Will Hong Kong restaurants stop importing Chinese produce and instead grow hyperlocal food?
Hong Kong has a burgeoning movement in urban vegetable gardening, complementing rurally located restaurants that have their own gardens
At Wolfgat, the rustic 20-seater eatery that shot from obscurity to win 2019’s Restaurant of the Year in the World Restaurant Awards, chef-owner Kobus van der Merwe and his team start every day gathering ingredients from the surrounding landscape. The restaurant is located in the tiny fishing village of Paternoster – population 1,971 in the last census – on South Africa’s long and weather-beaten West Cape coast, giving the chefs access to both land and sea.
“Each course we serve contains locally picked wild herbs and succulents that we’ve sourced within a few kilometres’ radius,” says van der Merwe. “We pick plants and forage for shellfish endemic to this coast and that encapsulates the flavour of the coast and the season. Paternoster has no palm trees or tropical holiday beach vibes – we have special Strandveld vegetation here that you have to look at closely to notice and admire. I want to capture that and share that.”
The indigenous plant kiesieblaar is baked until crispy and is stacked it with raw yellowtail and pelargonium mayonnaise; angelfish is smoked with wild sage and presented with waterblommetjie (commonly known as Cape pond weed), limpet and lemon veloute; and sorghum porridge is served with wild dagga (of the mint family, known for its medicinal and mild psychoactive properties), beer ice cream and honeycomb.
“Being so strict with ingredients is limiting; it forces you to be creative,” explains van der Merwe. “We see it as a positive challenge. We’ve been open three years and we’re still learning and experimenting. We want to offer a sense of place that’s truly representative of the west coast.”
Obsessive attention to local ingredients has long been a global dining trend, brought to serious attention a decade ago by culinary greats such as Rene Redzepi. With his boundary-breaking Noma, Redzepi reinterprets Nordic cuisine with strictly local ingredients, many of which he harvests from wild pockets of land in his native Copenhagen.
Now, more chefs around the world are embracing the concept of hyperlocal – taking the ingredient sourcing process into their own hands by farming on-site, foraging or carefully sourcing from within a tight radius of a few kilometres. There are a lot of reasons to go hyperlocal; one is that chefs are able to give diners a taste of the unique culinary personality of highly specialised regions.
Marc Soper, executive chef at Wharekauhau luxury lodge in New Zealand, gives diners not only a taste of the region, but of his particular farm.
Wharekauhau is a sheep and cattle farm, with gardens that produce a huge variety of plants, from rhubarb and kaffir lime to carrots and kawakawa (New Zealand bush basil). He pickles kawakawa flower heads with cider vinegar, mirin, sake, salt and sugar and serves them with fish or pork knuckle sourced from local fishermen and farms.
At least 80 per cent of Soper’s ingredients come from the farm, or the one next door: “A farmer plants kale at the back of the farm, and sometimes he catches me in his paddocks picking leaves, or pulling up the turnips or swedes he is growing for his cows. We make a very nice swede purée,” he says. Soper also gets vegetables from film director James Cameron’s organic farm, which is about 10 minutes away – but only when he does not have enough of his own.
“You know generally what’s going to happen each season, but the environment is always changing so you never know when exactly something is going to be ready or how much you’re going to have. We try to use every ingredient opportunity, and base everything in the kitchen on what we have rather than an attitude of ‘that’s something new, let’s go and find the product’,” he says. “I want to tell the story of this farm, put the story of this lodge on the plate.”