Daniele Cason opens a pizza omakase counter in Hong Kong
Chef Daniele Cason's Tokyo pizza omakase, rated Asia-Pacific's best for three years running, opens a second counter at Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong from 2 November.
The Pizza Bar by Daniele Cason has opened its second permanent address at Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, bringing a Tokyo pizza omakase that has built month-long waiting lists to Victoria Harbour from 2 November.
The restaurant sits inside the hotel's dining wing, where a handful of counter seats look directly onto a wood-fired oven. Guests watch each dough disc get stretched, topped and slid into the heat before it reaches the table.
Daniele Cason, who trained in Rome, has run the original Pizza Bar on 38th inside Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, since 2021. Food and travel title Foodie reports that restaurant has been named Asia-Pacific's number one pizza destination by 50 Top Pizza for three years running, a ranking that has pushed its own reservations book out by months.
One oven, one chef, and a reservation book that Tokyo diners already know is hard to crack.
Daniele Cason crosses the harbour
Hong Kong diners had a preview in June 2025, when Cason ran a four-day pop-up in the hotel's Gloucester Room. That menu, priced at HKD 1,888 per person for both lunch and dinner, set the template the permanent restaurant now follows: seven Roman-style pizza alla pala, made with dough fermented for 48 hours, topped with ingredients that shift between Italian and Japanese registers through the seasons.
Named dishes on the preview menu included a marinara, a baby corn pizza with charcoal-grilled tuna, a Wagyu beef version with eggplant and black lemon, and a zucchini and duck sausage pairing. Dessert was a fior di latte gelato with lemon jam and Okinawa mango, with a four-glass wine pairing offered alongside a non-alcoholic option.
Two sittings, ten seats, one counter
The permanent Daniele Cason restaurant runs two sittings each for lunch, at 11:30am and 1:30pm, and dinner, at 6pm and 8:30pm. It closes on Mondays. Mandarin Oriental's own listing recommends the counter for guests aged 12 and over; families with younger children are directed to a separate ten-seat private dining room instead.
The dress code is smart casual, with sportswear, flip-flops and beachwear turned away at the door. Given how quickly the Gloucester Room pop-up sold out in 2025, the counter's handful of seats are likely to move fast once word spreads beyond the hotel's own guest list.
Hong Kong has leaned into chef-led dining this autumn: the city's Gourmet Month festival put 400 restaurants on one programme through November. The Pizza Bar adds a narrower, pricier counterpoint to that scale — one oven, one chef, and a wait that Tokyo diners already know well.
