Lucy’s restaurant, a Hong Kong Island institution on Stanley Main Street, is closing after 23 years.
It will shut its doors at the end of next month, and owner Lucy Humbert will move back to the UK.
Ricky Chan Yau-kee has spent nearly half his life managing the restaurant, where the menu rarely changed.
“I was 23 years old when I started working at Lucy’s as a manager,” he says. He previously worked at The Peninsula and the Regal Airport Hotel in Kai Tak. “The guests were great and the salary was pretty good, so that’s why I stayed. The owner [Humbert] was always in the kitchen, so the guests knew us better than her.”
Humbert asked the staff members if they would like to take over the restaurant, but Chan says that after much deliberation they declined, citing a steady decline in business and difficulties finding staff.
“In the past few years it’s been hard to find young chefs to help out in the kitchen,” says Chan, who ended up having to do some of the cooking himself, particularly for the catering side of the business.
“Many of our guests retired and their children prefer to go dine in other places. We also had a lot of bankers come to our restaurant, but many of them left Hong Kong,” says Chan.
