‘The Dating Menu’ Explores the Loneliness of Hong Kong Dining

“I think it’s about loneliness. I mean, sure, the directors can talk about restaurants closing down, but I think it’s more about how each of the characters, everyone, is lonely — and the city is lonely as well,” says actor Rachel Leung Yung-ting of what lies at the heart of The Dating Menu (廚師發辦), Amos Why and first-time co-director Frankie Chung Wang-kit’s semi-romantic, bittersweet slice of urban culinary life. Set in present-day Hong Kong, as its restaurant sector grapples with closures, changing dining habits and cross-border competition, it’s arguably the first film with Why’s name on it that isn’t overtly angry and downbeat. The Dating Menu has his happiest ending yet, which may have something to do with Chung.

“Writing this also taught me something about myself. I like stories that try to be both honest and romantic at the same time,” Chung says by email. “This is my first film as a director. Getting to make it with actors this good, on a story I love this much — that doesn’t happen twice.”

Chung is talking about his star, Lo Chun-yip, fresh off his role as the heavy in Night King and one of the city’s most appealing young leading men, and Leung, who isn’t the female lead but is arguably the film’s most important character. Lo and Leung are in Golden Scene’s screening room, but Chung’s presence looms large. “The structure of this script is similar to Far Far Away, but the story and the message were very different. Frankie brought something new to the table,” Leung says. The Dating Menu makes for a companion piece to Why’s island-hopping romance from 2022. Like the earlier film, the story pivots on an unassuming, slightly aimless Hong Kong guy and his series of fun, disastrous and awkward dates with four women. The Dating Menu is the more mature, lived-in iteration of that quest. Leung returns, but Lo is new to the Why universe.

“I’ve known Amos for maybe 10 years, but I’d never worked with him before. He came to me, asked me to meet him with Frankie, and we talked the story through, shared some ideas when we read the script. They’re quite welcoming for actors’ input,” Lo says.

Accessible and emotional

Lo and Leung are also two of Hong Kong’s most reliable actors, who’ve oddly seemed to be rising stars for years. Lo has built a string of stellar performances playing thoughtful, complex and conflicted ordinary men that have made him the city’s own Ryan Gosling. “Funny thing,” Chung says, “I originally wrote this script for Amos, and the draft leaned more toward comedy. Then we cast [Lo] as our lead, Lam Hark, and that changed things. His energy pulled the film toward something more melancholic. It reads a little different from the draft now, but it’s closer to what I felt underneath the whole time.” Lo, who had been making short films since 2010, broke out as an actor in Derek Chiu’s No.1 Chung Ying Street (2018). He later played a traumatised teacher trying to help his students in Nick Cheuk’s Time Still Turns the Pages (2023) and, last year, a young father struggling with the pressures of new parenthood in Oliver Chan’s Montages of a Modern Motherhood.

Leung’s film career began around the same time, with a small role in Lawrence Kan’s When C Goes with G7 (2013), before she broke through in Cheung King Wai’s Somewhere Beyond the Mist (2017) and Kan’s award-winning In Broad Daylight (2023). Leung has since become the industry’s “Oh, her!” through a string of memorable supporting roles in All Shall Be Well, The Last Dance and We’re Nothing at All, among others. “I’m not interested in becoming a ‘star’, not at all,” she says. “I just enjoy acting. I don’t have a wish list. If I had to pick a director I really want to work with, it’s probably Ann Hui, but I’m just going to go wherever or to whoever needs me.”

Why has been dissecting Hong Kong’s personality and identity for years, starting with Dot 2 Dot in 2014. He may not be singing, but Why has become a persistent documentarian of romance and local folklore. Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts graduate Chung co-wrote Why’s Everyphone Everywhere and worked as an associate producer on Kiwi Chow Kwun-wai’s Beyond the Dream (2020), starring Terrance Lau Chun-him. The Dating Menu grew from a joke a friend of Why’s cracked one night about the easiest way for a chef to cut through the morass of a dating app: cook for each match and go from there. “Amos told me the idea and asked me to turn it into a script. I planned to just write it. Then I finished the draft, and he asked me to direct with him,” Chung says. “I put a lot of myself into the writing this round — especially the drifting, rootless feeling in Lam Hark, and pieces of memory from when he was young. Those parts felt personal to me. I really wanted to be there for them myself, not hand them off.”

That is the short version of how The Dating Menu came to be Why’s most accessible and emotional film to date. Like most of his work, The Dating Menu is a hyperlocal portrait of life and love in Hong Kong, with a subtle interrogation of the sociopolitical shifts the city is undergoing and how they affect the people who live there. Lo plays Lam Hark, a chef specialising in Japanese omakase — a chef-selected tasting menu — at his tiny, failing restaurant. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend and feels stuck yet somehow simultaneously untethered. It sets him reflecting on his life and trying to work out a way forward, while spending a great deal of time idealising the woman of his teenage dreams from a chat room around 2000 who called herself Zelda. 

Lam begins a very modern search for “Zelda” — he turns to a dating app — hoping it will be the spark that reignites both his professional and personal life. This search runs parallel with the struggle to keep the restaurant open when his partners, James (Yatho Wong Yat-ho) and Dong (Chan Lok-tim), think the wiser move might be to shutter it entirely. The film links the restaurant’s troubles to emigration and a local market increasingly reluctant to spend on omakase. Chung and Why pulled other details and stories from friends who’ve tried dating apps, and designed the dishes with Chef Paul Gourmet’s Paul Pang after the script was finalised, matching each meal to the characters and illustrating Lam’s evolution. Anyone expecting food porn may be disappointed, but the increasingly intimate food choices tell a moving story. And it does look delicious.

Revealing omakase

Lam may be the main character, but the four women he has omakase dates with are the film’s MVPs. Each reveals something about Lam and something about Hong Kong, but none is a mere cipher who exists purely to tell a man’s story. Leung partly accepted the role of the original Zelda because of her previous experience with Why on Far Far Away. She is well aware that some viewers saw her character in that film as a “bitch,” and appreciates Why’s willingness to hear out his actors, particularly when it comes to women.

Appearing as Lam’s dates are a kitchen designer and sophisticated global citizen (Renci Yeung Si-wing, Behind the Shadows), a single mother and domestic violence survivor living in public housing (Crystal Cheung Man-ka), an affluent insurance agent whose husband lives in London (actor-director Kearen Pang Sau-wai) and Leung as the first Zelda, now a lawyer. Each has her insecurities about trying new relationships and each comes away from dinner with a clearer sense of self; above all, they feel real. 

“I think maybe still in Hong Kong culture, being bossy or sassy is being a ‘bitch’ right? To get what you want makes you a bitch,” Leung says with a shake of the head. “As an actor we have the responsibility to deliver the story and the character, but as an actor I need to interpret the character as a woman, too. I could always discuss this with Amos.”

Ironically, Lam is the film’s most emotional character. He is able to recognise that he is fixating on the past because he fears the future, and Lo delivers a perfectly calibrated performance. “Actually, maybe he didn’t learn very much,” Lo says with a laugh. “He moves away from Hong Kong but he might still be worried he’s a failure. Maybe it’s the space he’s in. But he learns to at least face his problems rather than avoid them.”

Why and Chung shot every scene together, though on this occasion Chung focused on the finer emotional details. “I stay inward. It goes back to Everyphone Everywhere. On set, Amos noticed I had more patience for talking through the small emotional beats with actors. That’s where we complement each other.” The Dating Menu weaves in cultural references that Hongkongers will clock instantly without leaving non-residents adrift, and cinematographer Leung Ming-kai shoots it in warm tones. He appears briefly with his partner, Kate Reilly, in a scene where Lam calls to check in on the restaurant he left in sous chef Monkee’s (Gladys Yuen Si-heung) hands. 

The film is accessible because it feels like a film made by a bunch of friends — reflective and romantic without being maudlin. “If a person has nothing to look back on, that’s sad, but the things worth looking back on fade too, a little at a time,” Chung says. “That bittersweet feeling — facing what’s real while still reaching for something romantic in it — that’s the taste I go for.”

The Dating Menu opens in Hong Kong on 21 August.