Taste test

TIM CUMMING was baffled. 'What exactly is an apple cucumber?' he asked. Across the table from the Regent's perplexed food and beverage manager, one of his assistants, Alain Tsui, looked surprised by the question. 'Well, it's a summer vegetable. It has nothing to do with apples,' he said. Cumming thought for a moment, grasped another apple cucumber roll with abalone, roast duck and black mushrooms with his chopsticks and ate it without further comment.

One weekday lunchtime last month, the private room of the Regent's Lai Ching Heen Chinese restaurant was reserved for a special 20-course Chinese banquet - without an XO bottle in sight. For 90 minutes, the hotel's leading food and beverage staff, including Cumming, Tsui, general manager Thomas Axmacher, executive Chinese chef Cheung Kam-chuen and his European counterpart Jurg Blaser, sampled nearly two dozen dishes in a $2,700-a-head blowout. However unlikely it may have seemed to the casual observer, these men were hard at work.

A well-run hotel should be like a swan on a pond. On the surface it is all grace and forward motion; underneath it is paddling like hell.

Behind every meal ordered in a hotel restaurant lurks a small army - the cooks who make it, the waiters who serve it and, less obviously, the F&B management who decide to put it on the menu in the first place.

Lai Ching Heen's menu changes every month, while those of Plume and the seafood restaurant Yu alter every three months.

Lai Ching Heen's special menu changes with the Chinese lunar calendar to incorporate the most seasonal vegetables, fruits, meats and seafood. The ingredients may choose themselves but how they are put together is up to the chefs in the first instance, and to Axmacher in the last.

When the first diner orders any of the 20 new dishes on August 7, the start of the seventh lunar month, they will have been cooked, sampled and altered up to four times at tasting sessions.