27th Aug 2025 - Bloomberg "Burger King Leaves Hong Kong’s Peak as Black Sheep Rolls In"
Burger King Leaves Hong Kong’s Peak as Black Sheep Rolls In
By Jill Disis, Tara Mulholland, Alan Wong, and Supriya Batra
In this week’s Hong Kong Edition, we take a look at the changing restaurant landscape up on Victoria Peak — so long, Burger King — and speak with a local piano prodigy. For the Review, we find a vegan dim sum spot where even self-proclaimed carnivores won’t miss the meat.
To subscribe to this weekly newsletter for free, click here.
King Off the Hill
We say farewell this weekend to a Victoria Peak institution.
Not the Tram, of course, nor the Peak Galleria. We’re talking about the Peak branch of Burger King, long the American fast-food chain’s last bastion in the city proper (an airport venue, located past security, lives on).
While the restaurant was packed during a recent Saturday visit, there were hints of an empire in decline, not least the line of broken self-serve kiosks at the time. The Whoppers weren't as whopping as you might expect either, and they cost a heady HK$73 ($9.38) each. Burger King on the Peak closes Sunday.
It was clear from the rest of our tour around the city’s most famous vantage point that there’s been a significant transition of power up there. Restaurant heavyweight Black Sheep has left its mark all over the hilltop, opening five new venues this year.
“The Peak is such an iconic location,” Akbar Butt, Black Sheep’s chief operating officer, told us. The group now has six ventures on the Peak, a special place for him and his fellow executives who grew up in Hong Kong and take inspiration from it. “For a while, we felt the F&B program could really benefit from a few upgrades over there.”
The transformation of the Peak’s gastro scene is a microcosm of a larger trend playing out across the city. We’ve written plenty in this newsletter about the challenges Hong Kong restaurants face as spending habits shift among locals and tourists. People have become thriftier since the pandemic, an issue compounded by the allure of bargains across the border in Shenzhen.
“If Hong Kong was the city that never slept, it looks like the not-so-sleepy people have moved north,” John Wong, an associate dean and professor at the University of Hong Kong who has studied business in the region, told us when we rang him this week. Options in Shenzhen are cheaper and varied, offering what he called “a repertoire of cuisines that can rival Hong Kong in many ways.”
Pricing is key to surviving as a Hong Kong restaurant operator. While Black Sheep owns several luxury and premium eateries, there’s been a “shift in strategy” toward value-conscious consumers as a component of the company’s expansion plans, Butt said.
Take pizza, for example: Customers at Falcone, Black Sheep’s neo-Neapolitan style pizzeria, can expect to dine out for at least HK$400 each. At Peak Pizza — a by-the-slice joint the company opened in January — a meal runs closer to HK$50 (if one slice is enough to sate your appetite).
Formulating the secret sauce that brings in customers can be expensive. Black Sheep founder Syed Asim Hussain late last year pegged the company’s spend on new developments at $30 million. Roughly half of that has been directed toward its hometown Hong Kong, including the Peak venues.
Turning that investment into profit has required some agility. Butt said some of Black Sheep’s recent success was born from pop-up experiments — including Peak Pizza, which got its start as a temporary spot in the city’s Soho neighborhood. Peng Leng Jeng, the company’s take on a traditional dai pai dong, is extending a pop-up run because of strong demand.
There’s an advantage in being small and nimble, said Jonathan Glover, founder and director of the Hidden Gem restaurant group.
“Gone are the days of fat cats with expense accounts spending 1,500 bucks on lunch,” he said. “Tourists, particularly the international business traveler, are not here in the way they were.”
Hidden Gem — owner of the Flat Iron Steak chain, as well as the recently opened Picanhas’ and Lasagna Factory — designs its concepts around specific meats that can be imported at high volume and lower cost. All restaurants are supplied by a centralized butchery and kitchen, enabling them to operate with smaller on-site kitchens and higher seating capacity.
The company also leases existing restaurant spaces that have failed or are being vacated, allowing it to avoid expensive refurbishments while negotiating rent and revenue-sharing opportunities with landlords.
The restaurant industry can be notoriously brutal, and the past few years haven’t been kind to many operators in Hong Kong and elsewhere. But Glover is bullish about the future of the city’s food industry. It’s just a matter of making sure the price is right.
“The locals are here,” Glover said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re a small enough group and lean enough and flexible enough to pivot. And that’s the key.” —Jill Disis and Tara Mulholland