Lobster Bar & Grill at Shangri-la

Roast beef, lobster, and the same pass

The Sunday roast lands with Yorkshire pudding, duck fat potatoes, gravy, and horseradish. Cary Docherty, chef at Lobster Bar & Grill at Shangri-la in Hong Kong, works that grammar inside a room better known for seafood towers, prime rib, and whole Boston lobster. His route to this station began at The Art Institute of New York City, then passed through London kitchens at Maze, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Foxtrot Oscar, and Little Social before Hong Kong took over the line. Gough on Gough gave him a head-chef post in the city; Lobster Bar & Grill placed him inside the hotel rhythm of Island Shangri-La, where repetition matters as much as invention.

Docherty’s present remit also includes Salisterra, added in 2022, but this room asks for a different discipline. Lobster Bar & Grill has held its place at the hotel for over three decades, and a chef entering that kitchen inherits memory as well as mise en place. The work is not a blank menu. It is a hand on an existing house, keeping its appetite for classic grills and shellfish while letting British roast logic sit naturally beside lobster, crab, and beef.

A grill program built on familiar weight

The menu reads by appetite rather than theatre: Seafood Tower, Grilled Boston Lobster, Prime Rib, Côte de Boeuf. The craft sits in timing and proportion, in the point where a lobster moves from sweet to tight, where a rib carries its pepper rub without losing its own fat, where a tableside smoked salmon gesture has to feel practiced rather than performed. The kitchen works with the old steakhouse vocabulary, garlic butter, lemon butter, Marie Rose sauce, horseradish, gravy, and lets those decisions remain legible.

Sunday roast gives the clearest view of Docherty’s hand. Roast beef rib comes with Yorkshire pudding, duck fat-roasted potatoes, glazed carrots, creamed spinach, cauliflower cheese, watercress, gravy, and horseradish. Crab on toast brings crab mayonnaise, avocado purée, gem lettuce, dill, lemon-lime, and beef-dripping brioche. These are not fragile constructions. They depend on heat, resting, carving, sauce work, and the patience to keep each plate within the house style: generous, polished, direct.

The room keeps a hotel pulse

The dining room carries polished wood, nautical blue, and the practiced ease of a hotel restaurant that has seen business lunches turn into late bar seats. Live music gives the room movement without taking the pass away from the plate. The counter and the bar are close enough to belong to the same evening, especially in a house where cocktails and seafood have long shared the first part of the meal.

Central moves quickly outside the hotel, but the room holds a steadier tempo: cutlery reset, shellfish lifted to the table, roast beef carved into the appetite of a regular. The craft here is continuity under pressure. Docherty’s next service is not announced as a reinvention; it is measured in Seafood Tower, Prime Rib, and the Sunday roast at Lobster Bar & Grill.