Mee

A pan-Asian pass in Copacabana

The light technique comes first: the cut clean, the broth clear, the seasoning left legible. Mee sits inside the Belmond Copacabana Palace as Rio’s first luxury pan-Asian restaurant, and its leadership is split between oversight and the bench. Ken Hom oversees the restaurant and lends it his pan-Asian authority, while chef Alberto Morisawa helms the kitchen day to day. Earlier sources name executive chef Kazuo Harada in the same room, so the station has passed through more than one hand without losing its brief.

Hom’s involvement was not nominal. The brigade trained in Bangkok before opening in order to hold Southeast Asian technique properly, which points at a philosophy of cultural fidelity rather than fusion novelty. The restaurant holds 1 Michelin star, one of only two starred venues inside the hotel, and the work asks for a kitchen that can hold polish without making the room feel rehearsed.

Omakase beside the wider map

Mee’s program moves between à la carte, tasting menu and omakase, with the sushi bar working in 16- or 19-course formats. The map is broad, crossing Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Korea, Vietnam and China, but the stronger gesture is at the bench: sushi and sashimi cut to order, shrimp tempura sent out with its heat still clean, dim sum portioned for a sampler, crispy Sichuan tea smoked duck handled for skin, smoke and flesh. The menu names dishes by origin rather than folding them into a vague house style, a useful act in a dining room built on breadth.

Sake sits close to the food. The beverage program carries imported Japanese sake, cocktails and wine, with pairing work that belongs to the meal rather than the bar as decoration. The result is not a museum of Asian cuisines. It is a hotel restaurant working with a wide pantry, formal service and a pass that has to keep many techniques moving at once, with Brazilian vibrancy allowed to sit alongside the Asian nuance rather than under it.

The room by the pool

The room holds 92 seats near the hotel’s swimming pool area, with a polished bar, low light and wall installations by Belgian artist Christian Develter. It is intimate by hotel standards, though not hushed into stiffness. Plates move through a dining room that keeps conversation at the table; the counter and the pass carry the tighter rhythm.

Omakase changes the scale. At the sushi bar, the guest sits closer to the hands, close enough to watch the sequence of rice, fish, knife and pause. Away from the counter, the room reads more broadly: tasting menus, à la carte orders, sake glasses, cocktails, a table sharing duck, tempura and fried rice under the same measured light.

A hotel dining room with its own station

Mee is one of the Michelin-starred venues inside the Copacabana Palace, and its station has become specific within the house. It gives Rio a formal pan-Asian room without treating the cooking as a theme, and it lets the hotel hold another register beside its older rituals. If the future of the place is not announced through a named opening or succession, the craft remains visible at the counter. The close view is still the omakase bar at Mee.