Kitchen laboratory keeps chef happy

Menex Cheung has been a chef for nearly two decades, and the executive chef of China Tang still has a great interest in developing new dishes.

I interviewed a biologist years ago whose interest was "in the laboratory." Cheung's is in the kitchen. He spends his leisure time thinking about "how to make a common dish uncommon." The kitchen is his lab.

"I can take what seems like a common dish apart and add new elements."

Our mala chicken at lunch was his invention, a Cantonese-Sichuan crossover in presentation and essence.

His training was somewhat like Shaolin kung fu training, having started with menial work like sweeping floors, carrying buckets of water and washing vegetables, pots, pans and dishes.

He was punished once, for taking a day off without good reason, with washing vegetables while standing for a week.

"It took a few more years before I was allowed to do real cooking," he said.

But he's not afraid of hard work, and he was serious about training, so he won prizes at many contests.

His career has taken him from Beijing to Inner Mongolia.

The kitchen is a place where respect has to be earned by skills. "At every big hotel I'd worked for I would take a hands-on approach, created new dishes and introduced new menus," he said.

He became executive chef at China Tang on the strength of his "kung fu."

That afternoon, he recommended his thoughtfully put together tasting menu: appetizer, barbecued pork, chilled bitter melon, steamed pork dumpling with shrimp and matsutake mushroom, roasted duck spring roll, mala chicken and 30-year aged tangerine peel, and Shao Xing rice wine steamed Patin fish.

We then had abalone bun and chilled ice jelly for dessert. What we loved the most was the double-boiled pig's lung soup with almond cream.

Terence Chang Cheuk-cheung is the retired headmaster of Diocesan Boys School