This Bangkok Restaurant Is Serving a Cantonese Menu Inspired by a Chef’s Childhood Memories of Hong Kong

At Yu Ting Yuan, the Chinese restaurant inside Four Seasons Hotel Bangkok at Chao Phraya River, Executive Chef Tommy Cheung has built a menu around a deceptively simple idea: that spring does not arrive all at once. His new tasting menu, Passages of Spring, available daily from March 15 through May 15, 2026, traces the season’s quiet arc from its earliest, most tentative moments through to its full, generous bloom, drawing on seasonal Thai ingredients, Cantonese technique, and a lifetime of personal memory.

Chef Cheung grew up in Hong Kong, and the menu reads like a series of postcards from that city, rerouted through Thailand. Deep-fried spring rolls filled with fish maw and lobster, wrapped in crisp northern Thai betel leaves, recall the aroma of fried wontons from a Sham Shui Po street stall he passed every spring as a child. Steamed tomato, asparagus and pork dumplings bring back afternoons near the old Wan Chai Pier, where the sight of tomato-and-pork dumplings signaled that the season had finally turned. A jade-green spinach and river shrimp soup, puréed until silken and threaded with tofu, bamboo shoots and mushrooms, was inspired by the spinach porridge his mother prepared during Hong Kong’s humid spring rains.

The menu’s most distinctive dish is a steamed Thai sand-goby with fifteen-year-aged tangerine peel, a pairing that balances the fish’s peak tenderness against the peel’s deep, mellow warmth, a flavor that Chef Cheung traces directly to the citrus tea his grandmother made each spring. Young bamboo shoots alongside keep the dish grounded in the season’s signature freshness. A final savory course of braised Thai frog legs with seasonal bamboo shoots, shrimp roe and Thai basil completes the arc, its layered aromas evoking a bamboo forest after spring rain.

The collaboration component of the series brings Chef Li Qiang of Cai Yi Xuan at Four Seasons Hotel Beijing, a one Michelin star and Black Pearl recipient, to Bangkok for two evenings on March 27 and 28, 2026. The four-hands dinner pairs northern Chinese precision with Chef Cheung’s contemporary Cantonese sensibility across a progression that moves from delicate appetizers through a double-boiled quail soup, steamed fish, braised pork with early spring bamboo and a noodle course, before closing on a durian-pandan dessert. The dinner is priced at 5,800 Thai baht per person, with an optional wine pairing at an additional 3,500 Thai baht per person.

Passages of Spring is served at lunch and dinner daily through May 15, 2026.