Diner’s Diary | Beef & Liberated: Mandarin Oriental executive chef quits to flip burgers
After nearly 10 years chasing an elusive second Michelin star at Hong Kong Island’s oldest five-star hotel, Uwe Opocensky wants to have some fun – and come up with the ultimate burger
It’s been a month since Uwe Opocensky officially left the Mandarin Oriental and swapped avant-garde dollops of puréed seaweed for burger flipping at Beef & Liberty.
The group executive chef for The Greater China Restaurant Company is already busy in his new job, with many new projects on his proverbial plate.
“I’d been at the Mandarin Oriental for an amazing nine and a half years and I could have continued being the chef there, but I wanted a change,” he says at the new Beef & Liberty at California Tower in Lan Kwai Fong.
He explained he has known the owners of Beef & Liberty for more than a dozen years and they began talking last summer about new concepts. In November 2015 they asked him to join and it was an opportunity Opocensky didn’t want to pass up.
“As group executive chef of Beef & Liberty I’m one of four who make decisions and I’m more free. It’s more about taking away the layers of bureaucracy and having fun, not that I didn’t have fun at the Mandarin,” he says.