Harlan Goldstein is back, larger than life

He’s one of Hong Kong’s most controversial culinary figures, but after a couple of years away from the headlines, Harlan Goldstein is back, larger than life.

It takes a certain type of personality to suffer the slings and arrows of a hostile press and come out on top. A pugnacious personality, maybe. An unapologetic and very self-assured one, definitely.

Of course, it’s characteristics like these that often lead to success in the cut-throat world of restaurateuring, so it’s perhaps no surprise that Hong Kong’s Harlan Goldstein, survivor of a debacle that saw him stripped of the commercial rights to use his own name, has once again come out swinging.

It’ll soon be two decades since Goldstein, a heavy set, straight-talking New Yorker, has called Hong Kong his home. He’s now chef-owner of two of the city’s most talked-about restaurants: Gold, which opened around two years ago, and the enfant terrible of Hong Kong’s burgeoning steakhouse craze, Strip House.

Goldstein isn’t shy to talk about the split that led him to where he is now. In 2006, after being accused of financial impropriety, he split with his business partner in a long, acrimonious legal battle.

The resultant settlement, which was hashed out over a “big bottle of wine at the Four Seasons” was not favourable to him and he says he laid low for two years, biding his time and searching for the right location to re-emerge onto the city’s restaurant scene. Goldstein thinks it made him a better businessman, more savvy about choosing the right partnerships, and has ushered in a new, perhaps more open relationship, with the press.

Gold’s main dining room

After a short stint as a young executive chef, he was 28 when Asia first beckoned in the form of a role in Beijing. Goldstein recalls: “My first question was, where’s Beijing?”After starting at the then China World Hotel (now part of the Shangri-La group) in pre-boom Beijing, and an unfulfilled six months in Thailand, Goldstein was invited to Hong Kong to interview for a job at the exclusive Aberdeen Marina Club.

“I didn’t want to come to Hong Kong – too fast, people were too rude – but I went for an interview and they had seven restaurants,” he says.

“I looked in the parking lot and there were Ferraris, Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and in the back there were 400 luxury yachts, and I thought, ‘this is my place.’”

After several successful years at Aberdeen he decided to leave the hotel- run business and become an entrepreneur.

He opened Harlan’s, his first restaurant, in 2004, and recalls: “The most exciting thing was when I opened up Harlan’s in IFC the chairman of Shangri- La, my boss at the time, told me, ‘Harlan, your restaurant will never work in Central, in a shopping mall.’

“There are 88 floors of financial whizz kids above us, and they need to eat,” was his comeback. He was right, and Harlan’s was just the beginning. “I dreamed all my life about having one restaurant and in four years it’d turned into six restaurants, and each one was different. The second was Tuscany by H, very successful and high- end in an area [Lan Kwai Fong] where people generally just go to get drunk.” He then took it up a notch, opening a new concept on the first floor of the same building, and opened Private H, describing at as a “little playpen for Donald Trump [types] – that was during the banking era when money wasn’t a problem. I would get 14 bankers in there who could spend HK$4,000 a head.”

Wild forest mushrooms, black truffle and smoked organic egg with pappardelle

When that period of financial excess came crashing to an end, he retreated to lick his wounds and turned up two years later with Gold, which he describes as spacious, warm and elegant, classy without being over-pretentious, and an ideal place to have a long business lunch.

One of the most notable improvements Goldstein made when opening Gold was the quality of the wine list, and he’s made strides in his own knowledge of what he’s selling. He says a lot of his stock is sourced at auction sales and that the key to earning his patrons’ trust in regard to the wine list is providing good value.

He admits that he’s far from the level of a sommelier, but has learned plenty about wine in the past nine years of restaurateuring: “I know what goes good with the food and every wine that I’ve put onto the list. I drink it to experience it, so I know what the taste is and what it will go with. Wine and food matching is very important.

“I have a good relationship with distributors in HK – I have only three suppliers and the rest I buy myself. The everyday wine I buy from the suppliers but I look for rare, different unique things. When I was [recently] in New York, I drank a lot of wines to experience. I’m not focused on one thing, I’ll try Israeli wine, Lebanese wine, anything.”

A highlight for Gold’s wine reputation came last summer when Goldstein sold one of his regulars, a mainland property tycoon, a Jeroboam of 1945 Château Mouton Rothschild. One of only 24 bottles in the world, the collector’s item was listed on Gold’s wine list under the aptly-named section “Crazy Stuff” where wines start from HK$15,800. Other collector’s items include a 1961 Pétrus Pomerol at HK$148,000 and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti grand crus (1985 and 1971) from HK$180,000.

“I know the food and the taste and textures of everything on the menu and it’s my goal to have my diners take a mind-blowing culinary journey of drinking wine and eating food,” he says. “If it’s a hot summer day, I’ll start off with a friendly Shaw and Smith Sauvignon Blanc from Australia.

“For a more serious diner I recommend Wente Riva Ranch Chardonnay, Peter Michael La Carrière Chardonnay, Jermann Chardonnay or Giaconda Estate Vineyard Chardonnay. I recommend them with a carpaccio of scampi with figs and orange and citrus dressing, or oysters on the half shell with three different dressings, or steamed clams with Iberico hams and crispy garlic and basil and chilli.”

Strip House, on the other hand, offers a more down-to-earth experience. “It’s a 1940s bordello, a real whorehouse. I’ve exactly recreated a strip club: you’d go in, walk in and all the girls would be coming out and you’d offer to buy them a drink and do a show, a dance. I’ve given it the colours of red velvet curtains, the lighting is much lower, and the music is remixes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I have the oldies back there, so it brings you back to that era. Food-wise I concentrate on prime beef and really great appetisers.

Gold’s sumptuous bar

“Gold is my baby, my flagship property so I really try to spend as much time as I can here but Strip House being the little sister, I also love that little restaurant so I do have a lot of energy to play around with it – adjust the menus, the specials and I have a lot of fun with it. I check it every day, but I also try to concentrate on Gold. I try to divide myself evenly and I have confidence in my team.”

Hand-picked house wines are a combination of Old and New World, including a range of reds: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Shiraz for pairing with steak.
Given his expressive, perpetual-motion- style personality, it won’t stop here for Harlan Goldstein. He’s signed a deal with Lan Kwai Fong pater familias Allan Zeman and will open another Italian concept restaurant in Zeman’s new California Tower next year. He has plans for a Greek restaurant – he’s already named it the Fat Greek – he just needs to find the right location.

In his two decades in Hong Kong, Goldstein has stood witness to a number of significant changes in its dining scene, a progression that has seen it develop a culinary culture that lives up to its reputation as a world city.

“The food scene has improved a lot, there are a lot better concepts now, a lot more talent and it’s become a really great international city for food. Competition is high but that’s good – it makes you want to be better. Product availability is good, and is one of the things that we’ve seen improve over the years.

“There’s been a marked improvement which coincides with when Michelin came in [to publish its first Hong Kong and Macau guide in 2009]. It’s been controversial, some people say ‘no’. I’m going to stay a bit neutral but I want customers to come because they enjoy the food that I’m offering, not because I have a Michelin star. I’ve been to a lot of Michelin-starred restaurants and been disappointed.”

And while he no doubt was disappointed to witness the way his relationship with his first independent restaurant ended, it has made him a better restaurateur.

“I never considered giving up. This is my city. I really love HK. It’s fast, it’s stressful, it’s crazy, it’s exactly what I like.” Quite an about face from the reasons he gave for his reluctance to move to the city 20 years ago.
So after such a bruising experience, what keeps him going? “It’s passion that drives me. My wife always warns me, ‘that’s enough restaurants now, don’t over-expand, you’re doing the same thing that you did before’, she’s telling me the indications and I say, ‘well this is me, I can’t change, I can’t stop.’

“I go at a certain level because I don’t want people to come to my restaurant and say, ‘that was a bad experience’. I’m very conscientious of that. After Gold it was sixteen months before my next project and the one after that will be in a year, so it gives me time.”