In just 48 hours, I ate my way through the highlights of a stopover favourite

There are no live seafood tanks at The Legacy House. It’s not that sort of Cantonese restaurant. Instead, you get the feeling that you might just be the live seafood, given the huge floor-to-ceiling windows that look out from the dining room onto Victoria Harbour.

From the junks bobbing in the busy waters outside, the ferries criss-crossing from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, the sparkling embankment over on Hong Kong Island, The Legacy House would be framed like a tank, a tableau of fine-dining excellence. Like much of Hong Kong, this restaurant is recognisable to an Australian visitor, but different. We tend to understand Cantonese fare in our homeland, given the obsession we have with yum cha, the ready acceptance of dumplings and stir-fries into our nation’s cuisine.

Only occasionally, however, is it done with such polish. The Legacy House is luxurious, with its Michelin star and its dreamy views of Hong Kong’s bright lights and bustle. The dishes – double-boiled soup, steamed dumplings, fish with rice noodles, deep-fried duck – might sound familiar but here they’re pushed to an impressive degree of finesse, the best ingredients, the highest culinary skill.

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I arrived on a flight from Tokyo this afternoon, made my way into the city and dropped my bags at my hotel, then jumped in a taxi and headed across the harbour to Rosewood Hong Kong, which plays host to The Legacy House. The challenge I have in this city is to discover just how much you can do, how much you can experience – and more specifically how much you can eat and drink in this place so well known for it – in a 48-hour stopover. A Michelin-starred Cantonese meal isn’t a bad place to start, and it helps that you can wander just a few metres from the restaurant over to the DarkSide, a classy cocktail bar that’s also in Rosewood.

“Welcome to the dark side,” says a waistcoated barman as he slides a coaster onto the bar in front of me and passes across a menu. This isn’t unusual for Hong Kong: this city has a thriving cocktail culture, a slew of bars with a wide variety of themes and vibes that all specialise in fancy drinks served late into the night. A jazz trio strikes up at the far end of the room.

Well-dressed patrons slip into cosy booths. A boozy cocktail finds its way onto the coaster in front of me. This is the thing in Hong Kong: you can choose your own adventure.

You can choose familiar or totally different. You can go luxury or cheap and cheerful. You can lean hard into southern Chinese culture or you can dive into the many ongoing iterations of Western ideas.

There’s no need to think too hard about where The Chairman fits in. It’s the next morning, I’ve still been in Hong Kong for less than 24 hours, and I’m preparing for yet another incredible meal. This time it’s at a restaurant that is taking high-end Cantonese food to the world, keeping things traditional and yet still finding itself lauded on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list (No.

19), and by Michelin (one star). The Chairman is old-school Chinese in many ways, and highly recognisable – the no-nonsense waiters, the white tablecloths set with chopsticks and small bowls – but the food? The food is shockingly, incredibly good.

I could go on for days. Chef Danny Yip has resisted the temptation to go Instagram-friendly here – the plating is simple, there’s not a single flower petal or foam in sight – but the dishes are the sort you would fly to Hong Kong just to taste. There are Hokkaido scallops, so lightly steamed that they’re still blushing, kissed by the complex citrus notes of 20-year-old pickled lemon, served in the half shell on a bed of slippery noodles.

There’s char siu pork, just a single big hunk, sweet and umami-strong. And the show-stopper: steamed flowery crab with aged Shaoxing wine, fragrant chicken oil and flat rice noodles. It’s very difficult, as a cook, to do anything to the subtle, tender flavour of crab to make it better, not to mask that flavour but to enhance it.

This dish does that. Other diners turn to look at me as I eat it: they know what a transcendental experience this is. They want to watch as someone else has it.

Wow. A meal like that takes some walking off, which is why my first 24 hours ticks over while wandering around busy Central, aimlessly strolling streets and taking in sights and scents and the feel of a city in a state of flux. Dinner tonight recalls the Hong Kong of old, some might even say the “real” Hong Kong, if there’s such a definition.

I’m dining in Wan Chai at Sun King Yuen Curry Restaurant, where there’s no months-long waiting list like the Chairman, no stunning views like The Legacy House, no cocktails or any drinks at all like the DarkSide. What there is, however, is two iconic dishes that you as a solo diner – or at least I as a solo diner – will have to choose between: stir-frie