(Full disclosure – I received one night’s free stay at the hotel as well as free dinner and breakfast, presumably in return for posting reviews here.  Naturally this might incline me to be more positive than usual but I promise that everything here is my honest opinion; feel free to treat this with as many grains of salt as you’d like.)

I grew up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in The Bronx and I’ve been eating Italian food all my life, but all of the Italian food I ate growing up was Americanized versions of southern Italian cuisine.   Italian food is extremely popular all over Asia and Hong Kong is blessed with some really special Italian restaurants representing all of the country’s various regions, allowing me to broaden my taste and experience.  Even after all these years here, I have yet to visit all of the notable Italian establishments here.  My favorite Italian meals in Hong Kong to date were at Toscana at the Ritz-Carlton.  Toscana is gone and that chef has a new restaurant in HK that I have yet to try.  At any rate, I feel that I do know a thing or two about Italian food.

When the Holiday Inn Golden Mile informed me that my free night’s stay would include a free dinner, I looked at the list of restaurants there and I was hoping it would be at their Italian restaurant and luckily it was.  Osteria Ristorante Italiano opened in 2009 and represents one of the steps that the Harilela Group is taking to upgrade this iconic hotel.

When we approached the restaurant, I was thrilled to note the open kitchen.  Not only could we look in but they could look out and that was a good thing because there was no one at the front desk to seat us.  The chef noticed us standing there and called over to the staff to get someone to help us out immediately.  This is the chef:

Michele Camolei is originally from La Spezia in northern Italy and is said to be a veteran of Michelin-starred restaurants in Tokyo.  From a bit of googling around, I discovered that he’s a vegetarian, which in this case means that he’s made certain vegetarians are well catered for on his menu, which concentrates on classic recipes and simple fare.

The restaurant doesn’t really look like the titular Osteria but the look is simple, clean, low key and somewhere between casual and formal.  The only drawback I could find was that the relatively low ceiling made for a noisy venue when the place was full – and it definitely was full when we arrived.

Manager Gianluca Ciola made us feel very welcome.  One might think it was because they had written “VIP” next to my name in the computer but he seemed to be putting on the same level of effort at every table.  Luca comes from Venice and told me he’d previously lived and worked in Shanghai.   We started off with two glasses of chianti.  There were some nice bread sticks on the table and someone came by with their basket of breads, another server filled small dishes with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Exactly the way it should be.

My gf loves her ham so I suggested she should start with the classic combination of parma ham and melon.  The ham was excellent and the portion was about twice the size that I would have expected.  That was good because I was able to steal from her plate more than once.

For me, whenever there’s a carpaccio on the menu, I go with that.   Here it’s a little bit different – some salmon (smoked in house) served with green apple slices while the “first class beef” was topped with mushrooms and some ricotta cheese (to which Chef Michele later told me he added other ingredients to keep it light and fresh) and of course some parmesan, with a lightly dressed salad of arugala (or rocket as the Brits call it) and cherry tomatoes.  The salmon tasted very nice, fresh, just lightly smoked.  The beef was fantastic.  I can’t recall ever having a better carpaccio.

On to the main courses.  My gf went for the porchetta, two large sizes of perfectly cooked suckling pig.  The skin was amazing, the sauce was great (sorry, I neglected to write down all the menu details) with a nice green vegetable and some fingerling potatoes.  The portion was way too large for my gf to finish which meant once again that I had a generous tasting of this.  Nice.

I was originally thinking about the osso bucco but then I decided to go for lighter fare.  Spinach fettucini with lobster, prawn, scallop and asparagus lightly dressed with olive oil and garlic.  They make their pasta in house and again, what sets apart this basically simple dish is that it was expertly prepared.  The pasta was al dente, of course, and the shellfish was excellent as well.  Again, a huge portion, I couldn’t finish the whole thing!

At this point we were really full.  Unfortunately we couldn’t even contemplate any dessert, so I can’t tell you about that.  As we finished off our wine and let our stomachs settle, I looked around the room at other plates of food coming out of the kitchen.  Even the look of the pizza impressed me.  I could be very happy to return here with my gf and we could order a pizza and some wine and enjoy.

Signing the bill I saw that if we had paid, the meal – two starters, two mains, two glasses of wine – would have cost us under HK$1,100 and I think that’s very reasonable given the quality of the food that we ate.  I’ve got “no reservations” about recommending this restaurant and definitely plan to return.