How we source

The buying is half the cooking.

A short walk, a long memory.

Two buyers, one ferment shelf, and a list of growers we have kept for years.

Buy close, cook plainly, season with patience. The grower does most of the work before we ever light the wok.

The Chairman keeps a short walk and a long memory. Before the city wakes our buyers cross the harbour to the wet markets and the New Territories farms, then carry back baskets of whatever the growers cut that day. We do not chase rare ingredients flown from far away. We chase the ones cut this morning by people we have known for years. The kitchen treats that produce plainly and with respect, the way a Cantonese home cook would, then sharpens it with house ferments, charcoal, and a clean hand. Nothing leaves the pass without a name behind it.

A wet market lane filling with produce before sunrise

Before the city wakes

The menu is decided at the stall, not the stove.

Our buyers split the wet market and the farm runs and send pictures back as the baskets fill. Only when everything is in does the kitchen write the day.

Named, not nameless

Every basket comes from a person we can call. If we cannot tell you who grew it, we do not serve it.

Plainly handled

We trim, we season, we apply fire, and then we stop. The point is the produce, not the technique.

Held by ferment

What the market gives in glut we preserve, so a summer chilli or a winter citrus can return out of season.

Yuen Ka-Ho grew up behind his grandmother's noodle stall in Sham Shui Po, learning to read produce before he could read a menu.

He spent a decade cooking through Guangzhou and Hong Kong banquet kitchens, then stepped back to do something quieter. He still walks the markets himself most mornings, because he believes the buying is half the cooking. His rule for the kitchen is simple: if a grower would not recognise their own vegetable on the plate, send it back.

Yuen Ka-Ho

Chef and Buyer

A slow road to a small room.

2006

Yuen takes over a worn shopfront in Central and starts buying for it himself each morning.

2011

The first ferment shelf is built, holding citrus peel and chilli from the year's best market runs.

2017

A standing arrangement with the Pat Heung growers fixes the daily vegetable buy at the source.

Now

A small room of forty seats, still cooking only what the morning allowed.

The few hands behind the buy and the wok.