not a surprise to the people who had been eating at Amber. It was the overdue formalisation of something that the guests, the critics, and the kitchen had understood for years.


A Dutch chef who left the Netherlands at seventeen, trained in three of the most formative kitchens of the Parisian tradition, cooked in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, arrived in Hong Kong in 2005, and spent twenty years building a case — in a room above a shopping mall, on a floor shared with a sushi counter and a kappo dining room — for a French cuisine without dairy, built from sustainably sourced ingredients, that leaves its guests feeling better than they did when they arrived. This is what three Michelin stars and a Green Star look like when they mean something.


The Green Star is not the lesser recognition. In the context of what Ekkebus has been doing for a decade — the anaerobic digester, the plastic elimination, the 500-kilometre sourcing radius, the dairy-free kitchen, the hotel-wide sustainability programme — it is the recognition that the industry most needs someone to receive, publicly and at the highest level, so that other kitchens understand what is being asked of them. Ekkebus said years before the Green Star existed that if a restaurant at the top sets the example, it trickles through to the bottom. The Green Star is the confirmation that the example has been set. The tasting menu is what happens when someone who has been thinking about the future of food for twenty years — about what it owes to diners, to farmers, to animals, to the planet — is also one of the best chefs in Asia.


Come for the sea urchin. Come because the room is extraordinary. Come because a meal that does not make you feel heavy afterwards is, in itself, an argument about what a three-star meal can be. Come, most importantly, because Amber is one of the restaurants in the world — they are not many — where eating is also thinking, where the pleasure and the question are the same thing, and where the kitchen's conviction is present in every dish as clearly as its technique. Arrive curious. Leave persuaded.