L’altro is a fairly new Italian restaurant in Hong Kong, which was just opened late last year in Central distrait on Hong Kong Island. The Executive chef, Philippe Léveillé, has been awarded two Michelin stars since 2001, a status which he has retained for the past ten years in his Italian restaurant Miramonti L’altro located at Brescia, Italy.
The first time I visited L’altro was in September last year shortly after they opened. The food was good and showed good potential as a new fine dining restaurant in Hong Kong, but as any new restaurants, there was a few rough edges that needed to be worked on. Chef Philippe Léveillé was at the restaurant at that time, but he has gone back to Italy subsequently. The usual resident Chef de Cuisine is Chef Antimo Maria Merone. Although, chef Philippe Léveillé is said to come back regularly to Hong Kong to work on the evolving menu and check on the standard of cuisine.
Sine the first time I visited L’altro, they have been awarded one Michelin star in the 2013 Michelin Guide for Hong Kong and Macau. I revisited them early this month, and I am happy to report that their standard of cooking has kept up even though Chef Philippe Léveillé was not there at the helm and they have actually manged to improved on many of the rough edges since the first time I went there.
Both food and service were very good. They also have a pretty knowledgeable sommelier, and they carry a fine selection of wines. We had the 7 course degustation menu. They had no official wine paring for the menu, but I asked the sommelier to do a paring for me. The selection of wine he chose to pair were all very good and matched the menu well. However, since there was no official wine pairing, all the wines paired were sold by the glass, which has 2 problems. The volume of wine was quite a lot. It was alright for me, but I can see that a lot of people who cannot drink a lot will have difficulty drinking 6 to 7 large glasses of wine. The total price for the wines was also quite a lot, came out to be close to $1,000. Which of course compared to restaurants with official wine paring, would be quite expensive.
Overall, I had a great time there second time round, and I would have no hesitation in visiting them again.
All photos were shot in RAW with Canon 5D Mark III with Canon EF 50mm f1.4 USM. The RAW files were processed with Capture One Pro with further processing with Photoshop CS5 before output to the web.
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