Chef teaches Chinese about New Zealand, one scoop at a time
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
That old Chinese pro verb was not written for award-winning New Zealand chef Dion McGrath, but his kitchen trajectory in China could be a living example of the Taoist philosophy.
Having worked as a chef for almost three decades with various fine dining restaurants and fivestar hotels mainly in Asia, McGrath took on the consultancy of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise in 2013 to help promote produce from his home country, a role that he hesitated about for five years before finally accepting.
“When I worked at JW Marriot in 2008, the New Zealand government first approached me and I said no,” says McGrath. But when another chef pressed him to take on the important role in food education, he said OK.
The responsibilities as a consultant chef include collaborative promotions with five-star hotels and restaurants to add New Zealand products to the menus, retail promotions to open doors for new products, and cooking demonstrations and classes.
The role may sound more like a salesman than a chef, but McGrath makes both sides work.
“If a New Zealand company wants me to do a demonstration, first it has to promise me one thing: After I have done the demonstration I want to see how many sales (the product) gets afterwards,” he says
Sales have usually been good, but the reward is not for his own pocket (he doesn’t take commissions), but the impact his work has in millions of Chinese household kitchens.
“I have seen chefs doing cooking demonstrations that I, as a trained chef, won’t even try because they are too difficult,” he says. That’s made him determined to make his demos both interesting to locals and reasonable to achieve in home kitchens.
At a recent event with Emerald Foods, for example, he developed a handful of recipes that “can be finished by anyone who can start a fire” for the company’s several premium ice-cream brands like New Zealand Natural, Chateau, Killinchy Gold that were introduced to China for the first time.
The recipes include fried banana and ice cream, ice cream with Coke, cookie sandwiches, coconut-rice pudding and hokey-pokey — the last a special New Zealand flavor that’s the second most popular in the country after vanilla. It consists of plain vanilla ice cream with small, solid lumps of honeycomb toffee.
McGrath thinks it’s important to let the ice cream speak for itself: “Sometimes we get too caught up and putting too many things with ice cream.”
“My philosophy is that for a great pure product you don’t have to do too much with it. Sometimes the simplest is the best,” he says, adding that for his ice-cream creations, he’s very much inspired by his childhood culinary memories.
Born and bred in a mountainous village in New Zealand, McGrath grew up eating a lot of natural produce, fruits and vegetables. He first found his interest in the kitchen when he was tempted by storebought cookies he got from his classmates. That idea was rejected by his mother, who said if he wanted cookies, he had to make them himself.
Over time, he came to appreciate how his upbringing on a farm gave him an advantage when he was ready to qualify as a chef.
“We kill our own animals for the meat. If we want beef, we kill the cow, also sheep and pigs. Being in New Zealand is very green: We also do lot of hunting, pig hunting, deer hunting and duck hunting,” he says.
At the age of 14, he started as a dishwasher at a little restaurant owned by his father’s friend, and climbed his way up to helm several well acclaimed restaurants like the Pavilion & El Pomposo Restaurants, eventually managing Four Seasons Group’s largest food-and-beverage operation worldwide in Egypt. He has also helped two of the restaurants he took charge of in Hong Kong to win awards as the best fine dining restaurant.
He has worked and lived in China on and off since 1992. McGrath believed the consumers here today are more open-minded to new things than in his home country — even open to trying ice cream in the winter time.