Jimmy’s Kitchen

‘The old saying still holds good: ‘Whether you’re a resident or a long-time absentee on solitary return, just visit Jimmy’s and in half an hour you’re almost certain to greet someone you know.’
– Australian journalist Richard Hughes on his introduction piece for Jimmy’s 1982 cookbook: Jimmy’s: Secrets from Hong Kong’s Best-Loved ‘Kitchen

The thing with Jimmys is that you walk in and you know you are walking through history even though it’s just renovated and new. It’s hundred year old restaurant from the day they opened in Shanghai, and a 96 year old restaurant from the first time they opened in Hong Kong, back in 1928 by the Landau family. Which makes it one of Hong Kong’s oldest and most storied restaurants still standing. During the 70s there were very few good European-style restaurants in Hong Kong, it was relegated mostly to 5 star hotels and private clubs, most of which didn’t allow Chinese people.

Jimmy’s provided a common ground for Chinese and Western business crowd, serving movie stars, entrepreneurs and travellers, and becoming an icon destination for some of the most influential people at the time, some of which went so often that had their own personal tables at Jimmy’s (e.g. Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa).

For this project renovation, they didn’t want to look 100 year old, but they still wanted to look classic. So we needed to find a way to bring its unique legacy forward into the next generation. The original restaurant was a very ‘down-to-earth’ place, very approachable and not scary at all. The new design was aiming to bring it a little bit higher up in terms of making it more elegant, classic, yet simple. It’s meant to feel like you are walking through history (knowing that you are not). We have 100 years of history compressed in one single project. Here, the fabrics was one of the big resources we used to play with this, so we used fabrics to bring this history into the project they reflect all the changes you go through a lifetime. In a 100 years you go from the end of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, De Stjill, Modernism, Post-modernism, until today. This is all combined in there, creating a person. It’s a 90 year old person, with a 35 year old spirit, made of all this layers. It’s formal, updated, sophisticated, but still approachable. This stands out in the rather sober ambiance given by the elegant wood paneling work on walls and ceilings, combined with some unexpected elements such as leather umbral and mirror ceilings. The experience is enhanced by the old building as well, there’s history packed inside Pedder building.

One of the biggest challenges were related to the space. The site was very large, very long and had a very low ceiling. So we actually had to ‘break-up’ the space into smaller rooms in order to make the proportion of the room comfortable. But if you break the space too much you make the operation too difficult, because you need someone looking after each room, which makes it more expensive from the operational perspective. So we had to play around with this strategy to find the sweet-spot between making the rooms feel comfortable from a space proportion point of view, but still efficiently manageable from a operational perspective.

Design: Zanghellini & Holt Associates
Photography: Soledad Sambiasi