School chef honed skills on warship
With a bandana for a chef's hat and a wicked sense of humour, chef Sonny Huh is a South Korean Captain Jack Sparrow, and his Black Pearl is the popular restaurant franchise School Food.
His zany brand of modern Korean comfort and street food shot to fame when it featured on a popular Korean drama. Hong Kong's K-pop fans queued up to click-and-post the colourful interiors with feel-good mottos such as "dreamy taste in your mouth".
They also liked the signature dishes such as blooming (mini kimbap arranged like the petals on a flower), (a braised rice cake street dish), bibimbap and near-luminous soft drinks.
The School Food opening in Kowloon Bay's Telford Plaza next Friday will take the number of branches across Asia to more than 90.
To keep the brand fresh, Huh introduced several new dishes after a recent trip to South Korea. These include tuna mari, his smaller take on a Japanese maki roll, and chicken curry mari, whose white and yellow bite-sized rolls contrast with the pink beetroot and crab mari.
He's also introducing a dish from north of the border. Buckwheat is a Pyongyang-influenced noodle dish that includes crunchy kimchi and pickles along with a beef broth and spicy sauce.
Dishes created to please the local palate are on the menu at several outlets. For example, the upcoming Kowloon Bay venue will offer boneless chicken's feet with spicy sauce and toasted seaweed.
Huh says the barbecue pork fried rice and super spicy street topokki are especially popular. He brings Western ingredients into other dishes, such as the gluten-free carbonara topokki, which is influenced by the Italian dish, and pan-grilled cheese kimchi .
He says there is an art to eating Korean food, and especially recommends eating kimchi in winter. "Eating chilli brings the body heat up, making it easier to deal with cold temperatures, while helping the body's organs function well. When you feel bad, maybe you've been dumped by your boyfriend, eat chilli. Sweat and cry, and you feel better."
Huh is also a big fan of umami, known as in Korean: "The taste is like a blanket, making you feel warm, and is a common flavour in Korean dishes."
Although Huh is astute when it comes to traditional food, and the School Food menu spans proteins such as fish and shellfish, beef, chicken (and even Spam), he says he was "born vegan", something of a rarity in South Korea.
It was tough, but we did have fun, and I even pretended to be a pirate sometimes
Huh grew up with such an aversion to meat and fish that he refused to even taste them, much to the confusion of his family. "When I grew up, people didn't understand and used to think it was a joke. Only one kind of person didn't eat meat then - monks. Monks and me."
But Huh still wanted to be a chef and had his first reluctant taste of meat at college before becoming a navy chef. "I had to eat meat on the ship, or I would have been in trouble. I didn't chew, just swallowed," he says.
"I'm still allergic to shellfish, which I've tried because I have to, but it's OK; it hasn't killed me yet. And I can't eat chicken. I'm not sure why; maybe I was a chicken in a former life."
The former chicken had to toughen up for the navy, a world away from a commercial restaurant experience. "On a warship, you couldn't use gas so we only used steam or electric power. For steam, I had to go down to the boiler room and ask the engineers.
"They'd say, 'in five minutes I'll give you 10 minutes of steam', and I had to salute, run back to the kitchen as fast as I could, and start cooking. Then they'd cut the steam. If you missed the timing, you were screwed."
The pressure to produce good food was very high, especially as he was cooking for the same captive audience each day.
"We all needed enough energy to work, so the food had to be nutritious, and it had to be safe. Taste came third. But if the taste wasn't good, you got into trouble. If I cooked the rice for lunch, and it was too sticky, I had to hide somewhere until dinner," he says.
Huh remembers his time there fondly, saying it really was a bit like . "It was tough, but we did have fun, and I even pretended to be a pirate with an eye patch sometimes.
"Everyone had a little something wrong with them - in a good way. Living in a tiny place with a bunch of guys, if you're not a little crazy, you can't stay there for long."
