Restaurant Porn is a column of daydreams presented as a means to introduce BC diners and designers to concepts, looks, and fully-formed ideas that they might draw an inkling of inspiration from.

(via) Take a good look at Eat Darling Eat, a modern Chinese dessert shop in Hong Kong. It’s spectacularly different. While uniquely bright, colourful, hard-edged and artfully futuristic (more Fifth Element than Blade Runner), I wonder if its appearance doesn’t suspend the disbelief of its sweet-toothed customers, putting them in head-spaces close to our imagined explorations of, say, Willy Wonka’s fantastic Chocolate Factory…

I mean, have you ever seen bar stools like these? Me neither. I have more questions. What do the staff uniforms look like? Are the desserts delivered by robot? Where the hell is the point of sale? I have no idea and I don’t care, and that’s just part of the power of the design by Hong Kong’s NC Design & Architecture. I’m already sold. The firm is headed by the young and exceedingly talented Nelson Chow, who was not only schooled in architecture here in Canada but also tailoring in New York City. He’s done a lot of really cool work in his career so far, much of it in hospitality. This is my favourite so far.

Located on the ground floor of the Fashion Walk mall in the megacity’s Causeway Bay, Eat Darling Eat’s bread and butter is the fancification of nostalgic childhood faves like pineapple buns, tong sui and egg tarts. I was expecting some dreamy Coruscant weirdness on the menu but it all sounds rather down to earth, which makes me dig it even more.

– Photos by Nic Gaunt –