Snowboarder-turned-chef Akira Back plays a new game in Hong Kong
The Henderson, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, looms like a shard of glass frozen mid-spin, its curves catching the Hong Kong skyline. The ground beneath it was sold in 2017 for more than HK$23 billion—at the time billed as the priciest land sale in the world. It seems deliciously incongruous, then, that within this skyscraper chef Akira Back wants nothing to do with stiff formality. “I don’t want hardcore fancy,” he says. “Hong Kong people already dress nicely anyway. I don’t want them to think, ‘Oh man, we have to dress triple nice.’ Just come, relax, eat, leave.”
It’s a contradiction that makes perfect sense once you know his story. Back doesn’t do tidy boxes; he calls his own food a “melting pot of culture”: traditional Japanese techniques filtered through a Korean upbringing, shot through with the swagger of Las Vegas, where he’s now based, with a little of the anything-goes spirit of America. “I grew up in Korea, and I lived in America. My identity is there and my palate changed. That’s in the food. At my restaurants, you can bring your vegan friend or your friend who only eats meat. Everybody is happy.”
Curved lines and fluid forms echo Zaha Hadid Architects’ design language, with a light-filled space that mirrors Back’s unbuttoned approach to fine dining (Photo: Akira Back)
Now comes his long-awaited Hong Kong debut: Akira Back, joining a global list of 28 restaurants in cities from Paris and Dubai to Singapore and Seoul. On the menu, signatures that have followed him around the world: the wafer-thin AB Tuna Pizza with ponzu and truffle oil, toro tartare with caviar and nine condiments, 48-hour Wagyu short ribs that nod to his mother’s galbi-jim (tender braised short ribs). Cooking that’s playful and unbuttoned, refusing to sit neatly in any one tradition.
And Hong Kong, of course, is a city that thrives on this hybridity: soup dumplings next door to sushi omakase, roast goose institutions opposite third-wave coffee bars, French pâtisseries round the corner from century-old tea houses. “It’s a melting pot here too,” he says, grinning. “Hong Kong people, they know. They’re chill, they’re international. They get it.”
AB tuna pizza with ponzu aioli and truffle oil (Photo: Zed Lee)
None of this, however, was inevitable. Baseball was Back’s first love: as a child, he was a number-four hitter, the powerhouse slot in the line-up. “If I didn’t move, I’d be a pro baseball player,” he insists. “I’d be retired already, drinking champagne for brunch.” However, his father’s work in textiles had other plans, and the family relocated from Asia to Aspen, a Colorado ski resort town. There, the boy who once dominated at the plate suddenly found himself adrift—unable to speak English, too shy even to order a hamburger. His sister thrived at school; he floundered. And then, one day, he watched a group of kids tearing down the slopes, fearless and free. Snowboarding wasn’t love at first sight, not yet; it was camouflage. A way to blend in and to learn English by osmosis. “I wanted to be cool,” he says. “That’s it. I just wanted to survive.”
He spent the next seven years on the professional snowboarding circuit, competing in events and even featuring in extreme-sports films. Sponsorship deals followed, but snowboarding, like baseball before it, eventually pushed too far. What began as a way to fit in and learn English started to feel like a career path. And when it did, he stepped off. “I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“Brother From Another Mother” roll with freshwater eel and sea eel (Photo: Zed Lee)
Snowboarding had started to feel like a job. Sponsorships, pressure, the mounting seriousness of it all, and that was never why he picked up the board in the first place. Taking over his father’s textile business wasn’t an option either: “I’d destroy it,” he says. Instead, he gravitated to the restaurant where he and his friends spent their time, because the chef there, as he remembers it, “looked cool.” That was enough. His mother laughed when he told her—he’d never so much as washed a dish at home—but kitchens offered something new, something he could claim for himself. What began as curiosity soon became commitment, and in Colorado, he apprenticed with sushi master Kenichi Kanada, where the lessons were anything but gentle: pans flying, grains of rice to be counted… “torture”, he says, but the making of the patience and precision that still define him.
He stayed, scars and all, even opening two restaurants for Kanada. Kitchens, he realised, were no different from dugouts or locker rooms. “Someone messes up, the whole team loses. It’s one team … I’m a coach. My hope is always that my players are better than me.”
And with this mindset, he leads differently from the kitchens that shaped him. “Everybody has a dream. My job is to share mine and teach as much as I can. If the staff stay, great. If they go, I want them to leave with something valuable. An Akira Back name on their résumé should mean something.”
Adorned with artworks by Back’s mother, the space mirrors the restaurant’s fluid design: intimate, sculptural and deeply personal (Photo: Akira Back)
Las Vegas toughened him further. He moved there to cook, first running Yellowtail at the Bellagio and later opening Kumi at Mandalay Bay. The Strip as crucible, a place of volume, spectacle and unforgiving demands. It was the perfect stage for an ambitious chef to prove himself, and it forged the swagger that still drives him today. The pressure didn’t flatten him; it fuelled him. “Opening a restaurant is like a game. Everybody says, ‘What if you lose?’ I don’t think about losing. Sportsman mentality: I’m winning. No matter what, I’m gonna win.”
The world took notice: soon he had restaurants across continents, awards stacked like chips on a casino table, celebrity fans. And yet these famous clients barely register. “I feel exactly the same,” he says. “I don’t really care—but I don’t tell them that.” Cooking for his parents, on the other hand, sends him spiralling. “I get a nervous breakdown. I don’t eat for one day—I want my senses sharper.” In Las Vegas, where fame is wallpaper, perhaps it’s the most intimately familiar critics who remain the most terrifying.
Family now runs through everything he does. His mother’s art is inseparable from his restaurants—her canvases cover walls, menus and plates from Las Vegas to Hong Kong. His parents are fixtures on his Instagram too: his father making kimchi and cheering with him at ice hockey games—reminders that as his empire sprawls, they remain its quiet core.
A young, blonde-haired Back during his Aspen years, chasing cool in a new country (Photo: Akira Back)
As for the food itself, he won’t have the word “fusion”. “No fusion. My food is me. I know how to cook traditional food, but you cannot deny where you came from. My mum’s food, that’s who I am. I learnt Japanese technique, but I’m Korean, American. My food is my journey—it keeps changing. I use more kimchi now than I ever did; because I’m older, I like Korean food more now. That’s me.”
These days, the dream isn’t another restaurant but a hotel, somewhere in the mountains or by the sea, with a tennis court. “I’d kick everybody out—I’m playing,” he says, laughing. Free time is already spent with a racket in hand. “I have no life,” he says without self-pity. “Work, tennis, sleep on planes, drink champagne, slam it, pass out. That’s my life. Do I hate it? No, it’s my dream.”
Before kitchens came the cold: years spent carving through snow taught him balance, endurance and the thrill of risk (Photo: Akira Back)
When pressed for advice to hopeful young chefs, he says, “Don’t do it,” half-serious. “But if you do, do it right. Stay in one restaurant for a long time. Learn every station. It’s war. You have to be ready.”
So here he is: from Seoul sandlots to Aspen halfpipes to the vinegar-scented kitchens of Colorado, now in Hong Kong, stamping his name on The Henderson’s gleaming tower. The building sits on record-breaking foundations, but what Back brings is something less rigid, more human: food shaped by baseball, by snowboarding, by scars and swagger and a refusal to stop moving.
“I love opening restaurants,” he laughs. “Everything goes wrong, but I love it. It’s fun.”
And maybe that’s the point. For all the multibillion-dollar land deals and accolades, Akira Back is still chasing the same thrill: of being cool, of surviving, of playing the game and winning. Different arenas, but still the same player; always in motion, always coaching, and always, somehow, moving forward.
Back moves with the same focus that once drove him on the slopes: disciplined, restless, alive (Photo: Zed Lee)
Akira Back Hong KongAddress: 5/F, The Henderson, 2 Murray Road, Central, Hong Kong
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