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Award Winning Chef Rowley Leigh, Chef and Restaurant Consultant of The Continental Hong Kong, opening in October

01 Sep 2014

Award Winning Chef Rowley Leigh, Chef and Restaurant Consultant of The Continental Hong Kong, opening in October

Swire Hotels is pleased to announce that Rowley Leigh, British Chef, Restaurateur and Food Writer is the chef Consultant of The Continental, Hong Kong, the flagship stand-alone restaurant owned and managed by the newly-established restaurant division of Swire Hotels.

Rowley is one of the founding fathers of modern British cooking. Over the past two decades in London, he has been acclaimed as one of UK’s most outstanding and celebrated chefs heading iconic restaurants such as Le Café Anglais, Kensington Place, and Le Poulbot after an apprenticeship at Joe Allen and Le Gavroche.

In 1998, Rowley also began a career as cookery writer, winning the prestigious Glenfiddich award three times with The Guardian and The Sunday Telegraph and has now been ten years at The Financial Times.

The Continental at Pacific Place opens in October with interiors created by David Collins Studio, the team behind The Wolseley and The Delaunay in London and Scarpetta in Miami. The restaurant will occupy the free-standing building on L4 designed by Thomas Heatherwick, who was responsible for London’s New Routemaster bus and Olympic Cauldron, as well as the Pacific Place Contemporisation Project.

The Continental’s menu draws its inspiration from the grand cafés of Europe and will feature a variety of European classic dishes from breakfast through lunch and dinner to late night drinks and snacks.

“I was brought up with a French style incorporating other elements into recipes where I’d take one out and put something else in. It’s a lot French, a little Italian and an British sensibility. Everything I do is a response to the best ingredients and I just try to do justice to them,” said Chef Leigh.

The Continental follows the successful launch in November last year of Plat du Jour, the French bistro in Hoi Wan Street in Taikoo Place and Public in One Island East opening in September.

The restaurants will follow Swire Hotels’ sustainable dining principles: in addition to sourcing food from sustainable sources, they will use quality local ingredients wherever possible.