95-year-old dim sum chef launches menu of forgotten items at Tim Ho Wan in Hong Kong

Hong Kong dim sum restaurant chain Tim Ho Wan has launched a nostalgic dim sum series with the help of 95-year-old veteran master Foo Shing. The series recreates five different dim sum dishes built from the chef’s personal recipe records that have almost disappeared from Hong Kong menus, with small adjustments to cater to modern tastes. “I met Chef Foo at a networking event,” says Cheung Yat-sing, Tim Ho Wan’s global product innovation director. “He told me he still kept his dim sum recipes, so I flew to Singapore to learn from him.” Foo’s life has been an astonishing one. Born in 1931 in Guangdong, he entered the kitchen as an apprentice in Hong Kong at the age of 13. “It was a really tough life,” he recounts. “We would wake up at 2am to start work to make dim sum for breakfast that opened at 5am. We’d work all day, and even after we cleaned the kitchens, we still had to help the restaurant make food deliveries. “We’d lay a board on top of the dim sum steaming baskets and sleep there, and we’d wake up at 2am and start all over again. Sometimes, we’d only get two hours of sleep a night.” He adds that apprentices would have to “get on the good side of the dim sum chefs” to learn, and that they would do all kinds of odd jobs – including washing the senior chefs’ underwear – in hopes of currying favour. Foo is a fourth-generation dim sum maker with a culinary family history that stretches back to the Qing dynasty, when dockside, open-air tea halls sprang up as rest stops for the working class. “Barbecued pork buns, [and] shrimp and pork dumplings were the classics. Another was beef siu mai,” Foo says of the popular dim sum at the time. When World War II descended on Guangdong, Foo and his grandmother made a three-day journey to Hong Kong. “It was a tough journey; my grandmother had bound feet. We paid a guide to help us get to Hong Kong, and we’d stop by crude motels to spend the night. We’d eat lard with rice and a bit of sugar for sustenance,” he recalls. While the combination sounds indulgent at first, the chef explains that the meal was quite pragmatic. “Fatty cuts are the cheapest cut of pork, so to give you oil to flavour the rice, it is the cheapest option. Blocks of cane sugar were something we could carry when we were travelling, and we would flavour the rice with it for the energy boost. We needed the calories to make the journey back then.” Testing a dim sum chef Foo spent seven years in the kitchen under the tutelage of master chefs before he became a dim sum chef. The difference between dim sum then and now, he says, is that everything was made by hand. He adds that the test of a true dim sum chef’s mettle is in the making of beef siu mai. “If you can’t make a proper beef siu mai, then the rest of the dim sum they make won’t turn out that great,” he says. According to the veteran chef, there was – and still is, for those who are making it by hand – a particular method for preparing beef siu mai. “It wasn’t easy [back then]; we had to hammer eight layers of dough together to get the right consistency.” This technique creates a thin, textured skin that does not absorb too much water, helping achieve what is described as a dry-steamed effect. “How the skin of a siu mai absorbs the water is what gives it its dry texture after steaming,” he explains. Another key element is how the chef retains and balances texture and bite. Half the beef is chopped, the other is minced, then slowly folded with water and oil. “The surface of the beef should obtain a sort of lychee skin pattern, which shows that there is a perfect balance between the chopped and minced beef, to achieve a springy bite and smooth texture,” Foo says. For the Tim Ho Wan menu, Cheung worked with Foo to recreate the nostalgic quail egg siu mai, but they added basil to the pork filling and topped it with XO sauce. “We are mindful that diners want something less heavy on the palate, so we added basil and XO sauce to balance the richness,” Cheung says. The duo have also revived the lard bun, a classic dim sum dish that has largely disappeared from menus due to the negative health connotations of eating pork fat. A lard bun is also a Cantonese euphemism used to describe people who are tardy or dawdle. At Tim Ho Wan, it has been reborn as a crispy nut dessert lard bun, featuring a lard-infused dough and a slow-sautéed, house-made sesame filling. The buns, glazed with a blend of syrup, soy sauce, Pu’er tea and lard, have a toasty exterior and a fragrant, nutty interior. Dim sum trivia Foo shares other dim sum trivia, such as the difference between a cha lau, which means tea hall, and a zau lau, or banquet hall. Today, the two – which serve almost the same selection of dim sum – are often used interchangeably. However, the chef explains that in his day, they were very different entities. “Cha laus were a lot more casual. They only served breakfast and lunch. Zau laus served breakfast to dinner and sometimes supper.” The food served at these restaurants was also vastly different. “Cha laus served more baked goods, such as an assortment of betrothal cakes that used different grains. These places were in the business of selling betrothal cakes for proposals, but would serve superior tea to attract people to dine there. “Zau laus, on the other hand, made the bulk of their money through banquet events, so they had to attract patrons through the lunch crowd with yum cha and served more steamed dim sum and meat items. This is how you get some of the older patrons who would come with their own tea, because zau laus weren’t known to have a good tea selection. “These institutions were so different that they were represented by different trade unions back then.” Foo, who has hundreds of dim sum recipes recorded in notebooks and files, reveals that he never attended a school like the institutions of today. He went to an old village school where, for three years, he learned by memorising the words of poems recited by teachers known for punishing students with a cane or ruler. “There was a poem that I memorised to encourage myself to be innovative with dim sum for decades: ‘Living to your seventies is something rare, I’ll be flying if I reach my eighties, my steps will be wobbly in my nineties, but I’ll still chase to reach 100 years.’” The 95-year-old chef adds: “I don’t doubt I will reach my 100th birthday.”

95-year-old dim sum chef launches menu of forgotten items at Tim Ho Wan in Hong Kong

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Foo Shing looks back on an astonishing life as he opens up about items featured in Tim Ho Wan’s nostalgic dim sum series

Foo Shing looks back on an astonishing life as he opens up about items featured in Tim Ho Wan’s nostalgic dim sum series