TV DINNERS
Celebrity chef Andrew Ahn who’s a regular competitor on the online cooking show, Go, Fridge!, has opened a new Beijing eatery, Li Yingxue reports.
The fourth season of the online cooking show, Go, Fridge!, wrapped up in July with more than 1.1 billion plays on the video-streaming website, Tencent Video.
On the show, six cooks team up in pairs and cook one dish for the guest star based on ingredients in the celebrities’ personal fridges. Each dish has to be prepared within 15 minutes.
Korean chef Andrew Ahn was the chef who found himself on the winning team most frequently, just like in the previous season. His passion for food and cooking often impressed the guest star. He has become a favorite of the audience.
While they may have to wait a year for season five, Ahn’s Beijing-based fans can now get a more immediate fix of the celebrity chef and even taste his dishes for real, as his new eatery, Maru — which specializes in modern Korean cuisine — recently opened its doors in the capital.
“Maru means ‘living room’ in Korean, and I want my restaurant to be like a living room for friends and families to gather and enjoy a meal,” Ahn says. “In South Korea, my family and our neighbors always visit one another’s living rooms to chat and eat.”
Ahn had to fit decorating his restaurant around the shooting schedule for
Each filming day started at 9 am and finished in the following morning. But he didn’t miss a single decor element, down to selecting each glass and each plate.
Ahn was invited on as a guest chef in 2015, after the directors had auditioned more than 200 candidates. “They called me for a meeting, and when we met, they just asked me to cook a dish in 15 minutes,” Ahn recalls.
Ahn has a habit of snacking on the ingredients while he’s cooking, which won over the directors. They thought it would add a fun element to his performances.
In each episode, each chef proposes ideas for a dish using just the ingredients in the guest’s fridge. The guest then chooses a chef, and they then have to cook the dish within 15 minutes.
“Thinking of ideas based on ingredients in the fridge is the first challenge, as the stars all have different living habits,” says Ahn. “To finish the cooking in 15 minutes is the next one, and the directors always ask me to show new skills as I’m a professional chef.
“Causing flames to leap out of the pot is no longer new for the audience, so I have to think of new ideas and demonstrate new skills all the time.”
After graduating from culinary school in 1998, the 43-year-old started his gastronomic journey by making Western food at a five-star hotel in South Korea before finally moving to Beijing in 2009, after working in Dubai for a year.
“I like cooking, and I’ve been fortunate to turn my hobby into a career,” he says.
Maru is his second foray into the capital’s competitive culinary landscape, after opening One Pot (formerly Ssam) a couple of years ago. This time, Ahn is offering his own take on traditional Korean food and presenting it in a Western style.
Quinoa-and-shrimp salad with arugula, pickled lotus roots, cantaloupe and fresh chestnuts is one example of a standout dish from his two decades of culinary exploration.
When South Korean actor Bae Yong-joon was preparing to open Gorilla in the Kitchen, his restaurant in Seoul — which focuses on healthy food that doesn’t sacrifice flavor — he turned to Ahn for help in creating the menu. Ahn, in turn, spent months consulting with a nutritionist to design fare that was both healthy and tasty.
“I learned how to make delicious salads, and all the salads on my menu at Maru are based on that experience,” Ahn says.
Then there’s Maru’s special grilled pork entrails: a dish that, with its authentic Korean flavors, Ahn says cannot be found anywhere else in Beijing. The grilled cabbage, however, is his own creation — Ahn brushes Korean sauce onto the cabbage before adding pieces of bacon.
Other subtle touches — such as adding needle mushrooms to grilled meat, or marinating chicken in milk with green peppers for 24 hours before frying to tender-in-the-middle-but-crispy-on-the-outside perfection and serving it with soy, chili or garlic sauce — show just some aspects of Ahn’s considerable skill set.
He is also keen to keep exploring Chinese food, from Sichuan to Yunnan cuisines. He admits to drawing inspiration for his cooking from the food he experiences every day. He now adds Chinese yellow pepper to his Korean soybean-paste soup.
“Chinese food has more cooked dishes, while Korean cuisine focuses more on cold dishes and soups,” observes Ahn. “I tried jianbing guozi (a traditional Chinese snack) for the first time in 2007, and I fell in love with Chinese food right then and there.”