Regarded widely as one of Asia’s most cosmopolitan dining destinations, Hong Kong has long had a soft spot for European chefs. Yet I’d venture to say that the city’s most thoughtful high-end dining experiences – those embodying Hong Kong’s vibrant east-meets-west swagger – won’t be found at restaurants bearing the names of Robuchon or Ducasse. Instead, it is the city’s own sons and daughters (a good chunk of whom have undertaken the early stages of their culinary careers abroad) that are cooking up a proverbial storm. One Mr Vicky Cheng is such an individual.

A familiar face to devotees of the Michelin Guide and Maison Krug, Cheng is the indefatigable mastermind behind VEA – ranked the #16 restaurant in Asia last year. He is acclaimed for his playful and original recipes, which electrify traditional Chinese ingredients using French technique and recently he has even embraced the nothing-less-than-Herculean task of opening WING (his own take on an orthodox Chinese restaurant) in a city teeming with the best that this genre has historically had to offer. Earlier this month, as Cheng was busy baptising WING’s new kitchen in the fire of pre-lunchtime, we spoke to the award-winning chef about his early days on the pass in New York, what it feels like to receive your first Michelin star, and how he’s edging forward traditional Chinese dishes with an approach that is all about being considered yet respectful.

ACM: It’s a common refrain among award-winning chefs of Asian descent, but – as others have occasionally mentioned – when you began cooking professionally, almost everyone in your family opposed the move. What motivated you to continue?

VC: When you say “what”, the question should actually be “whom” – and it was my mother [laughs]. I’m paraphrasing, but she more or less told me that if I was committed to cheffing [as a profession] that I had to throw myself in 100 percent – to the extent that I shouldn’t listen to anybody else. That included most of my close family: my siblings, my father, my aunties. But, ultimately, whenever I was on the verge of questioning myself, she’d support me – on the proviso that I commit myself fully. So that’s what I did.

Why was there so much backlash from the people closest to you? Presumably, you demonstrated you were serious about cooking as a career from an early age?

The obvious answer to that is because 20-something years ago, cooking professionally – as I’m sure you know – was nothing like it is today. Even if you were generously compensated or something of a ‘celebrity’ chef, a career in kitchens was something you did if you didn’t have the means to a proper education. Most of the culinary schools, especially in North America, where I’m from, were in their infancy, and much of my family’s opposition boiled down to the traditional scepticism about chefing’s viability as a career path.

Still, it was painfully obvious to my teachers and instructors – even when I was in high school – that cooking was precisely what I wanted to do. We didn’t have any culinary programs, but anything vaguely connected to the culinary arts was something I would fight to be involved in. That seems like a pretty basic prerequisite, but I was so driven by anything relating to food that it was undeniable to everybody else around me.

Were there ever any early ‘warning signs’, so to speak, that reflected your appetite for delving into the culinary arts? Any you recall as being quite pivotal?

As I said, it got to a point where my teachers clearly knew I wanted to be a chef – and my marks in [home economics] reflected that. When you’re a grade 11 high-school student, nobody expects you to have your career all figured out, yet here I was, adamant that I wanted to cook for a living.

So what happened next?

Well, in our final year of high school in Toronto, we had the option to participate in a co-op program where, basically, on odd days we’d perform workplace experience while still going to campus on Tuesday and Thursday.

I get the feeling you weren’t terribly excited about the latter two days.

Honestly, I looked forward more to the days when I was working – even though it meant long hours. Imagine having spent your whole life at school and then suddenly working in a restaurant for 12-13 hours per day. It was tough.

Where did you undertake your co-op experience?

A fairly classic fine-dining establishment – Auberge du Pommier. That was my introduction to the world of French cuisine but, funnily enough, even before that my first job in hospitality was at a sushi place during grade 10.

That’s unexpected. Was it a full-blown omakase restaurant or one of those casual restaurants that serves ‘utility sushi’? California and dragon rolls, that kind of thing?

It’s actually pretty interesting: it was an upscale sushi bar situated inside the basement of Centro – this high-powered Italian restaurant that’s no longer around. The owner absolutely loved Japanese food, so he had this very small sushi counter put in that only served guests inside the basement bar. The chef who he hired came into my mother’s printing shop one day and was in the process of ordering business cards; she just flat-out explained that I was very interested in cooking. So that was, in fact, my very first exposure to a professional kitchen.

Not too shabby for a teenager…

Right. Then because of that stint, when I was admitted into my co-op programme, the chef of Auberge du Pommier [Jason Bangerter] took a chance on my résumé – he was just so surprised by the amount of experience I’d had by grade 10. That’s how it all started: Jason took me under his wing and, after my co-op program ended, he invited me to join as a cook. I ended up staying for the next five-and-a-half years.

You did, however, eventually move to New York, where you apprenticed under Daniel Boulud at Daniel. What about that experience has stayed with you?

Basically, all of the fundamentals that I learned in Toronto – going from not knowing how to properly hold a knife to doing every station in the brigade de cuisine – were refined under Daniel. The hours I spent in his kitchen were when all the polishing and fine-tuning really happened.

Speaking of stations, did you develop a favourite?

Seafood – it’s the area I’ve always been most interested in. Actually, when I was at Daniel, the vast amount of my work was on the fish station, and I enjoyed that immensely. Of course, working in a Michelin-starred kitchen, you get the opportunity to tackle ingredients in almost every conceivable form, but it was my passion for seafood that actually landed me in Hong Kong…

With such an impressive career in North America so early on, was there any trepidation about returning to Asia? As I understand it, before you started working full-time in Hong Kong, you hadn’t been back in nearly a decade?

I believe strongly in serendipity – that everything happens for a reason. In a way, that’s kind of what happened with Hong Kong. I was in New York at the time, and Daniel had offered me a management position, but that means I would have had to sign another multi-year contract. In my heart, I wasn’t 100 percent committed to the idea. Partly because I’d been cooking French cuisine almost exclusively for so many years, and felt like I should somehow incorporate Asian flavours into my career. I hadn’t decided to focus exclusively on Chinese cuisine at that stage – I was equally enamoured by traditional Korean and Japanese cooking – but I knew that I wanted to explore certain dishes falling outside the realm of cuisine we were able to prepare at Daniel. To do that, I needed to be back in Asia.

How old were you when you handed in your notice?

Twenty-four. My visa had just expired, so really, I had no choice but to pick up my bag and get out of New York. At the outset, I knew that I didn’t want to return to Toronto: there were too many memories, most of my family are based there and I had a suspicion that if I returned I’d probably never leave.

At the same time, it just so happened my Hong Kong ID card had expired, and so – long story short – I’d originally planned to come back to renew it without any intention of staying. In the interim I even travelled to Singapore, just to get a feel for the industry there.

I’d say New York’s loss was our gain. And it’s interesting – despite your really formidable background in French gastronomy, what you’re most well-known for now is Chinese food, albeit suffused with a really distinctive vein of European technique and presentation. When did you realise that was the style of cookery you were most passionate about?

I can pinpoint it exactly – six years ago, when VEA first opened. I’d been given an opportunity to open my own restaurant and by then, I’d already been cooking in a style that was nominally French with a tonne of Japanese ingredients. So the next step was to craft a profile of Asian flavours which were really representative of my personal journey. I’d been cooking French most of my career, was born in Hong Kong, grew up in a Cantonese family, and was raised in Canada – so it simply made sense to me to combine Chinese and French influences. We even coined a hashtag for it.

The other aspect of this decision was because, at the time, nobody in Hong Kong was combining the culinary traditions of France and China in a sustained, meaningful way. As far as I know, in 2016 there was only one restaurant in the whole city that had infused hip Western dining – the ‘it’ thing back then was molecular gastronomy – with Chinese flavours.

Am I right in assuming you’re referring to Bo Innovation?

Yep, but other than those guys there was nobody who had come close to tapping the potential of ‘Chinese x French’ fusion. The task was initially pretty challenging, but what I soon realised was that in both cuisines there are certain premium products that actually mirror one another. In haute cuisine, ingredients like truffles, foie gras and nicely marbled free-range beef play an established role; and in high-end Cantonese restaurants – which serve the most globally dominant style of regional Chinese food – you simply can’t overstate the importance of hoi mei [dried seafood], which fulfils a similar role.

That kernel of a concept eventually became VEA. We were arguably the first restaurant to prepare all of the dishes that used dried seafood – things like sea cucumber and fish maw – with French technique and those classic ‘fine dining’ flavours.

In hindsight, fusing those two culinary traditions together, especially for audiences in Asia, seems like an obvious move, so why is this a trend that we hadn’t seen earlier?

The two cuisines are, in all honesty, extremely distinct from one another. For somebody whose culinary education consists of studying French classics, there is often very little room to incorporate fusion influences, Asian flavours or improvisation. The upshot of that is you’re exposed to an extremely pure way of thinking, which is important for any chef who wants to establish how and why these very influential dishes are cooked a certain way.

Now, combining that regimented style of cooking with Chinese ingredients such as dried seafood is not a typical thing. The dynamic is more organic between French and Japanese food because of the intermingling between both communities. That’s why so many typical Japanese ingredients – whether it’s ikura or dried kelp – evoke a more cosmopolitan feel these days, and you can find them in extremely good French fine-dining restaurants across the globe. Conversely, it’s not as easy to weave Chinese influences into French cuisine, because the flavours and ingredients associated with the former are much less widely understood.

And yet many of your signature dishes that lean wholeheartedly into the heritage of various regional Chinese cuisines, such as Hong Kong street-food-inspired mignardises, are what nabbed VEA a Michelin star. Do you remember what you were doing when you got the news?

I remember the sensation vividly – it was a feeling of extreme happiness, mixed with shock. It was early in the morning, I was lying in bed next to my wife and as I was scrolling through my emails, I noticed I’d been sent an invitation to attend the awards ceremony for the 2016 Hong Kong/Macau Michelin Guide.

You’d think there’d be more fanfare the day you bag your first star.

I had no idea how it all worked at the time, to be frank. I wasn’t sure whether I’d been awarded the Bib Gourmand or some sort of other industry recommendation. At first I didn’t even believe we had gotten a star, I was in that much shock.

I want to circle back to your ambassadorship of Chinese cuisine. For a few years now, you’ve been a tireless advocate for traditional produce and preparations on the broader regional stage. Do you still find it challenging to ‘sell’ audiences on the merit of ingredients like lotus seed and dried abalone, particularly when the conversation around fusion cuisine is still so dominated by Japanese influences?

There’s a couple of things to unpack in that question. Firstly, as somebody who grew up in North America, I have a decent handle on what a typical ‘Western’ palate will and won’t accept. The team and I pay a lot of attention to texture – and that’s one of the qualities that dried seafood is most (in)famous for. Things like fish maw are well-known for their slippery, collagen-rich mouthfeel, and to a lot of people that can be quite repulsive. Even as someone who grew up in a Chinese family, I remember the hullabaloo around maw and sea cucumber always had to do with its nutritional value – your parents forced you to eat it because it was good for you.

Every culture always has that one ‘inside baseball’ dish I think – something that seems very unappetising unless you grow up around it…

Right. So when we’re developing these ‘Chinese x French’ dishes, we’re always thinking of ways to manipulate texture whilst creating flavours that are familiar to lovers of classic French food. An illustration of that is VEA’s Crispy Sea Cucumber – we inject it with a sauce that’s almost like a bisque, while the exterior is roasted.

At the beginning, putting these influences together felt like it could be controversial: even more so in Hong Kong, because locals are very familiar with the traditional way in which the ingredients we’re using are prepared. But I felt I had nothing to lose, because of the amount of time and effort my team had put into research, into asking the hard questions. And conversely, we’ve had a lot of diners who were really curious about what the canon of classic Chinese cookery can take from Western cuisines in terms of presentation, technique or unexpected flavour combinations. That was part of the reason we opened WING – because I spent so much time trying my hand at traditional Chinese dishes at VEA, even though I could never put a single one of them on the menu.

What factors have changed enough recently that you’d risk opening a concept like WING in an environment as synonymous with high-end Chinese dining as Hong Kong?

The pandemic was a big consideration – I’ll come back to that in a second – but, moreover, I simply had too many ideas rattling around. Over the past two years at VEA, some of the most challenging for hospitality in general, I’d developed numerous dishes I found myself unable to put on our menu, primarily because they were just too traditional. Our regulars come to VEA for that fine balance between French and Chinese influences and I personally felt obligated to respect that identity. At the same time, I didn’t want to shy away from my growing interest in Chinese cuisine and, with so many ideas percolating, the obvious conclusion seemed to be that we should pour those into another restaurant.

When Covid-19 hit, it had a triggering effect. Like many of us who call Hong Kong home, I effectively found myself stuck here – for the single longest amount of time I can remember since we opened the restaurant in 2015. That lack of travel for overseas collaborations or organisation-backed events presented me with a solid opportunity to concentrate on opening a new venue.

When WING was originally announced, I remember one of the big talking points was how it was being helmed by a chef with no formal education in Chinese cookery. And yet you’ve managed to leverage a lot of your training in European cuisine in service of traditional cooking methods – the German-made dry ager used to cure lap mei is a consummate example. How do you strike the right balance between that kind of innovation and the historical way of doing things?

You know, it’s funny: I always tell my guests that I’ve never had any proper training in cooking Chinese cuisine – but I know how to cook. I’m not going in blind, as it were.

Right. There are certain fundamental principles that are universally applicable…

Being able to trust your palate is one of those – if I’ve prepared something, does it taste good? That’s no different in any cuisine: you’re adjusting for acidity, spice, salt, sugar, whatever the dish needs to find its ultimate balance.

In theory, a Chinese chef with a conventional background could stand next to me in my kitchen and critique the way I combine technique and ingredients but, in a way, my advantage is precisely that I don’t think with their mindset. If I did, there would be a lot of constraints – centring on what is ‘proper’ and ‘improper’. I mean this in the most respectful way, but sometimes rules are meant to be broken, you know?

A sentiment that sounds an awful lot like the guiding philosophy for one of your favourite watch brands…

Right – I see what you did there [laughs].

Before we get stuck into watches though, I just wanted to linger for a few more moments on this notion of crafting traditional Chinese dishes with a non-traditional mindset. Are there any recipes at WING that you feel have benefited from the attention of your outsider’s mindset?

You know what? There are multiple – but I’ll just restrict myself to two. The first would be our crispy skin chicken. In China’s culinary lexicon, there are always a few dishes that are absolutely essential – if you’re opening a restaurant they’re almost as inevitable as serving tea. Non-exhaustively, that includes a fish course, rice and noodles, various wonderful soups and, very importantly, poultry.

In the specific case of Cantonese food, there are numerous versions of crispy chicken. Of these, the most typical is carved and replated whole, served with a side of lemon juice and seasoned salt, almost like a pepper salt. While we were in the process of writing WING’s menu, I became increasingly aware that the chicken at various restaurants we were trying was inadequately seasoned – it was almost like you had to add your own lemon and salt, which felt nonsensical. Chefs should know how to season their food, so at WING, we don’t give diners the traditional accompaniments – we’ve already injected that into the chicken during the cooking process, ahead of time. Additionally, we implement a 5-7 day dry-ageing so that the flavour matures, the meat obtains tenderness and the skin becomes more crispy.

And the second dish?

That would be the maa tau – our crispy scale tilefish. The Japanese call it amadai and it’s a fish that is popular in their cuisine and, increasingly, high-end French restaurants (we even served it at VEA once upon a time). What makes the tilefish special at WING is that we prepare it whole: we leave the head, tail and collar bone intact, then we steam it. It’s paired with all the accompaniments that are a cornerstone of Cantonese cuisine: the fish soy sauce, the finely julienned scallions, the coriander – all brought together in the most traditional way.

That’s one of those classic Cantonese dishes that is so iconic it teeters on the edge of ubiquity – kind of like a great Sunday roast. Are there any details that help to separate your tilefish from the more conventional preparations?

It’s about nailing all of the little things. We spend a lot of time fine-tuning our recipe for the perfect soy sauce and after we’ve steamed the tilefish, we also crisp the scales. There’s a kind of pleasurable disconnect there: the garnishes and presentation suggest steamed fish, but then you take a bite and all of a sudden it’s crispy. I think dishes like that represent what we’re all about: respect for the traditional way of doing things, yet with one thoughtful element added to really make it our own.

Returning to our earlier conversation, what do you think it is about watchmaking that holds the attention of so many chefs from the peak of your industry? Guys like Éric Ripert and your mentor Daniel – is there some underlying ethos that unites them as watch enthusiasts?

I think it has to do with our working environment – a watch is just about the only accessory you can comfortably wear. The rest is largely fixed: you’re going to be in chef’s whites, you’re not going to have any statement jewellery (for fear of it getting in the way while cooking), you won’t necessarily wear your nicest pair of shoes – so that just leaves your wrist.

Did you already have this habit of wearing a watch in the early stages of your career?

No, I actually came to the hobby much later on, at my first restaurant in Hong Kong. Back in 2011, whenever I needed the correct time I’d use my iPhone – because you can always rely on Apple [laughs]. Still, it proved annoying having to pull out a phone in the midst of a busy service – especially when you’re trying to deliver dishes to an incredibly tight timeline – and I never felt comfortable doing so in front of our guests. So the decision to buy my first watch, more so than a lot of the collectors I know now, was motivated exclusively by practical concerns.

Is this a piece that’s still in the collection?

Yeah, I still have it – a Cartier Calibre fitted with an integrated bracelet. I forget the specific reference. What I do recall is being taken with the watch’s sportiness and size. That, and it provided everything I needed in the kitchen: date, time, a certain guaranteed durability. For me, nothing can detract from the fact that it was my first ‘nice’ watch, and I still thoroughly enjoy wearing it.

That’s so nice to hear. Did you cross the threshold for ‘sensible’ collecting soon thereafter? Because I think it’s fair to say that – based on the pieces you’ve acquired and your outspokenness about certain brands – watch collecting is no longer just about function to you, right?

Technically – and this applies to a lot of other hobbies I enjoy – the moment you buy your first watch, the practical aspect becomes a lot harder to justify [laughs]. Typically, when you start acquiring your second, third, and then fourth piece, and so on, it’s not about needing to tell the time anymore.

A big part of my own experience with the watch hobby also has to do specifically with life in Hong Kong. It’s not the most drivable city, so I don’t have a car, never mind multiple, to sink money into.

Based on your own philosophy as a chef, are there any particular names in watchmaking that strongly resonate with you?

I kind of gave myself away earlier, but Audemars Piguet would be one that always springs to mind. It’s so great that despite the brand’s heritage in traditional watchmaking, the team there have managed to cultivate such a youthful mindset. It’s a brand that is unafraid to embrace new ideas and attempt things other watchmakers aren’t doing.

Right. I wouldn’t say that radical experimentation always works for them, but there is a strong historical precedent for it. And nobody can credibly deny that, over the last half-century, the company hasn’t taken real risks…

Exactly – and that’s something to which I can relate. When we opened VEA in 2015, the move was extremely controversial. It was a huge ‘what if’, clouded in uncertainty. Nobody knew if this whole ‘Chinese x French’ concept would work. But here we are six years later, one of the most buzzed-about restaurants in Asia – a bar that I’ve also set for WING and one we’re committed to further raising in future.