Stack Concepts Ltd

Hong Kong’s pop-up restaurant scene is exploding, but few (forgive us) stack up as neatly as Stack, whom you’ll find invading all sorts of spaces around the city – night markets, going head to head with other pop-ups – but whose headquarters are stylishly rooted on the corner of Third Street and Eastern Street in Sai Ying Pun. What’s on offer is a smorgasbord of carefully curated, vibrant dishes, with a focus on sweet and savoury pancakes (the name makes sense now, right?) and boutique bottled cocktails.

Stack is a friendly pop-up restaurant; so friendly in fact that not only are guests welcomed with a grin that you’ll find hard to avoid imitating by the time your food arrives, but indeed so friendly they make collaborators out of those that traditionalist restaurateurs would consider rivals. This is the essence of Hong Kong’s pop-up scene, and it’s an exciting thing for diners to get involved in. For instance, 2014 saw Stack’s Sai Ying Pun pancake house hosting a far-from-hostile takeover by culinary buddies Eat Ethio under the Twins Kitchen banner, bringing Ethiopian cuisine to the corner of Eastern and Third Street, if only for a day.

But in terms of Stack’s actual day to day offering, diners can expect ridiculously opulent pancakes like the salted mascarpone cheese stack, buried under chunks of crunchy honeycomb and drowned in caramel sauce. We do like to begin with dessert, but for savoury-toothed Hong Kong foodies, Stack’s ham and cheese with hash stack is a good Sunday brunching option. All this said, blink and you’ll miss it – the menu changes in proportion to the attention spans of Stack’s creative cooks, an additional appetising side effect of this being the fact that you’ll also find delicacies like salted and roasted flathead mullet, tenderloin steak tartare (it sort of resembles a pancake, doesn’t it?), and blue lobster paella adorning the chalkboards, if only for a day. Find this highly stylish Sai Ying Pun eatery at the intersection of Third Street and Eastern Street, and find it quick or be left eating Stack’s dust – although we’re sure that this would taste good, too.