The Restaurant
The Aubrey opened in September 2020 on the twenty-fifth floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong, in partnership with Maximal Concepts, replacing the storied Pierre by Pierre Gagnaire on the same dining floor. The room takes its name and visual language from the British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley — black-and-white portraits set against rich red walls, antique furniture from across Asia, and a deliberate Japanism aesthetic that reads as the late-nineteenth-century European fascination with Japanese art rather than a contemporary Japanese restaurant. The dining floor runs three distinct bar formats — a drawing room, a curio lounge and the main izakaya bar — alongside a robata-kitchen-led main dining room with a wraparound window line that delivers a sweeping panoramic view of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon across the water.
The kitchen serves a neo-izakaya menu inspired by Ginza's late-night drinking-and-dining culture but extended with deliberate Western technique. Signature plates include the spicy fried cauliflower with mentaiko aioli, the agedashi tofu with bonito broth, the asparagus-and-avocado roll, an extensive sashimi-and-sushi programme using day-aged Japanese fish, and the robata grill turning Wagyu, Kobe beef and Japanese seafood across the open dining-room window. The format is deliberately scaled for cross-table ordering rather than a defended individual plate — the room is designed to extend across courses and drinks rather than close at the standard ninety-minute hotel turnover.
The bar programme is the room's second credential. The Aubrey ranked number ten on Asia's 50 Best Bars 2024 — one of only a handful of Hong Kong rooms on the list — and runs a parallel Japanese-cocktail menu built around shochu, sake, Japanese whisky and the city's deepest Japanese-spirits cellar. Service is at the upper tier of Hong Kong hotel hospitality: career captains, sommeliers and bartenders narrating without overselling, and a captain-led pace that treats the dining-and-drinking evening as a single coherent format. The Connaught Road harbour view, lit by the Symphony of Lights from across the water, is the dining-room photograph the room has rented from the property since opening. For a Hong Kong evening that wants the Mandarin Oriental address without the formality of a grand dining room, The Aubrey is the city's standing answer.
Why This Is Hong Kong’s Impress Clients Pick
The Aubrey is the Hong Kong impress-clients room because the twenty-fifth-floor harbour view does the work the menu cannot. A client flying into HKIA for a single-day meeting reads the Mandarin Oriental Central address as the city's standing institutional signal — a host who books here has read the geography of the meeting correctly. The neo-izakaya format gives the table the working middle ground that the city's tasting-menu rooms cannot: the cross-table ordering across robata, sashimi and small-plate Japanese closes the typical fine-dining risk in a city the visiting executive does not know. The Asia's 50 Best Bars credential lets the post-dinner programme stay in the same room, on the same floor — the dining-and-drinking evening compresses into a single address, which a guest with a long flight ahead reads as care. For a Hong Kong client evening that needs the full Central credential without the rigidity of a grand hotel dining room, The Aubrey is the city's standing answer.
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