Why Hong Kong restaurants are pairing whisky, not just wine, with food

It used to be that fine-dining restaurants would promote tasting menus that were paired with expensive wines, but increasingly it’s whisky that is the beverage of choice. The drink was considered by many to be too strong to partner with food,but recent events show there is plenty of interest.

The recent Hong Kong Whisky Festival 2016 at the InterContinental Grand Stanford, and the Malt Masters festival at the Conrad, both offered popular pairing seminars.

“There is a demand for whisky and food pairing in different parts of the world, but in some cases it has been bit haphazard,” says Ewan Henderson, a consultant who conducted two pairing seminars at Malt Masters, both of them fully subscribed.

“Some chemical reactions can build a bridge between the spirit and the food. Take the Maillard reaction for example. That is the chemical reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars (browning) when food reaches a certain temperature. It creates a lot of flavours – in roasted coffee, chocolate, grilled steaks, and anything barbecued,” he says. “That also takes place in the whisky making processes of malting barley and charring casks [in which whisky is matured and from which it takes much of its flavour]. We can recognise flavours that pair across.”

In the course of his seminars Henderson paired Japanese whiskies with yakitori (grilled chicken skewers); American whiskey with a maple corn dog (whiskey and maple syrup, he says, often go well together); and Irish whiskey with crab and ginger salad on boxty (a potato pancake).