Buffet chef brings new ideas to Japanese food, cooking
While other kids pretended to be scientists or doctors in kindergarten, Wang Hui played chef.
Fast forward to today — the 42-year-old has recently opened his third restaurant, Hecai Japanese Cuisine, in Beijing.
Wang started to learn how to cook Japanese food at the Sino-Japanese Youth Exchange Center in 1993.
Ten years later, he was named the executive Japanese-cuisine chef of Grand Hyatt Beijing, a job he earned by competing with 64 other chefs for one month and kept for more than a decade.
He left the hotel to start his own Japanese restaurant in 2015, bringing his cooking experience and management knowledge with him.
“Even though I’m an investor now, I still think from a chef’s perspective in which I value diners’ experiences the most,” Wang says.
“I’m providing the best ingredients and won’t use cheaper ones to make more profit. That’s the baseline of a chef.”
Hecai Japanese Cuisine is a buffet where people can order as many of what they want of whatever they want.
“This buffet style is usually seen in Japanese hotpot, where people can order as many raw meats as they want to eat,” Wang says.
“But it’s rare in Japanese fine dining.”
He aspires to counter the notion that Japanese dishes are only served in small portions.
“Japanese food isn’t a competition of ingredients or a visual feast,” he says.
“I want to create delicate dishes and allow people to eat as much as they’d like.”
He presents New Zealand crayfish, Canadian spotted prawn, shrimp from Russia and Mozambique, Norwegian salmon and tuna from the Indian Ocean to create a sashimi platter featuring seafood from around the world.
Each sashimi slice is 1-centimeter thick and served with homemade wasabi and Japanese soy sauce.
His Japanese-style boiled abalone is fresh but served without soy sauce.
Wang’s secret is to cook the abalone from Dalian, Liaoning province, with smoked bonito soup, mirin and saki, before marinating the abalone in the soup for two days.
“The freshness can go deep into the abalone, and the soup brings out its flavor,” he explains.
Another signature dish is pan-fried foie gras. He marinates the foie gras in truffle oil, special soy sauce, sweet wine and vinegar, before pan-frying it and adding caramelized seasonal fruit.
He uses headless shrimp from Sri Lanka for tempura. He covers the crustaceans with a paste of tempura powder, egg, fish roe and water before it’s fired in 180 C oil and served with both white-radish and ginger purees.
Wang gets up at 7 am every day to check the photos of what diners left on their plates after their meals.
“Being the owner is much busier than just being a chef,” he says.
“But it’s worth it to see my dishes develop from nothing more than ideas and to get good feedback from customers.”
Wang has already started to plan his next restaurant — a
kaiseki ryori (multiple-course traditional dinner) establishment that presents Japanesestyle fine dining.