22 Ships

Small Plates, Shared Tables: The Tapas Tradition in Hong Kong

Sharing food is not a foreign concept in Hong Kong. Cantonese dining has always been built around the table rather than the individual plate, and dim sum remains the city's most practised social ritual. What Spanish tapas culture adds to that instinct is a different ordering logic: dishes arrive as they're ready, the table evolves throughout the meal, and the point is accumulation rather than sequence. That format has found a receptive audience in a city that understands communal eating but is also increasingly fluent in European culinary traditions.

Within that context, 22 Ships occupies a distinct position. Sitting inside the PMQ compound on Staunton Street in Central, the restaurant operates within a converted 1950s police married quarters building that now houses a mix of creative studios and food and beverage tenants. The physical environment sets the tone before you reach the table: raw concrete, preserved institutional architecture, and an open courtyard that separates the dining experience from the surrounding SoHo street noise. Tapas bars in Spain rarely exist in heritage buildings of this kind, but the logic of the format — casual, convivial, mid-price — translates well to the space.

Where 22 Ships Sits in Central's Dining Hierarchy

Central has historically been Hong Kong's most stratified dining neighbourhood, with a concentration of formal tasting-menu restaurants that price against international peers rather than local cost of living. Properties like 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana, Caprice, and Ta Vie occupy the upper end of that hierarchy, each carrying three or two Michelin stars and menus designed around chef-directed progression. Amber at The Landmark Mandarin Oriental brings a similar formality to French contemporary cooking. Even Cantonese cooking at the leading end, as at Forum, operates through a service model built around deference and occasion.

22 Ships sits in a different tier entirely. Its cuisine pricing at the mid-range (HKD 40–65 equivalent per two courses before beverages) and its recognition on Opinionated About Dining's Casual Asia list , ranked 40th in 2025 , place it in a cohort defined by accessibility and informality rather than ceremony. That ranking matters because OAD's Casual Asia list specifically tracks quality at the non-fine-dining level, meaning the reference peer set is not Michelin-starred tasting rooms but quality-driven neighbourhood restaurants across the region. Reaching the top 40 in that company is a meaningful credential in a field that spans Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok, and beyond.

For comparison, the kind of precision and ingredient-forward thinking that drives places like Aponiente in Spain's El Puerto de Santa María , one of the benchmarks for ingredient-led Spanish cooking , operates at a different price point and intensity. 22 Ships takes the vocabulary of Spanish small plates and applies it within a format that is deliberately approachable, which is a specific editorial choice rather than a compromise.

The Ordering Philosophy: How to Eat at a Tapas Counter

The social ritual of tapas eating is built on a particular kind of table trust. You order more than you think you need, dishes arrive at the kitchen's pace, and the conversation at the table determines how quickly the meal moves. There is no correct endpoint. In Spain's bar culture, this pattern can extend across several hours and several venues; in Hong Kong's more condensed dining format, the same instinct gets compressed into a single sitting but retains the character of accumulation over sequence.

Chef Antonio Oviedo leads the kitchen at 22 Ships, working within this format. The Spanish tapas framework means that breadth matters as much as depth , the table's experience across six or eight dishes is the product, not any single plate. This is a meaningfully different editorial proposition from the chef-directed progression at tasting-menu restaurants like Alinea in Chicago or Atomix in New York, where the sequence is fixed and the guest surrenders control. At 22 Ships, the guest constructs the meal, and that construction is half the experience.

For readers who want to understand how this format sits globally: the leading tapas programs internationally , and Spanish cooking more broadly , have moved in recent years toward ingredient specificity and technical refinement while preserving the social logic of sharing. The OAD Casual Asia ranking reflects that 22 Ships participates in that broader conversation rather than simply transplanting a generic tapas concept.

The Wine List: France, California, and a Mid-Range Entry Point

Wine programs at casual restaurants in Hong Kong tend toward either predictable international house-pour selections or steep fine-dining markups that mirror the restaurant tier above. A list of 110 selections with 975 bottles in inventory occupies a credible middle ground: deep enough to reward exploration but not so sprawling that navigation becomes work. The list's stated strengths , France and California , reflect two distinct but complementary schools of viticulture, one built around terroir expression and the other around fruit-forward winemaking. The double-dollar pricing tier (moderate markup, a range of price points) makes it usable for a casual weeknight as much as a considered dinner.

This wine approach sits in contrast to what you'd encounter at the leading end of Hong Kong dining. The fine-dining tier , including venues like Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monte Carlo or the kind of cellar depth implied by three-Michelin-star properties , typically operates with five times the inventory and pricing that assumes a certain level of spend commitment. The Casual Asia positioning at 22 Ships means the wine list exists to complement rather than anchor the bill.

PMQ and the SoHo Neighbourhood: Where to Place This in Your Hong Kong Visit

The PMQ building on Staunton Street is a short walk uphill from the Central MTR or reachable by the Mid-Levels Escalator, which drops you into the SoHo grid of streets. The neighbourhood has been Hong Kong's most internationally inflected dining zone for over two decades, with European wine bars, independent restaurants, and creative spaces occupying the narrow lanes between Central and the Mid-Levels. For visitors using Hong Kong as a hub and working across multiple evenings, SoHo is the natural base for non-tasting-menu dining: walkable, varied, and operating later into the evening than the more formal tier one neighbourhood down.

22 Ships within PMQ specifically benefits from the compound's ability to absorb noise and crowd , arriving during a busy Friday service feels different from arriving at a street-level bar on Elgin Street, even if the spirit of the meal is similar. It is worth planning around dinner service, as the kitchen focuses on that daypart.

For visitors building a broader Hong Kong itinerary, our full Hong Kong restaurants guide maps the city's dining across price tiers and neighbourhoods. For other dimensions of the visit, the Hong Kong hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the broader picture. And for readers who want to measure this kind of Spanish casual cooking against a completely different register , say, the formal Spanish seafood tradition at Aponiente or American produce-driven cooking as expressed at Lazy Bear in San Francisco or Emeril's in New Orleans , the contrast itself is instructive about how casual formats travel across cultures.

Planning Your Visit

22 Ships is located at S109–S113, Block A, PMQ, Staunton Street, Central, Hong Kong. Dinner is the primary service. The Google rating of 4.2 across 660 reviews gives a reasonable baseline for expectation-setting: this is a consistent, well-regarded casual restaurant, not a destination tasting experience. Arriving without a reservation on a weekend evening carries risk; the combination of the PMQ location's foot traffic and the OAD recognition means tables move. For visitors arriving from outside Hong Kong, pairing this with the broader SoHo neighbourhood , including a drink at one of the area's wine bars before or after , makes sense as an evening structure. The Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen set this is not, and that is entirely the point.