How Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and Singapore’s national service helped Barry Quek find his calling
- The chef behind Beet recalls his time in the army, during which he lost 12kg and found his feet
- Since arriving in Hong Kong, Quek has shifted from imported to local produce, working with farmers in the New Territories
How would you describe your relationship with food growing up? “As a child I ate a lot, so I was really fat. When I was 14 years old, my first job was at McDonald’s. I was behind the counter taking customers’ orders. After working and eating there every day after school for a year, I weighed 100kg.
“Home cooking didn’t interest me because I had to help my mom with shopping when she went to the wet market, which is, well, wet and dirty, and I didn’t understand what the aunties [vendors] were saying. Meanwhile, my friends were in the arcade playing video games.”
Did your parents pressure you to lose weight? “Even though they said I shouldn’t eat so much, they didn’t pressure me because they thought I would slim down once I went into the army [for Singapore’s national service].
“High school was terrible. Every morning, from 7.30am to 8am, if you were obese, they would call your name in front of everyone and you had to run while everyone else read.”
What happened during national service? “When I was 19 years old, I went into the army and I lost 5kg-6kg in three weeks. There’s no way to get food unless they feed you, and after 7pm there was no food. We did lots of exercise– before we walked to the cookhouse, we had to do 100 push-ups or sit-ups.