Climate change documentary maker and restaurateur’s worlds collide - his group shuts steakhouse and makes plant-based Chinese fine-dining menu
- Restaurateur, filmmaker and climate advocate Malcolm Wood on starting Maximal Concepts group behind Hong Kong restaurants Mott 32, Blue Butcher and Brickhouse
- A keen skier and alpinist, he spent the last four years filming documentary The Last Glaciers. Seeing climate change close up has changed the group’s practices
Moving experience: I was born in 1981, in Taiwan. My dad is British and my mum is Taiwanese. They split up when I was five and my dad moved to Hong Kong. My stepdad worked for an airline and moved around every three years.
From Taiwan, we moved to Los Angeles, back to Taiwan, then to Hong Kong. And from there it was constant moving: by the time I was in my mid-20s, I’d moved 18 times and lived in Asia, Canada, the United States, India, Italy and the UK. I’ve lived in Hong Kong three times and went to Island School for just over a year when I was 12.
Hong Kong feels like home because it’s the place I moved to most often and it’s where both my parents are now. I went to boarding school in the UK twice, the first time when I was seven and then again when I was 13. Both schools were an hour’s drive from my grandparents, who lived in Poole, outside Bournemouth.
I stayed with them most weekends and hung out with my grandad. He loved to cook and was passionate about food and sourcing from markets. Because we travelled so much, my memories of being connected to a family and a home that was consistent were here and I really enjoyed sourcing from farms with him.
As a child, mum used to say, ‘You don’t want to be the person who goes to the restaurant, you want to be the person who owns the restaurant’
Mumtrepreneur: I come from a very entrepreneurial family – my mum and dad both work for themselves. My mum won a businesswoman of the year award in the 1970s, which was pretty difficult back then in a male-dominated society, especially in Asia.