Richard Ekkebus
Within a few years, chef Richard Ekkebus has turned Amber, the Landmark Mandarin Oriental’s signature French restaurant, into an international dining destination complete with two Michelin stars and an impressive 37th-place ranking on the S. Pellegrino’s World’s Best Restaurants list. He talks to Adele Wong about his perfectionist tendencies and catering to the local palate.
I was sort of born in the kitchen because my grandparents had a restaurant and I grew up in a family of hospitality. I always found the kitchen fascinating and a great place to be.
I’m from Holland but my [chef’s apprenticeship] was done in France. I worked for 15 years in France. That is where I learned to refine [my skills].
When I was [young] it did not cross my mind to go into catering or hospitality. I wanted to be an engineer, something completely different. While [pursuing] my studies I worked on the weekends in very good restaurants, and that is where I actually started to realize that being with food and preparing food was really what I wanted to do—not becoming an engineer. So I basically dropped out of my studies and became a chef.
My father actually said not to go into catering because he was the child of a family that was in hospitality and he only saw, as a child, the inconvenience of not being with your parents very often.
It’s a job where everybody works quite long and odd hours. When everybody’s celebrating Christmas, we are basically catering [for the celebrations]. So it is a very anti-social life, and my father did not agree with it at all and was actually very disappointed. Now of course he’s come to terms.
There are always high expectations in Hong Kong. People expect that from the day a restaurant is opened, it’s immediately legendary. That is of course not true. You go to Europe or any other place, and restaurants have built their reputations over a decade or more.
I think today we are a much better [restaurant] than we’ve ever been, and I hope tomorrow we’re going to be even better. To be fair, I am not very happy. I’m an eternally unhappy person, so I always look for ways of getting things better, more tasty.