But it was not his health that was the main reason for him to go vegan. “It is a Buddhist way to go vegetarian or vegan to pray for better health for your loved ones,” he says, noting that one of his relatives has not been well recently. “But I have been thinking of going vegan for a while as it is a lot better for your health, so it is a combination of both.

“My wife [Venus Wong] is doing it, too; she loves it even more than I do. She is also an actress so she’s always conscious about her weight and this is a good way for her to stay slim. My wife is a really good cook so, after we started eating vegan, we explored a lot of different food options, such as Beyond Meat and OmniPork – you can make a lot of delicious food that tastes like meat.”

The dishes start to arrive and we tuck into a colourful crispy taro, pumpkin and sweetcorn roll and the conversation goes quiet, which is usually a good sign.

“This is so good,” says Tsang, and we all agree – we love the crispy textures and combination of flavours.

Next comes the pan-fried lotus root cake with OmniPork, which also goes down well.

“I am a big steak lover,” says Tsang. “I thought it was going to be really hard to be vegan but it is actually not. When my friends eat steak now I don’t really have that craving. One thing I crave is Cantonese soup: they always throw in pork bones or a chicken in the soup. Recently we made soup without any pork bones and it didn’t taste the same. I have always loved Cantonese fish soup. I could have that every day. Now I just can’t have it so that is actually what I crave the most.”

The conversation turns to his movies and growing up as the son of well-known actor and director Eric Tsang Chi-wai.

“I grew up separated from all these industry people and the glamour of being a celebrity son. My dad was consciously trying to keep me away from the so-called limelight but we actually lived apart. He had his own apartment and then I grew up with my mum and brother so I didn’t really see a lot of industry people,” says Tsang, who spent part of his childhood in Canada.

“It was only after I graduated from university and when I returned to Hong Kong that I really started to be conscious of how famous my dad is because when I was back in Vancouver, no one really cared about who you are.”

Tsang was not interested in cinema until he was 16 when he started watching art house films.

“My whole introduction to cinema really began through Wong Kar-wai’s films and I learned that he was influenced a lot by the French New Wave directors from the 60s, so I started watching their films and from there, I started watching a lot of different European films and that’s how my perception of cinema began,” continues Tsang who first started acting in Hong Kong films in 2003. “It’s totally different from my dad’s work in 80s Hong Kong slapstick comedy, accessible to normal audiences in that sense.

“I think my dad was worried about me seven or eight years ago as he knows that I’m really into art house and he was concerned I was not going to be able to make a living, but after my film Soul Mate, I think he was relieved that I was heading in the right direction,” says Tsang, referring to the first movie he directed on his own. “And with Better Days , I think he is just generally very happy with the result.”

Better Days is set in China and touches on the universal theme of bullying but made specific to the experience of people in the mainland. “Bullying has always existed because it’s part of our human nature but there are things in the film that are very local in terms of what they went through when they’re in high school in China,” says Tsang. “We did a lot of research to make sure that when people from China watch the film, they would think that all this really speaks to their experience.”

We tuck into steamed tofu with taro, sweet purple potato and water chestnut, and fried rice with diced nuts before ending with dessert of lotus pond, a peach resin with red date and dried longan – the latter, though, Tsang does not eat. “I don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” he says.

Tsang has several projects in the pipeline – one is about South Asians in Hong Kong and their experience as refugees – and he wants to continue making movies. “My goal is pretty simple. I just hope that I can continue to make a film every one or two years and keep on making them until I can’t move any more,” he says.

Want more stories like this? Sign up here. Follow STYLE on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter .