The old Ritz-Carlton in Hong Kong may have been small but, much like the city itself, it punched well above its weight. While the hotel’s unprepossessing entrance was overshadowed by the elite Hong Kong Club building and the Rolls-Royce showroom next door, extraordinarily gracious doormen more than made up for it. The hotel’s Italian restaurant, Toscana, was widely regarded as the best in Asia before the hotel had to close, in January 2008, to make room for yet another office tower.

The new Ritz-Carlton, which opened on Tuesday last week, is the architectural antithesis of its avatar. The 312-room hotel extends from floors 102 to 118 of the International Commerce Centre across the harbour in Kowloon. And everywhere you go in the hotel, from the lobby to the rooftop bar, the staff intone: “This is the world’s tallest hotel, the highest spa, the highest bar ... ”

On Tuesday night, I was checking in when I bumped into a friend and her husband also staying at the hotel. When we met at Tosca, the Italian restaurant on the 102nd floor, we had to make our way past rows of glass cabinets filled with mirrored red and silver Perspex lit from the bottom and the top. The neighbouring lounge had two chandeliers with clear and red glass that looked like enormous chimneys.