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This decent and good-value hotel is reasonably well located and even boasts its own art gallery. Standards are high (it’s run by the Inter-Continental Group), there are four restaurants, a gym, pool and sauna.

If the wallet won’t stand up to a meal, just drink in the bar and watch everyone watching everyone else (see Felix).

The food is fantastic, the view better and the bar crammed with the rich and famous. The highlight, for men at least, are the cheeky Philippe Starck-designed urinals, where you relieve yourself against a glass wall and feel like you’re showering Hong Kong.

The shining pinnacle of Hong Kong bars is set in Kowloon’s famous Peninsula Hotel. Philippe Starcke designed Felix, and the result is coolness incarnate. Let the experience envelope you, beginning with the dedicated elevators and their light effects, to the untrammelled delights of Felix’s restrooms. The harbour views are an added bonus. If you plan to visit just one bar in Hong Kong, make this the one (see Felix).

In fact, the festivities are fairly muted here, but the food is good. Northern-style Chinese cooking and glossy interiors.

Fun and fetish goods go together in this smart store dedicated to cross-dressers and leather lovers. Look out for the family of leather teddy bears.

Most members of the largest ethnic minority stoically perform the low-paid occupations that Hong Kongers shun, working as domestic servants, drivers, waiting staff and bar room musicians, and remitting most of their income back home to the Philippines. Filipinas promenade in their thousands every Sunday at Statue Square (see Thomas Jackson Statue).

A daily food for many Hong Kongers, either on skewers as snacks or served with noodles in broth to make a meal. Traditional restaurants eschew machine production methods, and still shape these balls of minced fish, white pepper and other spices by hand, before poaching them in seafood or chicken stock.