Bonnie Gokson is well acquainted with the good life. But Crave discovers that it’s her commitment to simplicity and excellence that makes her restaurant stand out from the rest.
Text by Winnie Yeung
It is Friday evening, and on the outdoor terrace of SEVVA, the top floor restaurant at Prince’s Building in Central, the DJ is spinning tunes. Behind the couch which SEVVA’s owner Bonnie Gokson is sitting, people dressed to the nines are sashaying in and out of the terrace door with glasses of bubbly. It’s quite the scene. Gokson says. “Well it’s Friday night after all.”
Despite a rocky start two years ago (it has received some negative reviews on the food and service when it first opened), SEVVA is now going strong, and is commonly known as the “canteen at the rich”. “A lot of regulars dine here three, four times a week,” Gokson says.
Some credit SEVVA’s success to Gokson’s fame, as well as her family background. She is a member of the Kwok family, who founded and still owns Wing On department stores. Her older sister is Joyce Ma, the founder of Joyce Boutique. Gokson herself is a style icon, serving as image director for Chanel Asia-Pacific for years.
Fame and family alone, however, isn’t what brings in the business. SEVVA, despite looking like a standard fine-dining establishment, prides itself on being different from other high-end restaurants.
“Right-now the food trend out there is all about extra modern, quirky dishes. I recently had a dish, in which they paired white chocolate with caviar. It’s intriguing, but it tastes awful to me,” she says. “I’ve visited Fat Duck and el Bulli as well, but I think at the end of the day, people don’t generally like being fed with foams of different flavours everyday. I want them to keep coming back, so we do classic dishes that people are familiar with, with a bit of modern twist, of course. We serve honest food, because I want to do things I believe in.
Many of Gokson’s childhood memories revolve around food. She always had her own steamed mini whole garoupa for dinner when she was young because she loved it so much that she cleaned it to the bone like a cat every time. She also remembers hanging out at “Chinglish” restaurants like Cherikoff, along with her sister Joyce. “I always had my filet mignon and non-alcoholic Mickey Mouse cocktail,” she says.
But the memories that stand out most involve the food prepared by the family cook, Sister Yuk. “I don’t know where Sister Yuk came from, but what I do remember is how well she cooked, and that she handled all of our family’s bigger dinners,” Gokson recalls. “Her baked crabmeat in shell was done in the traditional way-every bite you had was full of crab meat.”
Today, Sister Yuk’s baked crab meat in shell is one of SEVVA’s signature dishes. Many others follow a similar vein-they are interpretations of Gokson’s memories of the best dishes she has had around the world. “We don’t do ‘la-di-da’, crazy dishes. Instead, we are determined to serve the best quality dishes, honour the classical recipes, even if it has to be done in the slowest possible way,” she says. The items on SEVVA’s menu are classics and familiar, yet done meticulously- a dish that you can gulp down in less than 10 minutes might have taken hours, or even days to prepare.
Gokson’s belief in honest food also has roots in her understanding and study of eating nutritiously. She implemented a balanced, healthy menu when she ran Joyce Cafe, an establishment she and her sister Joyce ran in the latter’s boutique more than a decade ago.
“We’re Chinese and we’ve always adopted healthy eating practices,” she explains. “Of course there are people who come to SEVVA, expecting rich ingredients,” she continues. “It’s their choice, but I’ll keep using mostly healthier ingredients instead.”
The practice of serving classic but intricately made dishes comes from Gokson’s belief that what makes or breaks a restaurant is the quality of the food.
“I just came back from a lunch at a top hotel restaurant-gorgeous view, but the service was poor. Worst of all the food wasn’t very good,” she says. “Restaurants are getting mediocre-people focus too much on the newness, like the perky new concepts, the decor, the hardware,” Godson says. “But there’s no real substance there.”
Gokson explains that people have gone to SEVVA and challenged her over the fame, or perceived lack thereof, of her chefs. “They came and asked, ‘So who are your chefs? Where did they come from? What do you have that others don’t?’”She says. “You can have the best chef in the world, with all the fame, but it’s simply not that simple.”
“I do it the other way round-I hire the right chefs to cook the dishes on my menu perfectly so you will respect the food-not to hire the most famous chef you can find. I only do things to stay true to myself.”
My Favourite Things with Bonnie Gokson
What is your favourite Hong Kong dish?
I love a good bowl of wonton noodles, especially when I am overseas for too long. You can only have that in Hong Kong, and nowhere else. The noodles are just so delightfully al dente.
Where do you go when you are craving local cuisine?
I love the Shanghainese restaurants and Cantonese kitchens in Wan Chai. The local vegetables are so much more tender-you can only find such tender baby kale in Hong Kong.
How do you like your hairy crabs?
Like most people, I like to crack open a whole crab but I hate cracking the claws by myself. So I also love the simply hairy crab roe stir-fry. Mmm.
What is the best city for food?
I don’t have one favourite restaurant but there are quite a few I love-serving modern American, French, Italian and Japanese-and they are in New York.
What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
I have one cocktail too many at times, and OD on too much caviar or hairy crabs. That makes me swear that I will not eat any for another year.
Share a piece of food knowledge with us
I’ve always been obsessed with healthy and nutritious eating. Here’s a tip: what helps protect men from prostate cancer? Simple: a bowl of pumpkin soup.
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