Celebrity Life
Chef Vicky Cheng of VEA on his New Chinese Restaurant Wing and Demystifying Fusion Food
After two successful decades cooking French haute cuisine, Hong Kong native Vicky Cheng recently decided to venture into Chinese cooking. For Cheng, who’s behind the acclaimed French-Chinese one-Michelin-star VEA, opening Wing represents a watershed moment in his career as a Western-trained local chef in the city.
I meet him in one of the stylish private rooms of Wing, which opened in the spring on the 29th floor of a new building in Central, where we discuss the first steps of his career as a young chef who was trying to find his identity, and what prompted him to open Wing.
Tell us about your new restaurant, Wing.
In a nutshell, it’s a contemporary Chinese restaurant. We use modern techniques and luxurious ingredients. What’s special about it, perhaps, is that I’ve never studied or cooked Chinese food before. Over the past few years at VEA, I’ve gained a lot of interest in Chinese cuisine – even though I’ve been cooking for 20 years, it’s always been French. My interest in Chinese cuisine grew to the point where I really wanted to open a Chinese restaurant. The food at Wing is cooked by me and my team. We could say that’s reinterpreted from the point of view
of Western-trained chefs.
Does the name have any particular meaning?
Wing is the middle character of my Chinese name. It means eternity. It’s also the only word that ever meant enough for me to tattoo it on my body.
Does this represent a new phase in your evolution as a chef?
Yes, absolutely. I came back to Hong Kong 10 years ago and I was cooking French food. Soon after, my concept changed to Chinese-French. Specifically Chinese and specifically French, no Japanese or Italian influences. I’d like to say that it was a breakthrough for me, to find
my niche, to find my uniqueness and to be able to identify my own personality and cooking style by incorporating luxurious Chinese ingredients, particularly dried seafood, into French cooking techniques, plating and taste.
What we do at Wing, however, has a lot to do with how we present the food and how you’d like the guests to eat it. It’s very important that it’s done in the most professional and authentic way. Chinese food should look like Chinese food.
Even though both Wing and VEA are my restaurants, you should also be able to tell just by looking at a dish, without the list of ingredients, where it belongs. For me, that’s quite important. At first, when I came back, I wouldn’t dare touch Chinese cuisine. There was no way, if you asked me 11 years ago, that I thought I could open a Chinese restaurant one day. It’s actually funny. Back then, somebody approached me to open a Chinese restaurant and I turned it down. I said, “No way. I don’t have enough knowledge and I don’t have enough experience.” I believe it’s a combination of opportunity, timing and just patience. It takes a lot to be able to cook Chinese food in a city that’s well known – perhaps most well known – for its Chinese cuisine.
In the past 10 years, it’s been all about cooking, learning and researching as much as possible to be able to do the things I’m doing now.
In a contemporary restaurant, how do you find the balance between innovation and honouring the traditions?
For me it’s quite straightforward. If you want to innovate, you must learn the tradition. First, you must understand why it’s been done in a certain way for hundreds of years before you even try to change it. I don’t believe anyone can change something to make it better unless they understand it profoundly. I can think of a million things to do and to change, but I will not, unless I understand how to cook the traditional version of a dish first. This is a rule I live by.
Do you focus on any regional Chinese cuisine?
I don’t focus on any particular region because I was never mentored by a Chinese chef cooking specific dishes. The only thing I can say is that I cook my Chinese food. Things are on the menu because I think they taste good, and because I’m proud of them and want to share them with guests.
My mother is Shanghainese. I was born in Hong Kong and surrounded by Cantonese influences. So perhaps these are the traditions that are a little bit more influential to me. At the same time, I love Sichuan and many other regional cuisines. I don’t want to restrict myself with what I can or cannot do.
Going back to my roots is also very important to me. When I came back to Hong Kong after working and living abroad, I hadn’t been back since I’d left basically, which was when I was very young. It’s meaningful for me to use my new set of skills and incorporate them into Hong Kong’s culinary culture and memories.
Is it an oversimplification to call your food at VEA “fusion’? Chefs often hate this term.
I don’t think fusion is the wrong word. VEA is absolutely fusion. We combine French and Chinese elements – that’s
the definition of fusion. I’m not, not against the term. If you’d asked me or any other chef 10 or 15 years ago, you probably would have offended me. But I can tell you right now that my food is absolutely fusion, in the right way. We use the best ingredients from both cuisines and we elevate them.
Wing, of course, isn’t fusion at all. It is absolutely Chinese. You could say, however, that it’s Chinese fusion in the sense that we’re not restricted to any regional type of cuisine in China.
Did you always want to be a chef?
Yes. I grew up watching cartoons and the Food Network, the only two channels I ever watched. I was just very, very interested in cooking from the beginning. It was a form of entertainment for me, but being a chef wasn’t as glamorous as it is nowadays. My family wasn’t supportive of it and my mom was literally the only person who believed me from the beginning. This actually gave me the motivation to be the best that I could be. When the whole world is saying you shouldn’t do this and the only person supporting you is your mother, you’ve got to prove the whole world wrong to support her decision. And that’s what I did.
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When Cuisines Collide: Vicky Cheng of VEA on His Chinese-French Cuisine
Championing his unique Chinese-French cuisine at one-Michelin-star restaurant VEA, chef and co-owner Vicky Cheng is considered one of the more creative culinary minds in Hong Kong. He tells us how this unlikely pairing of two diverse traditions arose.
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For some reason, unbeknown to me, the forbidden F-word (otherwise known as fusion) is still considered offensive in the culinary world. Describing two or more cuisines that have merged in a deliberate manner, fusion has a bad rap for being, well, so often bad.
First coined in the late 1980s, fusion and the cuisine that followed it gave birth to a plethora of gimmicky foods that had no place on our plates nor palates. We can indeed all live quite happily without the diabolical ramen-burger, yet fusion need not be such a taboo.
After all, its roots go back centuries – since trade began, in fact, when cultures connected, people mingled and foods or ingredients overlapped in cuisines enhanced by diversity. For me, this is the most apparent in Asian-influenced fusion, such as that of chef Vicky Cheng’s “Chinese x French” cuisine at VEA.
Hong Kong born but Canadian raised, Cheng is a fusion of sorts himself. But not until much later in life did he lean on this connection.
You might not expect such friendliness from an ambitious and successful chef like Cheng. But when I meet him in person, I realise that he’s both considerate and affable, even with his own team. The mantra “teamwork makes the dream work" is emblazoned on the kitchen wall and serves as a constant reminder that the restaurant’s success is based on their collective efforts.
VEA has been awarded one Michelin star for four consecutive years since 2017, and currently ranks in 12th place on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2020 list, thanks to the execution of Cheng’s inventive cuisine. “It’s simple,” Cheng explains. “Four years ago, we created what we label as Chinese x French cuisine, which basically takes all of the traditional French techniques that I’ve learned and then combines it with Chinese ingredients, philosophy and -- sometimes -- technique.”
Describing how he pulled the two together, Cheng confesses “growing up, I didn’t care too much for Chinese food. I’m Chinese, but my focus was always in French cooking. I thought that it was the best cuisine. I thought French cuisine meant fine dining, so that’s all I wanted to do.”
No wonder, then, that he chose to train in classic French cuisine, even though it was tough. He then went on to work with top chefs, including Jason Bangerter of Auberge du Pommier, Anthony Walsh of Canoe in Toronto and Daniel Boulud of the French fine-dining restaurant Daniel in New York. Thereafter, a need to renew his Hong Kong identity card resulted in Cheng relocating here in 2011, when he was appointed as executive chef for the now-defunct Liberty Private Works.
After a few years of working and living in Hong Kong, Cheng’s interest in Chinese cuisine gained momentum and eventually led him to open VEA. “It didn’t take me too long to say, 'OK, let’s do Chinese and French...’ I’m good at French cooking and I’m Chinese. My wife is Chinese, I’m eating a lot of Chinese food and looking for Chinese restaurants versus French restaurants now.”
For Cheng, Chinese cuisine became a subject of fascination. The somewhat elusive wok hei (or smoky and charred aroma that’s achieved by using a wok), the flavour combinations and the ingredients were all things he couldn’t even imagine while only focused on French cuisine.
Like the vast land it hails from, Chinese cuisine is broad and its diverse nature enabled Cheng to explore numerous regions that sparked intrigue. He adds, “I take a lot of inspiration from Cantonese cuisine, but at the same time I’m inspired by Chiu Chow cuisine, because my dad is from there. And Shanghainese cuisine, as my mother is Shanghainese.”It’s with these influences that Cheng loads his curiosity to learn more and gain knowledge, before merging different aspects of different cuisines to amplify a dish; bringing together flavour, spice, aroma and texture in a truly original combination.
He uses the Chinese braised sea cucumber as an example. “I love it this kind of texture and flavour,” he says, “but I understand how it can be difficult for people to get [or accept].”
This is the challenge that Cheng decided to take on. His solution: use one cuisine to influence the other and forge a bridge, or connection, between them. “I think with me telling the story of Chinese cuisine, it’s more easily accepted... I’m trying to amplify the technique, ingredients and possibilities of Chinese cuisine through the lens of French cuisine, so that it may be experienced in a different way, and therefore understood.”
Other examples of Cheng’s fused amalgamations can be found in dishes such as the Japanese mackerel, crowned with ribbons of crispy celtuce and pear, accented with Chinese aromatics and pops of ginger-infused salmon roe, and finished with cold-pressed pear juice; a take on a classic Chinese vermicelli dish, which uses spiny lobster poached in a citrus beurre monte, paired with a confit onion ring, stir-fried vermicelli, lobster roe, pickled garlic and a lobster consommé.
Then there is the signature abalone pithivier, which uses Japanese 27-head dried abalone, braised traditionally in master stock, with sweetbread wrapped in spinach mousse and buttery puff pastry; an interpretation of the traditional Chiuchow-style duck, which is reincarnated as the 14-day aged Racan pigeon from France smoked with sugarcane pulp from Kung Lee herbal tea shop on Hollywood Road, and topped with a crunchy sugarcane glaze, amaranth and pigeon jus.
Among the desserts is the chilled melon sago-inspired dessert that features sweet muskmelon from Shizuoka in Japan, layered with a rich Hokkaido milk panna cotta and double-boiled rock-sugar bird’s nest.
Meanwhile, in the sleek 29th-floor bar lounge, award-winning mixologist Antonio Lai showcases cocktails that fuse different flavour profiles. Take for example the flamboyantly presented, mezcal-based signature cocktail, the Cleopatra Formosa, which blends a silky texture with smoky aromatics and tropical flavours; the Hong Kong-inspired Mango Pomelo, which brings the summertime dessert to life with rum mingled with tropical fruits and coconut; or the more refined Cashew Ramos, which uses single-malt genever and gin, shaken with cashew milk for a malty version of the traditional Ramos gin fizz.
As I end the interview at VEA, I come to the conclusion that although fusion, in cuisine and culture, is not anything new, the creative connections, innovations and subsequently, advanced experiences in modern cuisine are, and thus, in my opinion, should be always be celebrated.
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