INDULGENCE
Cultivate restaurant
After building anticipation through a series of privately hosted dinners throughout the past year, Cultivate, the first restaurant venture helmed by chef Leonard Cheung, recently opened on SoHo’s Elgin Street. Cheung, who was born in California to Taiwanese parents and previously worked at acclaimed Michelinstar restaurants 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana and Bo Innovation, channelled his experience and vision into the new 22-seat restaurant.
Branded as a fine-casual dining experience, Cultivate offers complex creations featured in a constantly evolving eight-course tasting menu that encompasses different cuisines, techniques and styles.
I talked to Cheung about the concept, his background and vision.
How did you come up with the idea behind Cultivate? The name Cultivate has been ingrained in my head since I was a teenager, I just didn’t know I wanted to use it for a casual concept, or a fine-dining one. How would you describe the cuisine in a couple of words? Is it closer to contemporary Californian or New World cuisine? Interaction is at the core of Cultivate. Why do you think it’s an important element in a dining experience? This is important, because the guest is at the core of every dining experience and should always be playing a role. This helps to ensure that, just like time, no meal can ever be recreated exactly. Spontaneity and intuition are at the heart of my cooking, and I believe they’re ingredients that elevate a meal even more than advanced cooking techniques and the ingredients we use. What’s the story behind the name? In such a crowded dining landscape, how does your restaurant stand out? My cooking style is incredibly honest. I don’t take cheap shots and hide behind highly premium ingredients to impress diners or hide mistakes. There are no mistakes to hide. ?e take humble ingredients, ones that sometimes aren’t taken too seriously in the world of fine dining. and we elevate them by manipulating textures, pairings and temperatures to completely alter an ingredient that a guest may have previously assumed was boring or overused. ?e use the element of surprise to elevate the senses. I told my kitchen team from the beginning that if one day I put on the menu a seared piece of foie gras with cherry tomatoes, balsamic, frisée and a shaving of summer trufAEes · in winter · they’re welcome to Rump ship and call me a sell-out. Tell us about the dishes you’re most proud of and the stories behind them. There are bits and pieces from several dishes throughout our tasting menu that 1 can confidently say 1’m proud of. A lot of work goes into the vegetables in our dishes at Cultivate · all the annoying fresh fava beans that we have to pick in the morning, all the sauces and blanching that we’re able to do fresh every day (my cooks want to murder me for doing so many things fresh every day instead of large batching), and the complexity in many of our sauces. One dish that I probably can never take off the menu, due to popular demand, would be Maitake (hen of the woods) Pho Gras. This course appears deceptively simple, with just three or four things on the plate, but I guarantee you the prep, as well as the execution of it in the final minute, is quite a bitch. ?e begin by marinading foie gras and curing the foie gras torchon in salt for two days; after we allow the foie gras torchon, wrapped in cheesecloth, to hang in our fridge for 10 to 15 days. The end result is a super-brown and funky foie gras torchon that’s extraordinary compared to regular ones you get from charcuterie boards. Next, the pho broth. Traditional Vietnamese pho noodle soup uses beef bones and meat; at Cultivate, our base is actually a browned mushroom dashi, with similar browned vegetables and aromatics as traditional pho. ?hen we’re serving guests at the final minute, we always infuse Thai basil and fennel pollen into individual soup portions for extra love. Finally, the maitake mushroom. ?e sear and baste it slowly for five to eight minutes during service, until all the crinkles on the outer surface are crisped nicely, and we place it on top of a slice of the dry-aged foie gras torchon. What does fine-casual mean exactly? The cooking techniques that we’re employing, and some of our ingredients, are at the top echelon of dining. However, we want the entire experience at Cultivate to be warm and approachable. I encourage my cooks to Roke around in the kitchen occasionally. ?e don’t take ourselves too seriously. Yes, we produce intricate masterpieces, but we also aren’t going to let tradition, ego or ¹checking boxesº stand in the way of innovation. How did you become a chef ? 1 started out wanting to be a pastry chef, and the first couple of kitchen jobs I had were in the pastry department. My parents expected me to grow out of this phase when I was an adolescent and follow our family’s footsteps into big business, but I was frustrated from a young age with how much bad cooking there was in most restaurants I’d been to · there were many moments when 1 was the only one puzzled and disappointed by the food, whereas all the family members and peers seated around me were smiling from ear-to-ear about what they were eating. I couldn’t let it go because I knew I could do better. I began by applying for an apprenticeship at Bo Innovation when I was 18, and got in by pure luck, shortly after graduating from high school. I was pretty bad back then and I don’t know how I was able to get recommended by Alvin to get an apprenticeship at Otto e Mezzo Bombana shortly after. I learned a lot from both kitchens, but I knew I had to go back home to the US to continue my fundamental training, so I hustled my way into securing the funds and the acceptance to enrol into the Culinary Institute of America in New York, and graduated with an Associate’s in Culinary Arts, and a Bachelor’s in Food Studies. After my studies, I worked across restaurants I admired in the US and Europe, before returning to Hong Kong. Does Cultivate encapsulate your idea of cuisine and your journey as a chef ? Cultivate is my first restaurant venture with two other business partners, and the initial ethos of the food does represent one aspect of my journey as a chef, but there’s a lot more work to be done. Our menu is constantly evolving · 30 percent of it changes every three weeks or so, with a complete overhaul planned every quarter. I believe in spontaneity and am constantly being influenced by everything around me, so evolution happens quite rapidly. How does it feel to open a restaurant during a global pandemic? And speaking of uncertainty, Cultivate only takes reservations up to 45 days in advance, due to whatever government restriction(s) may be imposed on all of us at any time. It will be harder to make amends and cancellations on guests with new regulations if our reservations are booked two months and further in advance. If you could cook only two ingredients for the rest of your life, what would they be? Seafood and extra-virgin olive oil.