Four Seasons hotel chef on the secret to three Michelin stars, creating dim sum for Lung King Heen and what he eats at home
- Lung King Heen chef Chan Yan-tak had already had a full career and retired before becoming the first Chinese chef to receive three Michelin stars in Hong Kong
- Nice ingredients matter, the Four Seasons chef says, as does serving food piping hot and paying staff well, many of whom have worked with him for decades
“[When I was young] we didn’t really celebrate [Lunar New Year] as my family wasn’t well off. A day or two before the New Year, we just got some new clothes. There are five siblings and I’m the oldest. It wasn’t easy to make a living then. We couldn’t afford elaborate feasts, at most we would eat chicken. After I got married, we had fresh chicken, which was cheaper than pork then.”
How did you get into cooking?
“My father died when I was 11 years old and my mother cleaned offices, so I started working when I was 14 years old at a teahouse near where we lived, selling dim sum that I carried in a big basket, going table to table.
“I did that for two or three months until a friend told me about a kitchen job in a restaurant where I could sleep and eat. It was Dai Sam Yuen, on Hennessy Road in Wan Chai [on Hong Kong Island], where DBS Bank is now.
“Later, when I got promoted, I did catering for the restaurant. We had to carry the stoves and ingredients to the customer’s home, and then bring back all the dirty dishes and chopsticks and wash them.
“When I started working in the restaurant, we lived in the dormitory. There was no overnight bus – we had to sleep in the restaurant. I only went home once or twice a month when I got my salary. I would take the Wan Chai ferry back to Kowloon and go home for one day and then back to work early the next day. We didn’t know it was tough – we were all in the same situation.”
Why did you leave the restaurant industry?
“In 1974, I changed jobs to train juvenile offenders to cook so they would be more employable after they were released. I taught them how to cook for six months. I took this civil service job because it was stable. I even had to do a physical test to get it.