The story
This street wasalways a kitchen.
Indian cooking did not arrive in Hong Kong recently. It has been here since the city was — and it arrived on this street.
From the earliest years of the colony
They came with the ships.
Indian merchants and sailors on East India Company vessels, soldiers, policemen, prison guards, clerks. They settled around what became Lascar Row — and they brought their cooking with them.
Hong Kong, c.1868–72. Photograph by John Thomson — public domain. 1849
A lease of 999 years.
Land on Shelley Street was leased to four trustees of the Muslim community — at a nominal rent, for 999 years. The mosque built there, rebuilt in 1915–16 with funds from the Bombay merchant Haji Mohamed Essack Elias, is the oldest in Hong Kong.
A Hong Kong street, c.1868–72. Photograph by John Thomson — public domain. The name on the door
The street is named for them.
Mosque Street — 摩羅廟街 — takes its name from that mosque, in a colonial-era Cantonese word for South Asians that many consider derogatory today. Under whichever name: this address belongs to a street that has fed this community for 180 years.
1992
Papa starts cooking.
Monu Gomes begins his career in Hong Kong’s old-guard kitchens — La Trattoria, Jimmy’s Kitchen. A year later the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator opens, running right past the mosque and this street.
2004
It was called Indian Village.
The family took this room in 2004 and cooked in it for fifteen years under that name. Same door, same kitchen, same telephone number we still answer today. Then in 2019 the name changed, and it changed for one reason. Papa had been at the stove for twenty-seven years by then, and it was time the family put their own name over their own door.
Today
The pot goes in sealed.
It comes out sealed. The lid comes off at your table — steam first, then the rice. His own room at last — and the same hands since 1992.
$10 back on the pot
Managing Director
Alex Gomes
Managing Director and co-founder, Gomes Restaurants Limited
Monu Gomes cooks. Alex Gomes builds what the cooking becomes. He is the one who saw a group in a family kitchen on Mosque Street — Papa Gomes first, then Gomes’ Gastropub on Caine Road, billed on its opening as Hong Kong’s first gastropub built around Indian food.
He runs the group with his father, and the split is not complicated: Papa is at the pass, Alex is everywhere else. Around the restaurant he is Papa Gomes Jr. The kitchen, less formally and with some affection, calls him Daddy Gomes.
Hospitality Industry Leader of the Year — GlobalFLUXX Conference Asia 2026 · Okada Manila, Philippines
“We realised that the Gomes brand resonates with Indian food especially after Papa Gomes’ success.”
Alex Gomes, Hive Life, 2022
