Life Style

With the long public holiday in the rear view, the weather has now progressed from pleasantly warm to bordering on sweltering. This weekend is the perfect time to get out and get healthy, so grab a cold one as Eaton Hong Kong celebrates seven years of its craft bar Flower Years, or celebrate Mostly Harmless’ new zero-alcohol approach to round out the weekend. In between, there’s still time have a proper drink as Jakarta’s Carrots visits The Opposites.Friday, April 25Flower Years 7th Anniversary of Fame Beer PartyFlower Years is the craft beer destination at Eaton Hong Kong. Photo: HandoutWhat: Eaton Hong Kong is looking to celebrate the seventh birthday of its craft beer outpost Flower Years with a bang! As the weather warms, there might be nothing better than starting your weekend with fr...

Classical pianist Igor Levit takes to a London stage this week for an epic musical endurance test directed by performance artist Marina Abramovic.Levit is aiming to be the first person to solo play Vexations, a single sheet of music repeated 840 times, in a public performance expected to last at least 16 hours.The audience at central London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall will witness “silence, endurance, immobility and contemplation, where time ceases to exist”, according to Abramovic on the venue’s website.Written by Erik Satie in 1893, Vexations” is described as “one of classical music’s most simple, yet arduous and demanding works”.Pianist Igor Levit. He has live-streamed a solo performance of Eirk Satie’s Vexations but will be the first person to do so on a concert stage when he plays it in Lo...

“The bread is phenom. The meat packs a punch and the sauce is crazy good.”When the influencer Can F Kennedy gives his ratings for kebab shops on TikTok, it is short and sweet.For more than a year, the 42-year-old has been eating his way through Berlin’s kebab shops, known there as doner stands.“I test all the kebabs in or right next to U-Bahn [underground train] stations all over Berlin,” he tells the camera.TikTok, YouTube and other platforms are home to countless German food critics – some of whom have large followings. Those on the lookout for the best kebabs travel across Germany and further afield.

Daria Van Tyne did not expect to see changes in a population of bacteria taken from her hospital in Pennsylvania, in the United States.Her hunch was wrong, but the results of her recent study point to a potential solution for antibiotic resistance.Bacteria are ancient organisms that have learned advanced evolutionary behaviours over billions of years.The particular strain Van Tyne was studying, Enterococcus faecium, exists in the guts of humans and many animals and is hard to kill.Results of a recent study overseen by Daria Van Tyne point to a potential solution for antibiotic resistance. Photo: researchgate.net“As a researcher, I’m very interested in how the bacteria that make people sick in the hospital are evolving and changing over time,” says Van Tyne, an associate professor of medici...

On a recent Saturday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, seven friends – plus one dog – contorted and twisted their bodies to fit inside a brown box 2.45 metres (8 feet) tall that had a mirrored door inscribed with the words “Memory Archive”.Once they were all mostly inside, they looked up towards a Canon digital camera that was peeking out of a small hole.They posed – smiling brightly and holding the dog in the air – as the shutter clicked eight times. They then stepped out of the booth, selected their favourite shots at a kiosk and waited about a minute for the photos to develop.The group, most of whom had only met a few hours earlier at a rave, had stumbled upon the photo booth as they were grabbing food at Idyllic cafe, and decided to commemorate the moment. They gushed over the results...

After indulging in all manner of treats during the Easter long weekend, you might be thinking of a laid-back follow-up – but Hong Kong’s F&B offerings have other plans. From limited-time tasting menus to brunch with DJ-supplied soundtrack, fill your calendar with these “must-trys”.Friday, April 25Aqua has reintroduced its Ankh tasting menu, a seven-course fine-dining experience. Photo: HandoutThis month, Aqua is bringing back its popular seven-course dining special, the Ankh tasting menu. Referring to the ancient Egyptian symbol meaning “the key of life” – also Aqua’s logo – and the philosophy of “where there is water, there’s life”, each dish is created to illustrate the versatility of water (no, we’re not kidding).Dishes include a fresh seafood tartare trio, a king crab salad with ca...

2.5/5 stars“Find the accountant”, reads the scrawl on the arm of J.K. Simmons’ soon-to-be-dead private eye at the beginning of The Accountant 2, the convoluted sequel to the 2016 thriller starring Ben Affleck.The number cruncher in question, Christian Wolff (Affleck), is no ordinary accountant – although he does know a lot about tax, it seems. He is mob-trained, with money launderers and warlords as his clientele.He is also autistic, lives in an Airstream trailer and is a lone wolf, although, judging by the speed-dating session he goes on in one of the film’s more amusing sequences, he is not against finding a life partner.The film is scripted by Bill Dubuque, who wrote the original and is also a co-creator of the television show Ozark, another tale of a mob-connected financial adviser. Un...

Demure, submissive and erotic, Suzie Wong is a bigger-than-life stereotype, a caricature Asian women grew up with in the US.We may have also secretly hoped to play that geisha-like image to win our way out of our oppression. But over the years, some of us grew to resent it, fight it and reject it, hoping to claim our true identity and dignity as a person.In The World of Nancy Kwan, a memoir by the pioneering Hollywood star, we hear from the real-life woman who played Suzie Wong.We learn that for an Asian actor, getting to play an Asian role was a victory back in those days, as the roles were often taken by white actors wearing make-up.The cover of Nancy Kwan’s memoir. Photo: APKwan was born in Hong Kong in 1939. Her father Kwan Wing-hong was Chinese, an architect with a love for films. Her...

If you have a dog, you might find yourself wondering at some point whether your four-legged friend would like to have a friend of their own.At first, the pros of getting another dog may seem to outweigh the cons, but you should think carefully before taking any action.Two dogs may be double the joy, but they are also double the cost – for everything from food to their healthcare to their insurance.Your household circumstances should be considered, too.Do not think that dogs will be able to teach each other to behave correctly, Rolf Franck says. Photo: Jelly TseTiming matters, too. The first dog should be properly trained by the time a second animal moves in, “otherwise it will be difficult with the second”, says Franck.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is justifiably known for his renditions of beautiful belle époque socialites.“To have been painted by [Sargent] added distinction to the most distinguished,” wrote one critic in a 1925 obituary.But before he became the hottest portrait painter in France – and eventually the UK and the US – Sargent had to establish himself as both a member of the cultural elite and a painter of unmatched talent.The only place to do that, in his mind at least, was the Paris Salon. When Sargent first arrived in Paris, he was an ambitious unknown.“He gets to Paris, he enrols in art lessons, he is young and energetic and really establishes himself in different circles,” says Stephanie Herdrich, the Alice Pratt Brown curator of American painting and drawings at the Metropolitan Mu...