ANGEL FOOD

America’s most lauded chef, THOMAS KELLER, touches down at the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong for a guest-chef gig, confounding CHRISTINA KO with his modesty

THOMAS KELLER KNOWS how to play the game, and play it well. His visit to Hong Kong had been bubbling for six months, during which time the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong received more than 1,000 booking requests for six meals costing up to HK$6,000, hosted by the famed American chef.

Luckily, Team Keller is a well-oiled one. Travelling with a group of eight and a box full of the exact ingredients used in his restaurant, The French Laundry, Keller hopes to recreate the experience of dining at his restaurant to a tee. “If they want local ingredients, they can eat that here any day,” he notes. People don’t come to try his version of “Buddha jumping the wall” or char siu fan.

During the shoot, he stares into the barrel of the camera, grabs kitchen staff and drags them into the shot, laughing off the photographer’s comment: “You’re not camera shy.” “I haven’t been in years,” he retorts, referring to the fact that he’s posed for the lens more than a handful of times in the years since he’s been dubbed “celebrity chef.”

Throughout the interview, he’s answering questions practically before I’ve asked them, and waxes lyrical even when I think I’m throwing him curveballs, such as “what would be your last supper on death row” (apparently, there’s an entire book on that answer, it’s called My Last Supper by Melanie Dunea, featuring answers by 50 top chefs.) He expects that I’ve read his cookbook, and gives me a copy when I tell him, somewhat abashedly, that I haven’t. He signs it in large cursive script, taking up the whole page with his signature, which is very well practiced.

Keller didn’t ask for celebrity status, nor does he acknowledge it. “Celebrity is something that somebody else deems you. I don’t consider myself a celebrity. ‘Celebritydom’ is what the media says. It’s your opinion and your burden of responsibility that has laid that term on chefs.”

The founder of The French Laundry, Ad Hoc, Per Se and Bouchon, all highly rated American eateries, obviously didn’t start out as a multiple-Michelin-starred chef. Keller’s parents divorced when he was young, and he started visiting his mother, who ran restaurants, at her workplace after school.

“Washing dishes was one of the first jobs I had as a teenager. I learned so much washing dishes that helped me be a good chef. When you think about what cooking really is, I think about rituals and repetition. You only become good at something by continuously doing it, so washing dishes taught me how to be organised. To be efficient. It taught me that instant gratification was meaningful to me – you put a dish in the machine and it comes out clean. To be part of a team. You have to be somebody that’s responsible and that the other team members can rely on. That part of my life set me up to be a really good cook because it’s the same thing.”

It’s not really “the same thing,” but you get the man’s point – that he values the basics just as much as all the braising, poaching and glazing he picked up later. There’s a certain affected modesty that’s common to all men of the kitchen, born perhaps of an inability to pinpoint the exact ingredients that make a stellar chef. But Keller insists that all that’s necessary is the highest quality ingredients and skilful execution. “There’s so many things involved in execution. But that’s really all there is, whether you’re cooking on the street or at the Mandarin Oriental.”

Part of becoming a globally acclaimed chef and restaurateur is that you tend to leave behind the nitty-gritty in the kitchen. “I was just in the back churning artichokes, and churning artichokes takes a certain amount of wrist action and strength. I used to do 36 in an hour, and now I just did four and my wrist hurts. You lose the ability to do those things because you’re doing other things.”

Those other endeavours include various organically conceived projects that run the gamut from Limoges porcelain and Christofle silverware collaborations to consultations for films including Spanglish and Ratatouille. His motivation for these outside projects is to add value to his restaurants and satisfy his team.

Teamwork comes up a lot in our chat. Despite his own fame, he gives due credit to the people that work around him. Soon, it starts to become a refrain…you can be sure that any question will be met with a shrugging of the shoulders and the subsequent attribution of admiration for his crew. It begins with our talk on his collaborations: “As I love to do, I enlisted individuals around me to help with the design. The idea was spawned at that moment, but the result had many people involved.”

Then we speak about the secrets of good nosh, and the pressure to perform for guests. He nods, “The most important thing about this trip has nothing to do with the guests, it’s to do with our experience, the team together. Hopefully, if we have those wonderful memories, the guests will have them too, because it really has to start with us.”

And even when we talk tourism, and what he’s done during this trip, he sidebars: “Last night, I took the team on a surprise journey, we went to a tailor shop that a local friend recommended and bought everybody a jacket.” I’m starting to understand his fascination with repetition – his answers certainly start to follow a theme.

Keller doesn’t exhibit many chinks in his armour. Forget “celebrity,” he seems the perfect gentleman, the perfect boss, and certainly the perfect chef. I almost think I see wings starting to sprout under his coat.

But in many ways perfection isn’t the ideal state. So I finally find one thing to convince me he isn’t a paragon of perfection: I ask him the first thing he ever cooked. “When I was a teenager, Hamburger Helper [boxed pasta with powdered sauce] was something that was very popular in my house. You felt like you had some integrity in the food because you could buy some fresh ground beef and put the two together. So those were some of the first things that I cooked.

“But that was more or less because I needed something to eat,” he clarifies, unnecessarily. It’s a perfectly enjoyable and genuine statement about Thomas Keller, the man – not the team, the celebrity chef, or the brand. He’s cooked pasta with a sauce mix, just like me, so I guess he must be human, albeit a very benevolent one. I’m still pretty sure about those wings, though.