He went from club nights to a Hong Kong restaurant empire: meet Leading Nation’s Gerald Li

Li has built his restaurant empire over the years to include both high-end and casual concepts in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Manila and Chengdu. Photo: Jonathan Wong

• Gerald Li, co-founder of Leading Nation, the group behind Forty-Five, talks about his path to the top of Hong Kong's fine-dining scene

Forty-Five is one of the most ambitious dining concepts to open in Hong Kong since the end of the coronavirus pandemic.

The three restaurants, rooftop bar and private members' club high above the Landmark luxury mall in Central were launched in the spring of 2023.

The hospitality group behind the venue beat out much bigger competitors to win the tender for the project.

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That group is Leading Nation, a Hong Kong company founded in 2016 by Gerald Li and Kevin Poon.

Before Forty-Five, Leading Nation had established itself by launching cafe chain Elephant Grounds, high-end restaurants such as the members-only Wagyumafia and omakase joint Sushi Mamoru, and casual restaurants including the deli shop Morty's and ramen bar Mashi No Mashi, an outpost of which recently opened in Singapore.

In addition to Hong Kong and Singapore, the group has a presence in cities including Tokyo, Manila, and Chengdu in mainland China.

Two years ago, over lunch at Sushi Mamoru, Li revealed almost sheepishly his plans for Forty-Five.

He gave details of one of its components, the ultra-luxurious haute cuisine restaurant Cristal Room by Anne-Sophie Pic, which, designed in conjunction with crystal ware company Baccarat, would become Leading Nation's crown jewel after opening in November 2023.

Despite this, Li seemed reluctant to draw any attention to himself and shied away from having the Post profile him or write about his ambitious venture.

Now that Forty-Five has been completed, and Leading Nation can finally boast it has a Michelin-star restaurant in its stable (Cristal Room received its first star in March, less than six months after opening), Li is ready at last to step into the limelight.

"Looking back, it's actually [been] more difficult than I thought," he says, admitting that he perhaps underestimated the scale of the project at the beginning.

"We've always been doing these multi-concept places [where] we take one space that is activated with different types of concepts so that it provides a different experience for guests," he says, referring to venues such as The Diplomat bar, with its hidden back room, and how Mashi No Mashi is interconnected with Wagyumafia.

"I thought it would just be like, open one restaurant and keep on going. And it really wasn't."

For Forty-Five, Li says he had to ramp up the process while juggling the numerous parties involved, including three different designers and two contractors and a separate party handling just the furniture.

There was also an important deadline to be met - to have the space, and specifically Cardinal Point, the project's rooftop bar, open in time for a big Art Basel party at the end of March 2023.

In the end, even though the furniture wasn't completely ready - the bar counter used for the party was a temporary one - the event went off without a hitch, crowning Cardinal Point as the new rooftop hotspot to rival the soon-to-close Sevva.

Such champagne-fuelled events have long been familiar to Li, who unexpectedly made his start in Hong Kong's bar and restaurant scene in nightclubs more than two decades ago.

After graduating from university in Toronto, Li returned to Hong Kong ready to enter law school - and have fun.

"In those university days [in Toronto], there were all these 'Asian parties', you know, hip hop and leather jackets," he laughs. "That culture wasn't really built [in Hong Kong] yet."

With a few of his fellow Torontonians, Li started dabbling in organising DJ parties and music promotion nights at clubs, which eventually led him to Edge, then one of the hottest nightclubs on Wyndham Street, in Hong Kong's Central neighbourhood.

"I was still in university doing law licensing," he says. "We did parties for Edge and then we took a cut of the percentages for the bar. And then we just ended up taking it over."

The club offered a stage for some trailblazing young Asian-American acts of the early noughties, including Jin Au-yeung, aka MC Jin, and hip hop group Far East Movement.

"That's how I met [Kevin] Poon," Li says of his business partner and co-founder of Leading Nation. Poon, who had started the fashion brand Clot with musician Edison Chen, would often use the venue for events and the two struck up a friendship.

Eventually, they would work together on producing the Hong Kong leg of Kanye West's Touch the Sky world tour, taking over a car park space in what is now the West Kowloon Cultural District and "building a stadium" for the event in 2006.

"That was the heyday when people were spending like crazy," he recalls.

Buoyed by his success, Li never ended up pursuing law.

From nightclubs, he moved into dining when he was given the opportunity to help open a modern Japanese restaurant in Beijing's central business district before the city staged the summer Olympic Games in 2008.

Makoto, an ambitious 12,000 square foot (1,110 square-metre) restaurant in a luxury office building, was named after its launch chef Makoto Ono - a Japanese-Canadian from Winnipeg who was crowned Canada's Culinary Champion in 2007.

It was actually Li's mother who met Makoto first in Canada; she connected the chef with her son when she learned that he was looking for someone to head the project in China.

The two fast became friends, and while the restaurant was covered favourably in Beijing media, that wasn't enough. "We did it for a year, and then it failed miserably," Li says, glumly.

Several factors contributed to Makoto's demise; not only was the office location not ideal, but Li quickly realised that being an outsider in China made things more difficult. "Beijing wasn't like what it is now. We had a lot of failures, from margins to staffing to not knowing the market."

After the restaurant closed, Li and Makoto - disenchanted by how the business had been run by their partners - decided to open their own venture in Hong Kong.

The private kitchen Liberty Private Works launched in 2009 on Stanley Street, Central; the name, Li says, was a nod to how they felt free from the drama of the previous project.

That was followed in 2010 by Liberty Exchange at Exchange Square, in Central, a larger space open to the public. It is the restaurant where young Canadian-Chinese transplant Vicky Cheng would cut his teeth as executive chef before opening VEA in 2012, which now has one Michelin star.

"A lot of the restaurants and concepts kind of grew from where my life was at the time," Li says.

From his club days to maturing into a restaurateur, it has been a long road to the top. Li is grateful for the "strong bonds" he has formed with his staff over the years, many who have been with him since Leading Nation's early days.

"If I have that connection, and I have that trust, I can show them that they can continue improving," he says. "And then they'll continue helping me grow the company."

He will need the support. Later this year, Leading Nation will go beyond opening its own restaurants - it will be consulting on the Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group's food and beverage venues, adding another layer to its portfolio.

With that said, Li says he is going to take a "safer" approach to growing in the near future.

"We did do nine restaurants in 12 months," he quips.

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

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