The Long Run

Black Sheep Restaurants co-founder Syed Asim Hussain runs dozens of Hong Kong’s buzziest restaurants, but his biggest appetite is for risk

- Eric Wilson.

Last October, Syed Asim Hussain lost someone very dear to him. His cousin Syed Muhammad Hussain Shah, five years his elder, had been climbing near a tributary of the Indus River in the mountainous Balakot region of Pakistan with his two young sons, ages 10 and 12, when the children accidentally slipped and fell into the rapids. Muhammad went after them and was able to push his sons to safety, but he was swept away and believed to have drowned.

Muhammad and Asim had been as close as brothers since they were children, when Asim was sent from Hong Kong to Pakistan to attend boarding school at the prestigious Aitchison College in Lahore. Muhammad, his mother’s sister’s son, was a positive influence on Asim, who suffered from asthma and other serious childhood ailments, and whose life, away from home from age 5 to 18, could easily have gone in another direction.

“I often say that in so many ways, he saved me,” Asim Hussain, now 36, recalls, seated in a private room at the Buenos Aires Polo Club in Lan Kwai Fong, one of the 30 restaurants he now operates as part of the Black Sheep restaurant empire that he and his business partner, Christopher Mark, established in Hong Kong nine years ago. “He was the cooler, older cousin, so a lot of his interests became my interests. For example, he was a really good basketball player, so I started playing basketball.”