Profile | A chef on feeling sorry for the frogs and eels he butchered, and why serving food hot matters more than its presentation
- Hung Chi-kwong, head chef of Rùn at The St Regis Hong Kong, started in a kitchen when he was 15, and found killing animals for food difficult at first
- Having worked at a fusion restaurant where the accent was on presentation, he considers serving food that’s flavourful and hot counts for more than how it looks
“The food I ate at home was very simple. My mother made soup and dishes like soy sauce chicken. They were delicious, and just thinking about the soy sauce chicken made me want to eat it.”
When did you know you wanted to be a chef?
“I got interested in cooking a bit late, when I was around 26 years old, but when I was a child I didn’t get good grades, so I went into the restaurant industry. I was 15 years old when my friend got me a job in a restaurant – he was working in the kitchen. It was long hours, 9am to 11pm or 11.30pm. We had a two-hour lunch break and went home at 1am.
“I needed to arrive early to work so I left home at 8am from Kwun Tong [in Kowloon]. There was no MTR then so there were traffic jams in the mornings, and it took me 90 minutes to get home from Central or Causeway Bay [on Hong Kong Island] because there weren’t as many buses.”
What was your first job like?
“After about four months, I was promoted to washing vegetables and butchering fish, eel and frogs.”
What was that like?
“Butchering eel was hard because you had to cut the head off first and then fillet it, but the body kept moving. At first I wasn’t scared – I don’t know why – but, after about a year or so, I started feeling sorry for butchering them.