The huge centrepiece to this coffee shop and restaurant is a 37ft dining table, and the 30 sets of tiles that form its impressive length are as varied and colourful as the customers who dine here. The city is Hong Kong – well used to inviting folks from other cultures to break bread under its roof, and in the case of the Old Street Kobiteh Restaurant, it’s the Malay diaspora that has seen one of its traditional dining experiences adopted for the local community.

Fostering this sense of togetherness was NC Design & Architecture Ltd, who devised the Malaysian streetscapes, particularly the night-markets, that are recreated on the table tops. The layout encourages communal dining just as the kopitiam coffee houses of Malaysia do – fare from all ethnicities are available under one roof there, and that’s the case here, too. Some nice old wall tiles and 50 shades of green underpin the interior of the restaurant, found in the New Mandarin Plaza, Kowloon.

Photography, Dennis Lo Designs