Loyal Dining aims to capture the era of 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong a la Wong Kar-Wai. While the restaurant is not quite as lovely as the famous director’s settings, it does make a rather good effort with checkered wallpapers, black and white floors, old-fashioned lamps and old-school photos lining the walls. The seating can be cramped, so make sure to ask for the booths along the side.

Loyal Dining harks back to the time when colonialists first arrived in Hong Kong and asked Chinese restaurants to recreate some beloved favourites from home such as steaks, beef Wellington and borsch. Not quite sure what these dishes were meant to taste like, local chefs incorporated Chinese elements such as soy sauce marinade to chicken wings, or rice served with beef stroganoff, creating a fusion cuisine known as soy sauce Western. We start with some quintessential soy sauce Western dishes: Russian borsch and chicken wings simmered in soya sauce (also known as Swiss chicken wings). Eastern Europeans will be surprised by the absence of beet, potatoes or sour cream in the soup, but locals will be familiar with this thin interpretation of borsch, filled with crisp cabbage and julienned carrots, which is pleasant enough but not memorable. What is worth a return visit, however, are the chicken wings, which are nicely fatty and come in a delicious homemade soya sauce. Salads are not usually a strong suit in soy sauce Western cuisine so we were surprised by the Caesar salad, which is appropriately seasoned and dressed. The only flaw to the salad was that it was served in a bowl, which made the large pieces of romaine difficult to cut. For mains, we try the beef Wellington; a signature dish of seared foie gras and barbecued pork rice with fried egg; and stir-fried garoupa with broccoli in XO sauce. The best was by far the foie gras and pork rice. The barbecued pork is as good as those found in any specialist Cantonese roast restaurant and while the foie gras is under-seasoned, it is also cooked well with a crispy exterior and melting middle. The sunny side up egg could have been runnier, but all in all, it is a delicious if meaty plate of food. The beef Wellington did not fare as well. Well-done rather than medium rare as requested, the beef is tough and dry while the pastry is too thin. The garoupa is a better choice with a juicy fillet of fish on a crisp bed of broccoli and the XO sauce lending just the right amount of spice.

There is no wine list available at Loyal Dining and only one beer (Heineken) on offer.

The stereotype of old-fashioned and abrupt waiters is certainly true at Loyal Dining. We were welcomed curtly and told that we had nearly lost our table (although we had actually arrived five minutes early), due to our not picking up the restaurant’s phone call to confirm the table. Half of our table’s main courses arrived 40 minutes after the others, a fact which was neither acknowledged nor apologised for.

A three-course meal for two should come to just under HK$600. While this is not a lot considering Loyal Dining’s prime location on Wellington Street, it is significantly more expensive than other restaurants in its category.