Le Le redefines Vietnamese fine dining in Hong Kong with Saigon soul food
Discover Hong Kong’s Le Le: progressive Vietnamese fine dining rooted in Elizabeth Chu’s Saigon childhood memories, Michelin-starred innovation and bold culinary storytelling
Elizabeth Chu Yuet-han ate a lot of pho ga, or chicken noodle soup, growing up. As a child in late-1990s Saigon, she could often be found in the kitchen of her maternal uncle and aunt, breathing in the sweet, heady aroma of an entire bird bubbling in a pot as its flavour slowly infused into the broth, alongside a medley of herbs chosen according to a cherished family recipe.
“The thing with Vietnam is, my family might make chicken pho this way, but my friend’s family might make it a different way,” says Chu, the eldest daughter of two property magnates. “Still, I think there’s something [with our version] that resonates.”
The urge to bring the flavours of her childhood to a wider audience eventually led her, as a 21-year-old social sciences student at the University of Hong Kong, to open her first Vietnamese restaurant, with Peter Cuong Franklin, the chef-founder of Michelin-starred Anan Saigon, in 2015, under the banner of her parents’ nascent restaurant group, ZS Hospitality.
In 2017, Chu formally took over as chairwoman, and while the road hasn’t been without its missteps – in 2016, a four-restaurant venture with chequered chef Harlan Goldstein unceremoniously fell through when he walked away for unspecified personal reasons – the soft-spoken millennial restaurateur has stayed the course.
Today, the group can lay claim to five Michelin stars across four restaurants in Hong Kong: two stars at Cantonese restaurant Ying Jee Club and one each at Hansik Goo, Whey and Feuille.
If the first decade of ZS Hospitality was spent raising its profile through partnerships with industry titans such as Mingoo Kang and David Toutain at Hansik Goo and Feuille, respectively, Chu seems set on steering the next decade towards causes closer to her heart. At the tail-end of March, she opened her most personal project yet. Le Le, which takes over the space formerly inhabited by offal-centric Italian restaurant Testina, is an ode to Chu’s Saigon upbringing, but seasoned with the hallmarks of haute gastronomy demanded by the Michelin set.
“We really struggled with how to define the cuisine, between calling it progressive, contemporary, innovative or modern,” she recalls. “In the end, we settled on ‘progressive Vietnamese’, because progressive means improvement.