The Hyatt Hotel is one of Manila’s grandest and for me one of the more accessible five-star hotels in the metro. I live maybe 20 minutes away, and after this luncheon I had, I began wondering why we didn’t visit the restaurants here a little more. I was invited to an intimate lunch at Li Li’s Restaurant a few days ago to sample the restaurant’s lauded dimsum dishes alongside a couple of other cool kids (READ: really talented bloggers). It was my first time being formally invited to an event like this, so I was a mixture of nerves and excitement. Aside from the delicious food, the other great part was getting to meet other bloggers like myself. I’m actually a shy person but I somehow managed to be less awkward, and in the end I had a lot of fun and ate a lot of dimsum!
Speaking of dimsum, I am a huuuuge dimsum lover. If you’ve been following this blog, you’d know I made a promise to myself to cook every single recipe from my favourite dimsum cookbook. Apart from that, almost every month, my two best friends and I go out for a dimsum date where we always end up stuffing our faces full of har gao and radish cake. But if I thought what we did during those times already qualified as “stuffing” ourselves, boy was I wrong. Eating here at Li Li’s, now this is the real deal.
Hyatt’s Li Li Restaurant is inspired by the life and the home of Li Li. She was born and raised in Hong Kong, and because she belonged to an affluent Chinese family, she was able to study in La Sorbonne in Paris. Her love for both the Chinese culture and the Parisian lifestyle led her to make the decision of settling in Paris with a mission to introduce her rich Chinese cultural heritage to the Europeans. She then opened a gallery specializing in Asian fine arts. During one of her visits to Geneva to attend an Asian-themed art exhibit, she met and was swept off her feet by Vince, a French UN Ambassador for Culture.
