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T’S not good when someone has a knife pointed at you. It’s less bad though when the person holding the blade is chef Su-Yen Thornhill and she’s proffering a slice of African cucumber.
Thornhill would laugh and pull a face at being referred to as a chef. But she is the force behind a weekly open-house “restaurant” that’s become a Jozi must-visit.
“Cooking is the one thing I’m not qualified to do,” she says, returning the blade to a chopping board and thinking out loud what best to do with the stumpy, spiny indigenous veg she’s taken to calling a “schnoz-cumber”.
She whips up an impromptu pickling liquid for the cucumber. She pours sugar and water into a pan filled with aromatics. It’s bubbling on a stove in her custom-built kitchen tucked away in the enclosed patio of an old stone house on a Houghton hill.
The kitchen was a gift from her father-in-law when Thornhill, her husband and two children made South Africa their home seven years ago. This is now Chez Fong — a dining experience that’s part
Su-Yen Thornhill has hit on a unique, fun recipe, writes
food theatre and part food experiment for the dozen or so guests booked in every Wednesday night.
Thornhill grew up in Hong Kong, born to a Chinese mom and Scottish-South African father. She completed her schooling in the UK and earned a degree in medical biology. She fell for a Jewish South African in the UK, and they lived in several countries before settling in South Africa. In between she became a science communicator, a yoga teacher, life coach and a trail runner.
Cooking was co-incidental — also a necessity. “When I was eight my mother decided she was going to die. She said if I didn’t learn to cook my father would starve to death or get a new wife and I would end up with a stepmother,” says Thornhill.
It’s classic Thornhill humour. The real story is that her mom did get ill but wasn’t dying. She’s very much alive and, Thornhill says, goes about reminding her guests she taught Thornhill everything about cooking. Her dad got to play guinea pig, eating all his daughter’s kitchen concoctions.
Mom laid the foundation for the Asian influence — you’ll find goji berries and dragon-eye fruit in her dishes. Everything else is Thornhill’s imagination, trial and error, a honed culinary sense of balance and creativity and the important ingredient of not taking it all too seriously.
Not a single menu has been the same since she kicked off Chez Fong 18 months ago. She cooks in front of her guests, items like squid-ink meringues with whipped cream and pickled red onion with chorizo bits. She has served sugar-cane prawn lollipops with the “schnoz-cumber” and created her version of the Vietnamese staple pho, using oxtail and seared sirloin. in front of my guests because I didn’t think something would work at the last moment,” she says.
Those initiated into the ways of Chez Fong adore the spontaneity and consistently rate her five stars. Her patrons love the big personality cooking, delicious experimentation and the joie de vivre with an Asian twist. Chez Fong feels like you’ve been cooked for by family — exactly the way Thornhill likes it. LS
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