How a trip to Hong Kong taught British-Chinese chef Andrew Wong that not all Chinese food was the same

Although Andrew Wong grew up eating a form of Chinese food – the type served at his parents’ restaurant in London (where lemon chicken was flavoured with orange cordial), it took a visit to Hong Kong before he realised that not all Chinese food is the same.

In the introduction to A. Wong: The Cookbook (2015), the British-Chinese chef and restaurateur writes, “The opening of the restaurant [A. Wong] in London was a project that took more than 10 years […] It all started during a trip to Hong Kong at a time when I had just started cooking professionally.

“Sitting in a busy restaurant one lunchtime, I was wondering why I could not spot any neon-orange sweet and sour dishes flying past, or any plates of chicken in black bean sauce on sizzling hot plates choking all the surrounding guests as the waiter whizzed through the restaurant. Instead I was being served stir-fried celery with lily bulbs and goji berries, and poached pork ears with chile oil. But it was all so damned delicious! Why were none of these dishes available in London?

“I could slowly feel the floodgates in my mind opening once I had comprehended that not all Chinese food revolved around ginger root, scallions, and gloopy sauces, and the deeper I dug, the greater the realisation of my ignorance about Chinese cuisine. During the subsequent years, I travelled with my scrapbooks around the various provinces of China eating and learning, followed by more eating.

“My scrapbooks are now bursting at the edges […] but it was the purity of the cooking and the nonchalant way in which the people created these dishes that stay with me to this day. We chefs spend our days treating food as if it belongs under a microscope, pleating dumplings as if it is an art only for rock stars, when the reality of the situation is that through­out China dumplings are usually pleated by 80-year-old grandmothers squatting on street corners while they simultaneously smoke and watch television.

“To this day, I have yet to meet a chef in any professional kitchen who can stir-fry rice faster than the street vendors in Chengdu, who serve 50-cent dishes cooked on their gas-fired grills.”

I doubt I’ll make anything from the dim sum chapter but the other recipes are more useful. These include golden sand corn with salted duck yolk, steamed langoustines with fer­ment­ed shrimp paste, Shaanxi province honeycomb noodles, salt and pepper snap bean fritters, dry-braised beef with oyster sauce and Sichuan pepper, stuffed chicken wings with black bean sauce, shrimp-infused slow-poached chicken, steamed sea bass with ginger and scallion, pulled noodles with pork, Xinjiang cumin lamb ribs, steamed milk custard, and sweet black vinegar, ginger and candied egg with pigs’ feet.