ProfileAmerican chef on culture shock in Europe – he foraged for ants and smoked reindeer – and doing his own thing in Hong Kong at Haku
- Midwesterner Rob Drennan, the chef de cuisine of Haku in Hong Kong, tells Bernice Chan about foraging for ingredients in Norway and geotagging blueberries
- His early career included cooking Japanese-American and Filipino cuisines, and at Haku he’s cooking ‘good food inspired by Japan’ and facing down negativity
How did you become interested in food? “When I was a kid, my mom wasn’t that great a cook, she was a very busy single mother for a while. But when we went to restaurants, I was drawn in, like when the Wizard of Oz says, ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain’. You read a piece of paper, it goes into the ether and then out comes your food.”
When did you start to learn to cook? “I was around 14. I was terrible at school. Science and history were my favourite classes, but not maths or English grammar. In my last two years of high school I signed up for a culinary arts programme. My culinary instructor chef was a Swedish guy, Claes Passmark, who had a way of teaching that made you interested in cooking. Afterwards I went to Oklahoma State University, which had a vocational college for culinary arts.”
What were your first jobs out of college? “I really started my career at Metro Wine Bar and Bistro [in Oklahoma]. We did bistro food like burgers, steak frites, pasta, all kinds of salads, flourless chocolate cake, crème brûlée. I was there for almost four years; by the time I was 21 years old I had been promoted to sous chef.”
Where did you work in Austin, Texas? “I worked at Uchiko, where the food was very Americanised Japanese food. It was a learning curve for me to learn the names of the ingredients. I didn’t know what yuba was, or that there were different types of aubergine. I felt so ignorant. At the end of the night we had knife-sharpening competitions to see who could sharpen the best.
“We would come up with special dishes that could go on the menu for a few weeks. On paper, one of my ideas sounded gross but it worked: compressed watermelon with heirloom tomato, yuba, pistachio, shichimi togarashi and dashi made with buttermilk instead of water. It made it onto the specials menu.