WONG NGO-PONG, 27, STUDENT TO CHEF AND RESTAURATEUR

When he was in secondary school, Wong Ngopong says that as soon as he opened a textbook to study, he would fall asleep. “But if I didn’t study I couldn’t stay at home and depend on my parents to support me,” Wong says.

Falling grades resulted in him dropping out after Form Three. He was interested in cooking and his secondary school teachers encouraged him to apply to the Chinese Culinary Institute (CCI), where he was accepted at the age of 16.

“I was happy being there,” he says. “At school

I was bored and didn’t get into it, but at CCI, even though there were classroom lectures, there were practical classes where we learned to make dim sum.”

Wong graduated in 2013 and worked at Yung

Kee, a well-known roast goose restaurant, for a few months before returning to CCI for seven months, not as a student, but to help set up a training cafe from scratch.

At The Peninsula Hong Kong’s Spring Moon restaurant, he learned how to prepare ingredients for the chefs, make rice, fillet fish, chop food and cook with a wok.

After three years he met up with some former schoolmates. One asked if he was interested in opening a restaurant and Wong jumped at the chance. He is often asked why he opened a Japanese izakaya and not a Chinese restaurant, to which he says, “With a Chinese restaurant you need a big place to start with, so already the rent will be expensive, and then you need to use a lot of gas and have lots of equipment and that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, so it would have cost around HK$2 million.

“There’s only two of us so it’s a big risk. Both of us like Japanese food and the cuisine lends itself to a smaller shop, so it is simpler.”

The Childhood restaurant’s menu features dishes such as pork cutlet with rice, grilled eel with rice and grilled skewers.

The Yuen Long restaurant has a manga theme, with figurines on a shelf, and framed memorabilia. “These are from my childhood,” Wong says. “I got some friends to draw them for me, so when I come into the restaurant, it feels like home.”