This week in PostMag: Macau’s revitalised Kam Pek Market and a farewell to Metropol Restaurant

Over several visits in its final weeks, photographer Jocelyn Tam captured the Admiralty restaurant’s slow wind-down. Her images convey, as associate editor Gavin Yeung writes in his intro, “a relic of Hong Kong’s boom years of the 1980s and 90s”. Gold and deep-red tones set the stage for steamer baskets stacked high atop some of the city’s last dim sum carts. But it’s the portraits that land hardest: staff who’ve worked at the Metropol for decades, there right up until the end. When Jocelyn asked what they planned to do next, the answer was, “Rest”. Good on them.

Hong Kong feels like it’s speeding up as we race towards the end of the year. The art world, at least, is in full swing, with gallery openings, new shows and plenty to see. Aaina Bhargava meets Cuban artist Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, whose solo show at Pace Gallery in Central ties together Caribbean history and folklore into a dreamlike aesthetic. He’s in Hong Kong for the first time, jet-lagged, wandering the streets through the night, finding it all a bit surreal in the best way. His canvases are dense and charged, full of night skies, crimson seascapes and ghostly figures. I’ve not yet made it to see the work, but it’s on my list now.

In Macau, Adele Brunner steps into Kam Pek Market, a 1920s building newly reborn as a food hall. It’s part of a broader push to revitalise San Ma Lo, Macau’s main drag, and architect firm Linehouse has handled the job with both restraint and style. They’ve stripped the interior back to its bones, carved out a new entrance and layered in just enough flashy neon and industrial polish to draw a younger crowd. It’s heritage with a pulse. Still recognisably old, but reconfigured to feel useful again.

And in the Philippines, Sarah Gillespie returns to Dumaguete, a city she last visited seven years ago in search of halo-halo. It’s still there, as are the colonial churches, motorbike-clogged streets and student crowds spilling out of its four universities. But this isn’t a city clinging to nostalgia. Instead, she finds a place that pulls in global influences – food, architecture, even karaoke – and remakes them in its own image. Dumaguete doesn’t just weather progression; it reshapes it into something unmistakably its own.