It looks like the street 28 HongKong first made cool is heating up as an F&B enclave of note. Two years after serving its highly innovative plates at the secretive Masonic Hall in the Civic District, Bacchanalia's moving into a shophouse unit on the stretch, joining the aforementioned bar, coffee spot Ronin, Catalonian tapas spot FOC, and Latino cocktail bar Vasco.
At its new, more intimate digs, head chef Ivan Brehm and his second, Mark Ebbels now have an open kitchen from which to showcase their clever techniques. How open? Very wide open – guests have to traipse past the kitchen team before landing butts on one of the 36 seats in the dining room.
Bacchanalia's new space, put together by interior designers Distillery (the same people behind Manhattan bar and The Club Hotel), features photos of irregular-shaped veggies on the wall, while the light installation – featuring 400 pieces of blown glass – from the restaurant’s previous home follows the move.
Head chef Ivan Brehm looking over the floor plan at the new space
Food-wise, the kitchen team continues to please food geeks with its sourcing of unique ingredients, Brehm and Ebbels' Heston-imparted techniques, and pretty plates. An early press release mentions dishes like Tiberian Harvest snapper carpaccio spiced with mace from Penang and Sichuan leaf dressing, as well as pickled Japanese sardines, assembled with ingredients sourced from an organic farm in Malaysia, the restaurant's own garden and a seafood farm set up in local waters.
These are served up in set menus at lunch, a seven-course tasting menu at dinner, and à la carte options at both lunch and dinner. A separate seven-course communal chef's table meal for 12, which showcases Brehm's kitchen experiments, is also served every Thursday.
Bacchanalia aims to open by mid-August at 39 HongKong Street