- AsiaSpa (regional luxury/spa focus) *
- Liv Magazine (HK’s wellness staple)
- Destination Deluxe (Hong Kong, luxury retreats)
- Compare Retreats (Hong Kong, expert wellness travel)
- WELL, Magazine Asia (HK digital impact)
- SpaChina or regional editions
- Organic Spa Magazine (international with Asia reach)
- GlobalHealth Asia-Pacific
- LuxuryWellness (India-focused but regional)
- Jetsetter or similar luxury travel-wellness hybrids *
Thursday, 28 May 2026
The Art of Wellness magazine launches in Hong Kong: Today! + Top Ten Health and Wellness Publications in Asia
An entire catalogue, 36 looks: Shot in One day!
The right photographer, model, hair and makeup team, stylist, location and... will power. An entire catalogue shoot done on time - and more imporantly in budget.
The side hustle...
Wednesday, 27 May 2026
Repost: New Punjab Club in HK: Star-Spangled, Spice-Soaked, and Gloriously Confused About Its Own Identity
Originally written circa 2022. Reposting because the food was then - and presumably remains -extraordinary. Some things deserve a second airing. This is one of them.
-- Rama
There is a particular kind of audacity required to open a restaurant in Central Hong Kong, seat only twenty people, insist your kitchen produces the finest cuisine of the Punjab - and then, with a straight face and a beautifully typeset press release, tell journalists it is Pakistani food.
Reader, it is not Pakistani food. Not primarily. Not really. Not if you've eaten in Lahore or Karachi or been to a Pakistani home kitchen where the flavours lean leaner, the spicing more restrained, the meat preparations closer to Central Asian influences than the buttery, tandoor-fired abundance of the Indian subcontinent's northwestern breadbasket. But we will come back to this. We always do.
New Punjab Club opened in 2015, tucked into Wyndham Street, Central - that strip of Hong Kong real estate that seems permanently committed to housing restaurants for people who've already decided they're having a good evening before they've even sat down. The restaurant is the brainchild of founder Syed Asim Hussain, the man behind the Black Sheep Restaurants group, who also happens to have personal ties to the space: his father's restaurant, The Mughal Room, once occupied the same address. There is something poetically appropriate about that - history literally cooked into the walls.
The concept was ambitious, even a little mad. Punjabi cuisine - proper, unapologetically robust Punjabi cuisine - elevated to fine-dining standards in one of Asia's most competitive restaurant cities. Twenty seats. A tandoor as the beating heart of the kitchen. A wine cellar with serious intent. And a bar program that quietly became one of the best whisky lists in Hong Kong. (The whisky-with-spiced-food pairing is, it should be noted, not a gimmick. It works. Magnificently. Your cardiologist would disagree, but your cardiologist isn't at the table, and long may that last.)
The rave reviews came quickly, and they came loudly. Broadsheets and glossy magazines fell over themselves. Food writers who had spent years dismissing subcontinental cuisine as inherently "casual" found themselves reassessing. And then, in 2019, Michelin confirmed what the dinner queue already knew: New Punjab Club became the world's first Punjabi restaurant to receive a Michelin star. The first. In the world. Sitting in Hong Kong, which already has more Michelin stars per capita than almost anywhere on the planet, including France. A detail that never gets old. The star has been retained every year since. Four consecutive years, at the time of this writing.
The chefs responsible - and here is where the Pakistani branding gets genuinely, lovingly complicated - are Palash Mitra and Chhabil Sidhu. Two Indian chefs. From the subcontinent's Indian side of the partition line. Cooking food the PR team is at some pains to label Pakistani. Doing so brilliantly. Now look, I am not here to adjudicate the politics of partition at the dinner table. I am here to eat. But the identity question deserves more than a dismissive wave, because it illuminates something fascinating about what Punjab actually is.
The Punjab, land of five rivers, was, before 1947, a single region. Then the Radcliffe Line cut through it with the blunt efficiency of a man who had never been there and had six weeks to draw a border. Lahore went to Pakistan. Amritsar stayed in India. Families divided. Recipes did not. The tandoor techniques, the mustard-laced winter greens, the slow-cooked lamb of the Mughal court, the dairy excess (the butter, the ghee, the cream, always the cream) - these belonged to a geography, not a passport. So what is distinctively Pakistani food, as opposed to Indian food from the Punjab?
The honest answer involves nuance that marketing departments rarely survive. Pakistani cuisine, broadly, draws on the same Mughal inheritance but layers in Central Asian and Persian influences more heavily - the pilaus and pulaos lean toward Afghan-style rice preparations, the kebab traditions echo Turkish routes through the old Silk Road, the seasoning tends toward cardamom and dried fruits over fresh chilli heat, the meat often lamb or beef where the Indian side might reach for chicken. Pakistani Punjabi cooking specifically favours the spit and the slow braise; it is less enamored of the intense dry-heat tandoor than its Indian counterpart, and the butter chicken - that totemic dish the world associates with "Indian food" - is almost certainly a post-partition invention from the Indian side, specifically from a Punjabi refugee family in Delhi. You know, the capital of...
At New Punjab Club, the tandoor is everything. Which tells you something. What Chefs Mitra and Sidhu do - did, at the time of this meal - is not fraudulent. It is, if anything, more honest than the branding: they cook the food of an undivided Punjab, drawing on Mughal-era recipes and the deep agricultural tradition of one of the subcontinent's great grain-growing, dairy-producing, food-obsessed regions. If that food happens to geographically straddle the modern border and be claimed by both nations with equal ferocity, well. Cuisine does not stop at checkpoints.
The menu that greeted our party of self-appointed critics - assembled, as is the custom, with the express purpose of eating too much and arguing about it afterwards, was a document of serious intent. The tandoor section alone could sustain a review. The Malai Tikka arrives as something close to a revelation: the restaurant's preferred local three-yellow chicken, brined for a day, then marinated in soft cheese, yoghurt, green chilli and yellow chilli powder before the tandoor works its alchemy. The result is chicken that has surrendered all of its moisture to flavour and none of its flavour to the process. It is, to use the technical term, ridiculously good. The Matka Murghi, the same three-yellow chicken sealed into a clay pot with safri spices, root vegetables and shallots and then left overnight in the residual heat of a cooling tandoor - produces a stew of such gentle, fragrant depth that you begin to understand why the process has survived for centuries. This is not a chef showing off. This is a chef respecting what time and indirect heat can accomplish that nothing else can. Pre-book it. I say this with the urgency of someone who has watched a companion be turned away from this dish: just pre-book it.
The Nashta section (street food but seriously elevated!) deserves its own small ceremony. The Tamatar Ki Chaat, made famously without onion or garlic (a cooking constraint that is itself a kind of culinary discipline, like a painter restricting their palette), uses heirloom tomatoes blushed in the tandoor and Pink Fir potatoes cooked overnight in the slow ovens. The result is something that tastes both utterly familiar and completely refined. And the Makki Di Roti with Sarson Da Saag (griddle-cooked corn flatbread scooping up mustard greens and date jaggery), is a dish so embedded in Punjabi identity (specifically the Lohri festival, celebrated across the Punjab on both sides of the border in January, with bonfires and folk songs and the particular joyfulness of a people who have survived another winter) that eating it in this room, with these prices, in Hong Kong, feels like time travel.... with better lighting and aspirational art framed at every visible space.
Then, there's the room itself. Twenty seats, as promised. It harkens to the era of post-colonial Punjab with the nostalgic flair of someone who genuinely loves that aesthetic rather than someone who hired a production designer to fake it. Old world charm is an overused phrase. Here, it earns usage. We rolled out into the Hong Kong rain, into one of those soaked taxis that smell of upholstery, stale beer and ambition, collectively bloated and arguing the question we always argue: why doesn't subcontinental fine dining get the respect it deserves?
The answer involves decades of Western food media's class coding of "ethnic" cuisines, the assumption that complexity and refinement belong to European traditions, and a generalized failure of imagination that Michelin, to its credit, has begun to correct.
One star. Four years running. Twenty seats. The world's first. The branding may tell you it is Pakistani. The chefs are Indian. The food is Punjabi, which, if you know your history and your geography and have paid attention to the past several paragraphs, is simply: yes. All of the above. And then some. Go. Take someone you want to impress.
And perhaps, just perhaps, let the food be the thing that doesn't require a border.
New Punjab Club
34 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong.
Reservations via www.newpunjabclub.com.
Words and Images: P.Ramakrishnan
The images have been AI modified, enhanced, sharpened from original phone pics!
Saturday, 23 May 2026
Failing updwards: A Case Study of Ibrahim Ali Khan: A Follow-up Feature
In the wildly incestuous ecosystem of Bollywood, where lineage often outweighs early missteps, Ibrahim Ali Khan stands as a compelling case study in... failing upwards.
Thursday, 21 May 2026
Cover shoot for Galaxy magazine: Wilson with Amanda G: Favourite models
My last cover shoot with Galaxy Magazine.
Tuesday, 19 May 2026
Designer Profile: Hong Kong's own Susanna Soo of S.Nine Celebrates 15 Years
Hong Kong-based designer Susanna Soo, a Parsons School of Design alumna with formative stints at Diane von Furstenberg’s New York sample rooms and Anne Valerie Hash’s Parisian atelier, launched S.Nine in 2009 - mere months before her own wedding. The label, now celebrating over fifteen years, has become a popular chapter in the mighty tome of Asian womenswear: a poetic fusion of New York polish and French couture refinement. Beloved for versatile ready-to-wear that moves seamlessly from day to night, S.Nine fuses classic foundations with romance, practicality, and an intuitive sensuality. Susanna’s garments celebrate the female form while honoring real life draped, tailored, and quietly empowering for the modern woman who values both presence and ease.
She speaks of clothes as if they were extensions of breath, something felt before named. “Even as a child I had a sensitivity to what ‘feels right’ on me,” she recalls. “I picked my own clothes very early on.” Watching her mother command airports and boardrooms in power suits revealed fashion’s alchemical power: “It was amazing how an outfit could elevate one’s energy.” By her mid-twenties, the path had clarified itself. Fashion was not chosen so much as recognised, something that aligned with her creative energy so completely that deviation felt impossible.
Everything was a challenge at the beginning. “But there was so much excitement in seeing a collection come to life and learning every little thing about the fashion business along the way.” The steepest early terrain was finding the right audience: tradeshows, persistent collaborations, the patient work of translation between private vision and public desire. Yet the memory that lingers is tactile - the bolts of sample fabric, the slow birth of silhouette in the garment district.
Her hands had already been trained in the right places. At DVF she bypassed the glossy Meatpacking showroom for the raw pulse of production: fabric and trim sourcing, pattern making, sample sewing. “That was precisely what I love about fashion: the unglamorous inner workings,” she says. “The sample fabric galore had me bedazzled and inspired. The obsessive pursuit of beauty, and a group of people with relentless grit to get there, to bring the show to life, is the most poetic thing in the fashion industry.”
Paris deepened the register. After winning the Arts of Fashion competition, her time at Anne Valerie Hash exposed her to the delicate navigation between ready-to-wear and couture. “The combination of NYC glamour and grit with female empowerment, mixed with Parisian effortless allure and couture refinement, were the elements that shaped my design journey.” Those dual influences still pulse through S.Nine: structured yet fluid, confident yet understated.
Her core philosophy remains anchored yet alive. “I believe in building on classic foundations, mixed with an authentic, intuitive touch.” The S.Nine woman embodies inner strength, kindness, justice, sensuality, and creative spirit. “Sometimes a piece starts with the touch of a new fabric; I love draping and seeing how it falls on the body. I want to showcase as much of the beauty of the female body as possible.”
Inspiration arrives on its own schedule. It might whisper through Scarlett O’Hara’s resilient fire in Gone with the Wind, or the luminous emergence in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. “It is a vibe that keeps whispering to me in a particular moment while I am sketching, and it all happens when it decides to happen.” The original muse, however, remains closest to home. “My original muse is really my mom. I think, as with all creative pursuits, it is always based on love.” Strong, kind, just, sensual, creative - the description circles back like a perfectly draped slip dress.
That personal foundation has sustained her through the industry’s louder demands. “Fashion is a big business, and because it is so visible in our culture and so commercialised, people hold certain expectations and labels about those inside the industry,” she observes. Chasing the media’s version of success, she warns, leads to burnout and hollow victories. “If you chase what you think you want based on what the media shows, you will most likely end up disappointed, burned out, and losing more than you gain in the process.”
Instead, she draws strength from quieter sources: a steadfast support system, spiritual practice, and the art of attentive living. “My mom and my husband have always given me shelter when I needed rest,” she shares. “Bringing inspiration into life, connecting with others through my own offering, finding my own way to do this in the different seasons of my life: that is the art of living.” The deepest reward remains profoundly human. “The most rewarding part is how much I have learned about myself along the way, and how many amazing human beings I have connected with through this journey.”
Bridal work has offered some of the most intimate of those connections. “To be part of the most important ceremony in their life is such a great honour,” she says. It demands trust and openness. One Covid-era gown tested the entire studio: less than a month from first fitting to final, with the bride preparing to relocate. “That was a real test for my team and me to make sure every step was precisely executed.” The memory carries respect rather than complaint, for the precision such moments require and the trust they inspire.
Looking ahead, S.Nine’s evolution feels like an unfolding. She aims to share the brand’s creative spirit with a wider audience while preserving its essential intimacy. More travel, expanded trunk shows in cities like Tokyo and Singapore, and “more fun, meaningful collaborations and projects are always welcome.” The focus stays on inspiration and connection rather than unchecked scale. “I would like to continue bringing new inspiration and creative spirit through S.Nine, sharing it with a wider audience, and travelling more to connect with different people.”
Legacy as a grand concept does not preoccupy her. “I don’t think about legacy,” she says plainly. She hopes the clothes have delivered something more immediate and enduring: joy, beautiful memories with loved ones, a lift to the spirit. Perhaps, too, that they offer quiet permission. “It also encourages young people to find their own path in their creative pursuit, to believe in themselves and not blindly follow someone else’s idea of success.”
In an era that often mistakes volume for relevance, S.Nine moves with deliberate quiet. The garments honor the body’s native elegance rather than shouting over it. They understand that true power in dressing frequently resides in what is felt rather than announced, fabric falling just so, confidence rising in response. A woman moves through her day, or through the most pivotal day of her life, carrying both armor and ease.
Susanna Soo’s own trajectory embodies the philosophy. From childhood sensitivity to maternal example, from garment-district rigor to Parisian refinement, from personal milestone to professional devotion, each chapter has informed the next without forced symmetry. The result is a brand that feels less like a declaration and more like an extended conversation between maker and material, woman and garment, private intuition and shared experience.
She returns often to the idea of energy: clothes that elevate it, moments that honor it, a life aligned with it. In her hands, fashion becomes less an industry category than a form of attentive presence paying close attention to how fabric meets skin, how silhouette meets spirit, how a well-chosen garment can quietly recalibrate the day. The pursuit remains obsessive, the grit remains real, yet the ultimate measure stays intimate: Does it feel right? On the body, in the moment, across the seasons of a life.
That question, asked early and answered daily, continues to guide S.Nine forward one precisely draped, intuitively tuned piece at a time.
Images courtesy of Susanna Soo.

















