The Verdict
When Michelin awarded New Punjab Club its first star in 2019, it was not simply recognising a restaurant. It was making a statement about what Michelin stars could be for: the first Punjabi restaurant in the world to receive the honour, a correction of the long-standing assumption that Indian cuisine — and specifically the hearty, fire-driven cooking of the Punjab — did not qualify for the guide's highest recognition. Seven consecutive years later, the star remains, and the argument it made in 2019 has been confirmed annually.
New Punjab Club is a production of Black Sheep Restaurants, Hong Kong's most considered group, and it reflects the group's characteristic approach: thorough research, specific point of view, and an aesthetic that interprets its subject with the intelligence of a kitchen that understands what it is celebrating. The restaurant is a salute to post-colonial Punjab — to the era of regal opulence and flamboyant energy that characterised the region in the decades following independence — expressed through plush leather banquettes, a gin trolley that arrives with the ceremony of a wine service, and hand-polished Damascus steel cutlery that makes the act of eating feel like something worth noticing.
The cuisine draws from both the Indian and Pakistani traditions of the Punjab — a state that straddles the border, and whose cooking shares more across it than the political geography might suggest. Tandoor preparations are the centrepiece: the clay oven at the heart of Punjabi cooking, capable of temperatures that no other cooking method achieves, producing proteins and breads with a char and depth that is impossible to replicate. What New Punjab Club does with the tandoor is what every great kitchen does with its defining technique: apply it with such precision and understanding that the result becomes definitionally excellent rather than merely competent.
Why It Works for First Dates
New Punjab Club works for a first date because it provides the rare combination of genuine excellence and genuine pleasure in a single room. The food is bold enough to generate conversation — the tandoor preparations arrive with smoky theatre, the gin trolley provokes engagement with a ritual that most diners haven't experienced before — and the cuisine is sufficiently distinct from the city's French and Cantonese fine dining alternatives to feel like a deliberate choice rather than a default. Taking someone to New Punjab Club on a first date communicates confidence: you know where the interesting things are, and you prefer them to the obvious ones.
The room itself is warm and opulent without the intimidating formality of a three-star dining room. The plush leather banquettes accommodate extended conversations; the service, attentive and knowledgeable, does not hover. The bill will be meaningful without being alarming. The lamb chops, which appear on every table, will be eaten slowly and with pleasure.
The Menu and the Tandoor
The Mughal Room Makhani — the restaurant's version of butter chicken — is the single dish that must be ordered. It is built on a recipe that understands the dish as a Mughal court preparation rather than a simplified export product: tomato-enriched, cream-finished, deeply spiced without heat dominating, served with laccha paratha that is made in-house and layered with a skill that makes every other paratha in the city immediately insufficient. The goat seekh kebab, formed from hand-minced meat on skewers and cooked in the tandoor until the outside chars and the inside remains moist, is the other non-negotiable. The keema pau — spiced minced mutton served in toasted pau — brings street food intelligence into the fine dining context without condescension.
The gin trolley is one of the most genuinely pleasurable things available in a Central dining room. A selection of premium gins, presented with the mixologist's knowledge and the occasion's sense of ceremony, pairs with the cuisine's spice profiles in ways that wine — the default pairing in Hong Kong fine dining — cannot. The cocktail programme extends this intelligence across the full menu.
The Experience
New Punjab Club is located at 34 Wyndham Street, Central — in SoHo, accessible on foot from the Central-Mid-Levels escalator. Reservations should be secured one to two weeks in advance. The restaurant accommodates groups well; the lamb chops and seekh kebabs are designed for sharing and scale naturally to larger tables. Dress code is smart casual. For team dinners and group occasions, the restaurant can arrange set menus with the gin trolley built into the format.
Related Restaurants in Hong Kong
For other restaurants in Hong Kong that have made Michelin history by proving what the guide can recognise, The Chairman — Asia's #1 for 2026 — is the parallel story in Cantonese cuisine. For a starred Central dining experience with a similarly convivial and sharing-friendly format, Roganic's new sharing menu format offers a compelling British farm-to-table comparison. For the most complete picture of Michelin-starred dining across Central, the full Hong Kong restaurant rankings by occasion covers every option across all seven occasions.