Hong Kong

The Lobby of the Peninsula Hong Kong is the mother of all Asian afternoon teas: a string quartet on the balcony, columns gilded in 1928, a queue on the Salisbury Road that the hotel refuses to take reservations for. Across the harbour the Mandarin Oriental answers with the Clipper Lounge and the Mandarin Cake Shop, where the rose petal jam has been made to the same recipe for half a century. Rosewood Hong Kong, the newest palace on the Kowloon waterfront, added Butterfly Patisserie and a tea in the Butterfly Room that has become the reservation of the city.

Below the palaces sits the cake-shop culture of the city: the egg tart, the pineapple bun, the paper-wrapped sponge, the mooncakes that the Peninsula has turned into an annual sell-out. Bakehouse, opened by a former palace pastry chef, is where Hong Kong now queues at eight in the morning for sourdough egg tarts, and Dang Wen Li by Dominique Ansel brought the Cronut spirit to Harbour City.

Chocolate is the youngest craft here: Conspiracy Chocolate makes bean-to-bar in Hong Kong with Asian flavours, and La Maison du Chocolat keeps a salon in Central. Prices sit between Tokyo and London; the hotel teas are a bargain by Dubai standards, and the egg tart is the best two euros in the guide.