19th on this year’s 50 Best Restaurants in the world and beaten only by The Fat Duck and Nobu in the UK, Hakkasan is a Chinese restaurant that exudes style and class by the oodles. A birthday, my brother’s, seemed like the perfect opportunity to test it out.

At first I thought that we weren’t going to be able to make our booking because a film crew had taken up residence on Hanway Place and the policeman who was “guarding” the entrance wasn’t letting anyone through. Luckily for us one of the crew realised that they were blocking access to the restaurant and quickly arranged for the blockade to move up slightly. I still don’t know what they were filming there, as Pat quickly dragged us away (clearly being stalkarazzi is not in the blood – ha ha), but it looked fairly intense and they were still at it when we left a few hours later.

But on to the restaurant.

At the entrance of Hakkasan you are met with two bouncer-esque characters who check your name on the reservation list. I’m not sure what their purpose is because there is a bar down stairs where you can wait for a table to become free when you don’t have a reservation and also, when you reach the bottom of the stairs, you are once again asked for your reservation details anyway. I guess it all adds to the experience.

The impact of Hakkasan is immediate – it is dark, yet shiny, with spot lighting on each of the tables and otherwise “night-club” lighting. The otherwise cavernous room is split into more intimate areas by large wooden poles which may or may not have been bamboo poles painted black. Its supposed to be a very modern take on the Chinese motiff. Unfortunately no photos allowed!

We were quickly seated at our table and the waiter immediately descended to ask if we wanted any drinks. At least he gave us a menu at the same time but please people – let us have a chance to check out the menu! The Hakkasan drinks menu was very impressive and contained a good balance of non-alcoholic and alcoholic cocktails not to mention a staggering wine list. When you check out some of the offerings its no wonder that people can easily spend hundreds, or even thousands, on one dinner here!

The food menu was also fairly impressive, with diverse and sometimes unique offerings, but surprisingly nothing shouted EAT ME which is terribly unusual for me not to mention the fact that the prices were outrageous if not unexpected.

As this was supposed to be a celebration we decided to go just a little bit crazy. We started with Jasmine Tea Smoked Organic Pork Ribs and Roast Mango Duck – both priced at just under £10. The Smoked Ribs were DIVINE. The sauce was perfect and the meat literally fell off the bone – making it very easy to eat even with chopsticks! The Duck was, honestly, a rip-off. No doubt it looked great but what we got in essence were thin slivers of duck (not the greatest tasting) and mango with quite a tart sauce which I think, rather than balance the dish, overpowered the flavour of the duck. So, going into the mains were were 1 for 2.

We had some difficult deciding on our dishes for our mains and ended up with Peking Style Duck, Roasted Sea Bass in Chinese Honey (at £38 our most expensive dish of the night) and Stir Fried Black Bean Vegetarian Prawns. The Sea Bass for me was the star of the mains which maintained the beautiful sea bass flavour coloured by a most delicious almost smokey honey flavour. The other two dishes were fairly average though I was quite entertained by the vegetarian prawn making a fairly good imitation of the actual thing. I still don’t know what it was made from though! This is not to say that the dishes weren’t good in their own way but nothing extraordinary which, at the prices being charged, I was expecting.

To my surprise there was nothing on the dessert menu that we were interested in, even if we could fit more food into our very full bellies. Instead we opted for a second round of non-alcholic cocktails – very yummy.

Shockingly Hakkasan imposes a 13% (!) service charge on the bill which took our dinner to just over £120 for the two of us. Considering we didn’t have any alcohol this was pricey indeed, though also very much expected. I guess they needed that much service to cover all the waiters and waitresses that seemed to be all over the place and maybe to cover the cost of the girl whose sole job appeared to be to open the door to the restrooms (!) because we certainly didn’t receive service that was fantastic. It was just okay.

Overall Hakkasan is definitely a place to be experienced at least once but my recommendation would be to save it for a special occasion though if you’re minted, well, I guess you could make it an everyday experience!