MIXING IT UP
A Singaporean chef, who infuses Western cuisine with Chinese elements, focuses on natural ingredients, reinvents common staples and adds fashionable flair to his food, is now bringing his creative touch to the menu of Mercedes Me in Beijing and Shanghai, Li Yingxue reports.
Vincent Wong has worked as a Western-cuisine chef since 2002 — but, otherwise, he enjoys Cantonese food the most.
The Singaporean chef works as a Western-cuisine chef at two Mercedes Me restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively.
He says the gig provides him an opportunity to experiment with techniques and be creative with the two cities’ traditional flavors and ingredients.
“Chinese ingredients give me a lot inspiration in creating new dishes ... (using ingredients) such as soy sauce and sesame oil, which are rare for a Western-cuisine chef to use.”
The 40-year-old bounced around the globe from 2008 to 2015, cooking in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Adelaide and Shanghai.
His international experiences helped him develop his own philosophy of cooking.
“The first rule is to respect natural ingredients. And the second one is playful yet common (to use common ingredients to make creative and playful dishes),” Wong says.
He cites watermelon as an example.
“We eat watermelon in summertime as a fruit. But when you put the watermelon in a vacuum bag to slow cook, it will taste like meat. I’ve seen people in China fry the watermelon peel as a dish, so my friend and I tried to plane the peel into thin slices and marinate it with ginger, so that it looks like ginger and tastes like ginger, which is interesting,” he says.
“To respect tradition is not to follow it but to reinterpret it and evolve it with new perspectives.”
Wong aspires to maintain dishes’ original flavors but to also surprise diners with such elements as plating or texture.
“The third rule is fashion, as I think fashion designers and chefs are quite alike,” Wong says.
“We chefs have knives to cut ingredients, while designers have scissors to cut the cloth — we actually share similar careers.”
Wong once designed a dessert named Ribbons of Melon, which shows his understanding of fashion in cooking.
“You plate the melon slice by slice. It’s like making clothes — and, also, sometimes, designers use cloth to make a flower, which can also be realized in cooking,” he says.
“There is no fixed answer for each dish which rule or two or all three rules I use. But it’s for the diners to make the judgment.”
He hopes his dishes not only nourish diners’ bodies but also their curiosity.
Wong launched a new a la carte menu for Mercedes Me in Beijing in November. It features 35 dishes, including appetizers, soups, main courses and desserts.
Cigar Duck is his answer to the most-classical ingredient in the capital. It uses advanced cooking techniques but honors the culture’s traditional roots with respect to Peking duck.
“I use ginger to wrap with the duck meat because ginger is part of the Chinese ingredients, which is much associated with most of the dishes in Chinese cooking,” Wong says.
“Also, I make pickled cucumbers to wash out the oily taste.”
He swaps the traditional sweet soybean paste for Hoisin sauce with wasabi.
“I want to prove to the chefs of tradition to step out of the box. That is my philosophy and my goal for my contribution to the culinary scene of Beijing,” Wong says.
Wong gives classic Caesar salad a modern twist — he cuts a head of lettuce in half and grills it before plating it with a sauce made of bacon, garlic, lemon juice and tabasco, topped with egg yolk fried at a low temperature before it’s finely sliced.
His pumpkin soup serves as a specimen of his rule of using natural ingredients. He selects and steams local pumpkins before straining them several times and adding them to vegetable soup.
“Steaming is a traditional Chinese cooking method, and to steam the pumpkin can bring out its own sweetness, so I don’t add any milk or cream,” Wong explains.
He also pays homage to Chinese cuisine with his soy-sesame cod with steamed foie gras, baby spinach and bean sprouts. Its broth has six oils: deep-fried ginger, deep-fried garlic, lemon, Italian parsley, deep-fried shallot and sesame.
The fish is marinated with sesame oil, soy sauce, coriander roots, minced garlic and a special cream of mushroom soup for two hours and then slow cooked before the soup is poured onto it. Pepper slices, bean sprouts and yellow mustard are then added.
“The codfish and foie gras also have two kinds of oil. But the whole dish does not taste oily but fresh. So, you can eat up all the soup,” Wong says.
Wong also creates a version of curry wurst sausage that looks like the traditional German dish. But he uses pork shoulder and chicken thigh with satay flavor inside.
His curry powder uses 13 ingredients. And his sauce includes granular onion. He uses red cabbage — rather than white cabbage — boiled in red wine and red-wine vinegar to make the side dish.
Wong’s signature dishes at Mercedes include salt-crusted half rack of lamb, the “M.E” Burger and Tomahawk Steak.
“Some dishes may now have their fifth version. Some may have the 10th. I hope all my dishes can grow with me,” says Wong.
For example, he created a dish using apples and beetroots this spring.
“Next spring, I’ll bring the dish back with the same flavor but with new plating,” Wong says.
“I can play with the texture, whether it’s jelly, or hard or soft. I want my dishes to have strong bonds with my diners’ memories. It would be my greatest pleasure if I can take them (back) to their childhood memories with my cooking.”
Tomahawk steak is grilled and rested before being roasted with apple wood. Soy Sesame Cod uses six different kinds of oil in the soup which fits Chinese foodies’ preferences.