Tatler Dining Guide - Hong Kong
United We Dine
The Family Meal
7:00PM. It’s dinner time. A team of chefs hover over their stainless-steel counters inside the semi-open kitchen, where guests enjoy a full view of the processes by which their dishes are made. Chefs prep, cook, sauce and plate and, along the pass, dish out their creations for all to savour. Turning back the clock a couple hours, however, at 4:59pm, the same team of chefs were dividing up their off-hour duties—washing up, preparing the mise en place, getting dinner service ready. The next minute, the alarm clock rang; everyone dropped their utensils and immediately left the kitchen. They formed a beeline and grabbed a plate one by one as they explored today’s “family dinner”. It’s certainly an understatement— staff meals are very important. Through these communal gatherings, chefs come together to create something off menu for their peers and, in turn, enjoy the appreciation and camaraderie among their team. This “family meal” offers a rare glimpse of chefs relaxing and socialising with one another as they escape their duties and responsibilities for a brief moment to unite, before the onslaught of hungry diners and the frantic pace of the kitchen. Three Hong Kong restaurants, each with their own interpretations of the team meal, show us what they do to keep their kitchen family happy and fed.
Roots
G/F, 7 Sun Street, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
AT 5:30 PM, Roots lights up its space and staff begin setting the table for their weekend family dinner. Sik faan (“let’s eat!”) is heard, and the young team of six chats and eats. Stephanie Wong, chef and proprietress of the Sun Street bistro, enjoys the family time together. “We always try to plan the meals together, and we have a system in getting what we need in the meal,” she says. “For a short month or so, it was our homemade barbecued pork. We would eat it every day. We put it in everything. We also went through a bread phase and one day we decided we wanted potsticker buns with pork. The next thing we knew, we were kneading new dough to make these miniature meat buns.” For Wong, creating staff meals from leftovers is part of the fun. Other times, staff meals can be inspiration for new menu signatures. “We have salted egg yolks on our menu, but we had so much of that one time, so one of our chefs came back with some tofu,” she recalls. “We deep-fried and coated it with the yolks—and that was a new tofu dish I’d never tried. We reworked the cooking for a week and the next week, it became our tofu toast with salted egg yolk and truffles.”
Creativity runs round the clock in the kitchen and Wong’s team started a new Instagram account to document their daily dinner, @shuguneatwhat. “Shu gun means ‘roots’ in Cantonese—our name,” explains Wong. “It began when one of us wanted to make
Other times, staff meals can be inspiration for new menu signatures
soup and another wanted to make different dishes. At last, it became a daily top-shot documenting what we ate.” Her posts follow a similar pattern, with a generous helping of vegetables, and Wong makes the reasons behind it clear: “Staff meals are also about the healthy, clean eating I want for my team. We spend so much time working together, so we may as well spend it helping each other build good health and taking care of one another.”