https://lubuds.com/yuan/

## 2. Yuan

Allium vegetables, onion, garlic, leeks, and their relatives, are absent from every dish at Yuan, a restriction the Central restaurant maintains not for religious reasons but as a deliberate culinary discipline drawn from a long tradition within Chinese vegetarian cooking. That constraint has shaped a menu built entirely around plant-based ingredients prepared with the kind of technical refinement more commonly associated with meat-based fine dining, under executive chef Ronald Shao.

The tasting menu moves through dishes that reference far beyond China's own culinary borders: a Chinese bun filled with olive vegetables opens the meal, followed by a soup built on coconut, galangal, and lemon leaf that draws on Southeast Asian flavour profiles, and a fregola pasta dressed with Thai bitter melon that folds Italian technique into the same Southeast Asian register. Sichuan dan dan noodles bring the menu back to a more familiar Chinese register, reworked here without the allium base that defines most versions of the dish elsewhere. The restaurant's seasonal approach means the exact lineup shifts through the year, built around what is available rather than a fixed card.

Yuan occupies a ground floor unit inside Chinachem Hollywood Centre, on a stretch of Hollywood Road better known for antique dealers and contemporary galleries than for restaurants of this kind, giving it a quieter footing than the busier restaurant rows nearby in SoHo. The absence of meat, together with the allium-free approach, has made the restaurant a specific destination for vegetarian diners seeking a fine dining register rather than the more casual vegetarian cafes found elsewhere in the city, and its inclusion in guides to the city's halal dining options reflects that a fully plant-based kitchen sidesteps many of the sourcing questions that come with halal meat.

Operating under the Lubuds Group, which runs several other dining concepts across Hong Kong, Yuan has positioned itself within a small field of restaurants treating Chinese vegetarian cooking as a fine dining category in its own right rather than a dietary accommodation folded into a broader menu.