Hong Kong chefs create spicy menus for more adventurous diners
Hong Kong chefs are turning up the heat with fiery chillies as more diners experiment with alternatives to mild Cantonese food, writes Andrew Sun
The heat is not just a basketball team in Miami. It's something emanating from more dishes around Hong Kong.
As a new generation of chefs becomes emboldened by adventurous, asbestos-tongued diners, restaurateurs have less trepidation about adding dishes that appear on the menu with icons of little chillies next to them. Many of these chefs are admittedly addicted to the burn.
"I like to challenge myself. I like spicy in general," says Ho Lee Fook's Jowett Yu. The Taiwan-born chef is not shy about liberally employing heat on his menu, from a spicy soy on dumplings to vegetables with bacon chilli jam, he also makes a variety of his own chilli sauces, from XO to sambal.
"It completes the flavours in a dish and adds a different dimension that is part of the palate profile like sweet, bitter and savoury," he says. "I like the way heat enhances different dishes. Even in a bowl of Vietnamese pho, adding a few pieces of bird's eye chilli completes the dish, just as the chilli oil in the Taiwanese saliva chicken lifts the dish. It's just nice to sweat."
Yu might like setting his mouth on fire, but he's not a proselytising firebrand to his diners. "I might like a lot of chillies but others may not, so you play around, see what the feedback is and adjust. In the early days, dishes here were way more spicy. Despite my grand notions, I still have to please people."