Most important to local customers, the birds are the famously fatty Chinese breed called “three yellow” (skin, beak, feet) that arrive, alive and squawking, each morning at the nearby Sheung Wan wet market.

Since most Hong Kong cooks and chefs shop daily and expect extremely fresh ingredients, the city has multiple hubs for vendors who sell — and butcher and trim and chop — produce, fish and meat on site. (They’re called “wet” because the sidewalks and floors are constantly hosed down to remove scales, leaves, blood and other debris.)

“Until Yardbird opened, expat chefs would come here and dismiss the quality of local products,” said the chef Jowett Yu, who runs a similarly informal restaurant nearby with a Taiwanese-inspired menu, Ho Lee Fook. “But philosophically, Matt just didn’t believe you had to fly in frozen chickens from France that took two days to arrive, instead of using fresh chicken raised 30 kilometers from the restaurant.”

Mr. Abergel and Ms. Jang have a strong restaurant philosophy , summed up as excellence without pretension. They arrived there after decades of restaurant work, both together and separately.

Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, Mr. Abergel said he absorbed a taste for chicken fat from his Russian- Jewish grandmother , and a love of grilling from his Moroccan-Israeli father. He started working in restaurants when he was 14.

Ms. Jang grew up working in her family’s restaurant in suburban Edmonton. Her father immigrated from Hong Kong, and her mother was a seventh-generation Scottish-Canadian; she grew up at a time when the population of Canada was far less diverse than it is now. “I was the only Asian person I ever saw during my childhood who wasn’t in my family,” she said. When her father was laid off from his job as an engineer, the family bought Golden Capital, a Chinese restaurant, in 1984.

By their late teens, both Mr. Abergel and Ms. Jang were done with school, heavily into skateboards and knew their way around a restaurant. They landed jobs at the same skate shop in Calgary, The Source, around the year 2000 , and have been together, in one form or another, ever since.