This Mid-Autumn Festival, Hong Kong brand consultancy Studio Générale unites celebrated chefs, bars and local businesses for its annual “Zou Zit” charity dinner on 30 September with #legend as its official media partner to support our city’s most vulnerable communities through its partnership with food charity, More Good. Studio Générale founder and director Mei Wang, More Good co-founder Matt Abergel and chef Esther Sham talk to Stephenie Gee about giving back to the vibrant city we call home
The Mid-Autumn Festival is typically a time of celebration and togetherness, marked by vibrant lantern displays, sweet mooncakes and family reunions. But for many of Hong Kong’s neediest communities, the festivities often fall short of the joy most of us experience.
Mei Wang, founder and director of Hong Kong brand consultancy Studio Générale, is on a mission to change that narrative through Zou Zit (做節), a philanthropic dinner series launched in 2024 that celebrates and transforms the Chinese tradition of shared tables – where meals are served family-style with dishes placed at the centre of the table for communal enjoyment – into an opportunity to extend our circle of care and share abundance with Hong Kong’s broader community through its partnership with local food charity More Good. The shared table at Zou Zit is a metaphor for community responsibility – what we consume together should nourish not just ourselves, but others at our collective table – and a reminder that true prosperity is measured not by what we accumulate, but by what we’re willing to share.
“Celebration is such an important part of our Chinese culture. And at the heart of these celebrations is really family, so we wanted to make sure that during these moments in the year we were being really conscious about the community,” explains Wang. “Oftentimes, celebrations are also when communities who are at risk or are resource challenged have a bit of struggle. Particularly for elderly communities, it can be a very lonely time where maybe their family isn’t around. So we wanted to make sure that during these special moments in the year we were giving extra care and extra love to those communities.”
Bringing together Hong Kong’s food and beverage, artisanal and creative communities, each dinner spotlights acclaimed Chinese chefs and the diversity of techniques, ingredients and traditions in their unique regional cuisines. In its inaugural edition last year, renowned self-taught private chef Nero Ip served up a feast of Shunde-inspired cuisine among floral installations by Kirk Cheng, with support of partners like Monkey47 Gin, G.H. Mumm, Flagrant Hot Sauce and Common Farms.
“It was a coalesce of a few things,” says Wang of the inspiration behind the series. “Last year, my agency Studio Générale came out of a really good year, but I was looking back and I realised that the team had so many great ideas that just weren’t able to be actualised because of the limitations of commercial work. So I wanted to do something where we could drive our own creativity and vision without the constrictions of the commercial work that we were doing for our clients. At that same time, I was also trying to find a way to bridge impact into my work. At a certain point, I think you amass resources and skill sets to a point where you want to try and start contributing back in other ways. And I wanted to bridge the professional side of my life with areas that I might be able to provide more direct impact beyond donating to charities. I think creative communities are so important in the ecosystem, but oftentimes it’s not clear how this community can support philanthropic efforts.
“But the last and real reason why it became this dinner series was because my friend, chef Nero Ip, who did our last dinner, invited me to his house for a meal where he cooked his family’s food – Shunde cuisine. It was absolutely amazing and I selfishly was trying to figure out a way to make him cook for me again,” she laughs. “I was thinking maybe we could set up a dinner with friends, and then it just kind of ballooned to where it became a much larger platform and event. He also shared a lot of the values in terms of wanting to find a way to contribute and that’s how it started. But really a lot of this was very selfish – I just wanted to be able to eat good food cooked by my very talented friends.”
In celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival, this year’s Zou Zit – to be hosted on 30 September at More Good in Chai Wan with #legend as the official media partner – honours togetherness, featuring a four-hands menu that draws from Maison ES chef-owner Esther Sham’s Shanghainese roots and The Hua Restaurant executive chef Yip Shi Cheong’s expertise in Sichuan cooking (think, family-style dishes like black pepper live surf clam, foie gras wonton soup, Sichuan-style fish maw and mala lobster noodles), a free-flow beverage programme curated by The Old Man, and local heritage businesses including Man Fung Noodle Shop, who will be leading the noodle dishes and tong yuen (glutinous rice ball) making, and Kingstone Engraving Company, whose personalised stone stamps will bring blessings for guests throughout the evening.
“This really was a collaborative project,” Wang says. “Every component of the dinner is a contribution of somebody’s talent. Esther and chef Cheong are giving us their culinary skills, their taste, their understanding of what Chinese cuisine is. This year for the florals we’re working with Gingermite, the Old Man is coming in for the beverage programme, who will be putting forward two cocktails that pair well with the food, and we also have two local heritage businesses coming in. It’s just such a nice way to bring in people of all different types of backgrounds and skill sets under a shared purpose and a shared umbrella. And I don’t think this dinner could be possible if we didn’t have this diversity in backgrounds. Philanthropy and service isn’t necessarily confined to somebody’s ability to donate funds. You can come with your specific skill sets, time, commitment, energy, ideas, and you can contribute in a way that is yours. We don’t have the backing of a huge corporation – this is really kind of self-driven so those are valuable to us.”
More Good understands this. Founded during Covid by close friends Brian Fung, Kenneth Chan, Matt Abergel, Tim King and Kiyoshi Hoshimi-Caines, More Good addresses food insecurity in Hong Kong by providing fresh, nutritiously balanced meals to those who cannot afford to eat well – refugees, the homeless, elderly and underprivileged – while building a community around it all, leveraging professional culinary expertise to ensure that every meal served maintains both nutritional value and dignity for recipients, as well as partnerships with like-minded organisations and individuals to sustain operations and amplify impact.
“For a charity, we’re definitely not money focused in the sense that we don’t just want you to be donating money,” explains Matt Abergel, More Good co-founder and Yardbird co-owner and executive chef. “We also need your time, we also need your expertise, we also need different types of people, and we want to attract those types of people as much as we can. Obviously we need to raise funds to make sure that this continues to operate, but we’ve never taken a money first approach, and I don’t think any of the people involved have ever taken a money first approach in anything we do. We knew our skills and we knew we could use what we built to be self-sufficient and to just operate with freedom. I think that was a big thing for us – we didn’t want to have to be beholden to insert giant corporation name here. We want to be able to just be ourselves, be free, be creative, work with as many different types of people as we want, and still do the same amount of good work that we’re already doing and that that we want to do. We’re always bringing creative people in together, and many of the recipients who are receiving our meals also feel empowered to be a part of the charity. They will come and volunteer to help with the cooking and there’s that sense of ‘I’m not just a recipient. I can also play a role in supporting others like me.’”
For Sham, the motivation to participate in the dinner was grounded in shared values of care, service and community. “I’ve always believed in empowering people with skills instead of just giving,” she says. “Prior to Covid when I had time, I used to go to Sham Shui Po to teach single moms how to cook because instead of just handing out meals, I wanted to empower them with skill sets, which I think helped them to gain confidence in themselves because you’re not making them feel useless – you’re helping them to stand up on their own feet. Then during Covid I had two more kids, so I had to stop, but I’ve been wanting to engage more, or rather reengage, in this kind of work. I was finding my way back in to helping and serving, and I was actually planning on organising my own charity dinner next year, so when Mei contacted me I thought it was such a coincidence. She had already planned everything, all I had to do was just participate, and it’s for a cause I’ve always believed in, so I was in. Back then I was mostly working alone, so it’s nice to meet and work with like-minded people. It makes things easier.”
“It really does,” Abergel concurs. “Our skill sets are all so different and we always try and engage people that don’t do the same things that we do necessarily and don’t have the same set of skills. And that’s how a community is built – when everyone has value and when everyone’s able to give something that’s more than just a dollar.”
Zou Zit’s mission is built on collective support, and together, the goal is to ensure that no one in our community goes hungry. “Our first goal is a very practical one, which is to build on top of our success from last year and expand our impact and be able to contribute more financially to the work that More Good does because it’s through these events and activations that the charity is able to sustain, not necessarily through donations,” Wang says. “The second goal I think is a little bit less tangible, but it is to celebrate this idea of a shared table. The root of what I think is so beautiful about Chinese cuisine and dining in a Chinese way is this shared table. Everyone gathers together at the table, dishes are put in the middle, and nobody leaves hungry because you’re all eating together. And we wanted to extend that concept and ethos to a wider collective table that is our city, and give back to the communities in need in the home that we call Hong Kong.”
Get your tickets now at More Good.
See also: #legendeats: Mooncakes for Mid-Autumn Festival 2025
