Hugo’s Hong Kong

Freshness first at the hotel pass

Freshness comes before garnish for Eric Taluy, Chef at Hugo’s Hong Kong in Tsim Sha Tsui, where grain-fed beef, seasonal produce, and French technique set the kitchen’s pace. Taluy is French, but his working life here belongs to Hong Kong’s hotel dining network: he serves as Executive Chef at Hugo’s after an earlier post there as Executive Sous Chef, with previous Executive Sous Chef roles at Hyatt Regency and Le 188° Restaurant & Lounge. In 2021, he was Chef de Cuisine at Ami and Wood Ear, another Hong Kong kitchen within the same city rhythm of formal service and European cooking. At Hugo’s, the frame is clear. Traditional French cuisine carries a modern twist, but the method does not crowd the product. Taluy’s own rule is plain: "Freshness is paramount. In my opinion, grain-fed beef tastes better." The sentence sounds like a station note, not a manifesto. It explains why the kitchen’s best-known dishes stay close to their materials: lobster bisque with the shellfish still central, prime rib carved for thickness and heat, Caesar salad built at the table rather than hidden in the pass.

Trolleys, carving, and the five-course line

The room’s craft sits partly at the pass and partly beside the guest. Hugo’s works in the older discipline of guéridon service, using tableside trolleys for lobster bisque, Caesar salad, steak tartare, Dover sole meunière, lobster thermidor, crêpes Suzette, café diablo, cheeses, desserts, and carved meat. The gesture matters because it fixes timing in public: dressing emulsifies in view, flames take the pan, and roasted US rib of beef leaves the trolley in slices described as 3cm thick and 20cm long. Taluy’s Modern European range also appears in set forms. Chef Eric Taluy’s Tasting Menu is a farm-to-table five-course menu built around seasonal ingredients. In 2022, he made a French GourMay special four-course dinner menu, still within the same vocabulary of French foundation and restrained contemporary shaping. The restaurant’s winter cooking has held to that line with five-spiced foie gras terrine, gratinated French onion soup with black winter truffle, pan-seared New Zealand John Dory, US beef tournedos Rossini, and spiced red wine poached pear. These are not quiet plates, but they are legible ones.

An L-shaped room with the work in view

The room keeps its theater close to the craft. Chefs in white uniforms work in an open kitchen, while servers in earthy tweed jackets move the trolleys through an L-shaped dining room. Ornate mirrors, chandeliers, guns, shield plaques, and the armor-clad figure of Hugo at the entrance make the house feel less like a current fashion than a maintained habit. Hugo’s began in 1969 at Asia’s first Hyatt Regency on Nathan Road, closed with the original hotel’s demolition at the end of 2005, and returned in 2009 inside Hyatt Regency Hong Kong, Tsim Sha Tsui. That continuity gives the present room its charge. The old service pieces are not decoration alone; they are tools for a program built on carving, flambé, pouring, and mixing within arm’s reach.

The measure stays in the dish

Recognition has come in numbers rather than slogans: in 2024, Opinionated About Dining Top Restaurants in Asia ranked Hugo’s #338, and in 2026, Opinionated About Dining Asian Restaurants ranked it #479. The evidence remains bench-side. Taluy’s kitchen keeps returning to freshness, authentic products, seasonal ingredients, and a French base carried into Modern European cooking. End the meal with café diablo and the room makes its point without argument: brandy, orange liquor, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, orange peel, fire, and coffee at Hugo’s Hong Kong.