How top chefs like Alain Ducasse and Pierre Hermé get a 7-course Michelin-star-quality dinner ready for 500 people – a test of skill and timing
Hong Kong’s elite are no stranger to gala dinners, whether they are raising money for charity or attending an awards night. Diners expect excellence as the culinary scene has evolved with chefs offering more refined and innovative dishes. With the foodie subculture now mainstream, chefs have their work cut out producing hundreds of meals that need to go out at the same time on a gala night while maintaining their usual high standards.
One such event was the recent Michelin Gala Night. Since the Hong Kong and Macau Michelin Guide moved its events to City of Dreams in Macau, their gala dinner on the evening of their book launch has been an anticipated event. Top local and international fine dining chefs are invited each year to participate, creating and executing dishes for more than 500 guests.
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However, serving the perfect dish for 500 diners, while maintaining the quality expected in their restaurants in Paris, London or New York, can be a challenge even for top chefs.
Taking on the challenge at the Michelin gala dinner in December 2019, the seven-course menu was overseen by illustrious chefs Alain Ducasse, Kunio Tokuoka, Alex Atala and Pierre Hermé, and Michelin star local chefs, Kelvin Au Yeung from Jade Dragon in Macau, Lau Yiu-fai from Yan Toh Heen in Hong Kong and Fabrice Vulin from The Tasting Room in Macau.
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The success is “down to the team, we have a very skilled team who are very well trained,” said Vulin, who created a lightly smoked salmon with watercress cream and acidulated beetroot. “It’s a dish we have all year round so the team knows what to do and it’s also about sourcing the best ingredients. When I create dishes, I know I can do it for a table of two as well as 500 people.”
Renowned pastry chef and chocolatier, Hermé, who was in charge of dessert, agreed.
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“The same team are making the dessert every day and tonight we will have 20 of our pastry chefs concentrating on one task that they know perfectly well as we have trained several times before [this event],” said Hermé, who created a chocolate dessert he calls Ultime – a classic combination of vanilla and chocolate. “I will not be in the kitchen, they will do it as they do every day when I am not there.”
But his dish was full of complexities, and Hermé says serving 500 diners took a lot of organisation.
“The dish is presented on a plate in a finely moulded cocoa pod covered in chocolate. The waiter will lift the top of the cocoa pod and inside you will find vanilla ice cream with chocolate cream, both cold, and chocolate mousse which is more tempered. After that you have some pieces of chocolate and vanilla sable biscuit, and after that you have layers of chocolate with fleur de sel – so it’s a combination of taste, texture and temperature.
“It is very precise timing tonight. If the dish waits in the room for 10 to 30 minutes, it will not possibly succeed. The timing for the chocolate cream, the timing for the chocolate mousse – to do it for 500 people is a challenge for us.”
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Part of that timing is also down to the service staff. “At the City of Dreams, they know how to serve for a lot of people at one time, because the service team have done it many times, so I am very confident,” said Hermé.
The chefs had another challenge – they had to be sustainable.
Au Yeung created a main course of slow cooked beef cheek with dried abalone and white truffle. “We had to be careful when choosing ingredients from around the world, we took into consideration the best seasonality,” said Au Yeung who oversees three-Michelin star restaurant Jade Dragon in Macau.
“It took about a month to source the best sustainable ingredients, as I also wanted to try a few different ingredients,” Au Yeung said. “I used organic ingredients that are certified and recognised worldwide as sustainable. The abalone is from Australia, from the best water and with the best sunlight. The abalone from Australia has a unified colour so it’s the best quality.”
“The way we looked at sustainability was to source the salmon from a farm because we needed a certain size of salmon in such a large quantity, so we selected a farm in Norway,” said Vulin about his starter. “Then, in regards to all the vegetables because this dish is called Salmon Parisien style, we looked at small organic gardens around Paris so the watercress and beetroot comes from one of those gardens,”
“Another link with sustainability is that we use birch to smoke the salmon,” Vulin said. “Birch is a tree that is widespread in Scandinavia as well as where I am from in the Alps, and it gives it a nice flavour.”
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“I always work with suppliers who have a certain ethos or philosophy in what they do. We know they are organic so there is quality, but we know there is a certain footprint having those products to come over here.”
We have to consider this for what will come after us. I come from a place where this was happening all the time. It was a small village where people were farming their own vegetables so doing this as a way of life. So when I moved into the bigger world, I was still mindful.”
Video By: Bridgette Hall and Jeff Chen
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Diners expect culinary excellence at gala dinners such as the recent Michelin Gala Night in Macau – which means top chefs have their work cut out producing hundreds of meals at the same time and to the highest of standards