Michelin's Hong Kong-Macao Guide Crowns Nine Three-Star Tables in Its 18th Year

Macao, the eighteenth ceremony of the Michelin Guide Hong Kong Macao, staged inside the Grand Lisboa Palace Resort in a year Michelin has spent marking its own hundredth anniversary, so that a guide built to judge kitchens found itself, for one evening, also marking its own age. Nine restaurants took three stars.

Seven of the nine sit in Hong Kong, Amber, Caprice and Sushi Shikon among them, each holding its line in a different part of the territory, each pulling a different kind of diner through its door, the results laid side by side the way a loom holds threads that never meet the same bolt of cloth until the shuttle forces them to cross. Two more sit in Macao, Jade Dragon and Robuchon au Dôme, so that the top tier of both territories now reads as a single weave rather than two guides working in parallel, one design pulled tight across a strait rather than two patterns pretending not to notice each other.

Beneath that top row, 278 establishments carried a Michelin mark into this cycle across the two territories, the guide's usual layering of stars stacked one on top of the other, a hierarchy that in a centenary year invites more scrutiny than most, since a hundred years spent grading plates raises the question of what, after a century, a plate is still meant to prove. The ceremony answered none of that directly. It rarely does.

One award broke from the pattern of stars entirely. Paul Lau Ping-lui, of Tin Lung Heen, received the guide's first Michelin Mentor Chef Award, a category measured not by what leaves his own kitchen on a given night but by the cooks who have passed through it and gone on to run kitchens of their own, the guide crediting, for the first time, the training rather than only the table.

None of that changes what happens next inside Tin Lung Heen, or Amber, or Jade Dragon, where the applause from Macao has already gone quiet and someone at a table is choosing, without any of this in mind, what to eat first.