Jean-Georges Vongerichten is a chef after whom three restaurants - Vong in New York, Vong in London and now Vong in Hong Kong - are named. And that's just using his surname. In New York, there's also Jo Jo - his nickname as a child - and Jean Georges which he opened last year in Donald Trump's International Hotel and Tower. The odd one out is Lipstick, which seems to have no obvious connection unless, of course, he wanted to share some little insight into his personal habits with the discreet readers of this magazine ... 'No!' cried Vongerichten. 'It's that the building is the shape of a lipstick. The owners hated it when I called it this.' But he beamed, looking like Puck girdling the culinary globe.
Let me be frank here. It is my professional experience that chefs are either dull and/or arrogant. I'd eaten well at Vong first but was determined not to be swayed: if need be, this interview was to be a rare instance of the fatted calf doing the slaughtering. You may be relieved (or disappointed) to hear that our encounter came nowhere that bloodbath. Vongerichten was voluble, occasionally incomprehensibly so, amused by the questions, good-natured and generous with his time; throughout the afternoon he didn't stop twinkling. He was, to use a hideous word which I'd heard several other women apply to him, cute.
He realises, of course, that this is his persona and I suspect that he works fairly hard at it. He was accompanied by his sidekick, an American chef called Kerry Simon whom he has known for 14 years and whose card read 'Cuisine and Design Developer'. 'In meetings, I'm not confronting people,' said Vongerichten, twinkling away. 'I leave that to Kerry. I like to make them laugh.' Simon looked into the distance, squared his jaw and said, 'Yeah. I have to protect his name every day. I carry the weight of that.' So we're talking about a good cop/bad cop scenario? 'Exactly,' replied Vongerichten. 'I want them to pay my ticket back from here, so Kerry asks all the difficult questions.' In fact, Vongerichten is technically also the Alsatian in this police drama as he was born in Alsace, in France, 40 years ago. His family trade was coal-handling although by the time his father retired, the energy business had gone solar; young Jean-Georges, however, wanted to be hot - nuclear, even - in the kitchen. When he was 17, he was taken on as an apprentice in a local three-star Michelin restaurant which inconveniently rang him the night before July 14, Bastille Day, to request his presence at 8 am the following day. 'I was out partying, chasing girls, I don't know what, and I came home at 2 am. The next morning I was ...' (here he closed his eyes and made feeble tottering gestures) '... and it's been like that for almost 25 years. The hours ... you're missing your life, your friends, you're with a girl but no one's going to wait until one in the morning. It took me a year to touch a pot. That was a highlight.' He says he used to toy with the idea of the garment industry. 'I'm attracted by clothes. Food and fashion are very similar. I'm a shoe freak, I have to buy a pair every week.' ('I won't tell you about his apartment closet,' interrupted Simon. 'It puts Elton John to shame.') But of course he remained at his stove, working his way round France, until he was invited to go to The Oriental in Bangkok in 1980. 'I get off the plane, the air is different. The first time I taste coriander, it's like soap, now it's my favourite herb.' Despite the fact that he was expected to prepare only French food, he learned to cook Thai and he picked up English; both accent and cuisine have retained the East-West blend which has proved so fashionable in the last decade.
In 1982, he came to Hong Kong to work in the Mandarin Oriental's Pierrot restaurant for a year. This is nicely symmetrical because, 15 years later, Pierrot made way for Vong. In the interim, Vongerichten had made a name for himself with his Asian-cum-French dishes, and restaurants with various parts of that name were springing up everywhere. He is adamant that it was the New York Times food critic who suggested the title Vong. 'I said, 'But why should I call it Vong?' And only then, I swear, I realised.' Does he have an ego? 'Oh, of course I have an ego. But I know what I'm doing, I know what people want.' Simon interjects: 'It's his vision, in an artist that can be misunderstood as ego.' Okay, I said to Simon, give me five words to describe your artist. Simon frowned and said, 'He's generous.' ('Non!' cried Vongerichten, but he was grinning.) 'Complicated.' ('Oui,' nodded Vongerichten. 'I like simple things but I'm complicated.') 'Intuitive ... humble ... he's good at motivating people.' Vongerichten sighed. 'For me, the most difficult thing is not the food or the customer, it's the staff,' he says. 'Just in New York I have 400 people working for me. You have to be a diplomat, a daddy.' As it happens, he is a daddy - he has a son of 16 and a daughter of 10 in France - but he has been divorced for almost eight years. 'We have the best relationship we ever had now,' he commented of his ex-wife. 'We talk about things we never did when we were married.' A little later he made a telling remark about himself: 'My way of getting close to people is to push them away.' Deliberately? 'No, not on purpose. But I do it to get them back.' He added that he did that when he was a boy, the second child ('That's why I'm fighting to be number one') of four, who wanted his mother's attention. Has he changed? Vongerichten pulled a face. 'I don't think people do. Maybe you don't do in public what you did as a child.' That's why he likes having Simon in tow, of course: then he can play the court jester and be the businessman. 'He's extremely ambitious,' remarked Simon. Vongerichten brightened: 'Oui, I want a restaurant in space.' Simon, who'd evidently heard this many times before, said, 'That'll be the first project without me. I like to keep my feet on earth. I like to keep us grounded.' And before then? 'He'll have a little hotel in Hanoi and all his friends will visit,' said Simon. Vongerichten beamed. 'Shut up!' he cried happily. 'I'll still be running around trying to please people.'