Hong Kong Cuisine’s Silas Li on being a private chef to Dickson Poon and doing ‘anything I want’, and why he’s now back cooking for the masses
- Silas Li helped set up the exclusive One-ThirtyOne restaurant before being poached by businessman Dickson Poon and working as his private chef for 20 years
- At Hong Kong Cuisine, he’s looking to level up the standard of Chinese cooking and not ‘keeping secrets’, instead sharing what he knows for the next generation
Technically, Hong Kong Cuisine in Happy Valley is veteran chef Silas Li’s first job cooking at a Chinese restaurant.
The Britain-born chef has over a quarter of a century of experience but mostly in Western fine dining and as a private chef.
He helped launch the exclusive One-ThirtyOne restaurant, in a remote part of Hong Kong’s Sai Kung peninsula, in 2000, which quickly became popular with high-society darlings and tycoons.
That’s where Dickson Poon, a luxury magnate whose company owns London’s Harvey Nichols department store and Hong Kong’s Dickson Watch & Jewellery chain, met Li and poached him to be his personal chef.
But after two decades cooking for just one patron, this year Li felt the urge to spread his wings and explore his culinary ideas and kitchen philosophy with regard to Cantonese cuisine.