UNCOMMON DENOMINATORS

It's not so much unusual ingredients that are wowing diners, but more the magic worked with each constituent by Executive Chef PAUL LAU of Tin Lung Heen at The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong, writes CHRISTINA KO

PAUL LAU, CHEF at The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong’s Tin Lung Heen, is no friend of modesty. The restaurant has been in operation since the last few days of March, and business is booming – so much so that no amount of cajoling, name-dropping or plain-out blackmail will help procure a booking. The hotel’s Director of Communications, Bonnie Kwok, confirms this with a beleaguered hint of a grin (or maybe I just haven’t played the right cards). Lau is both a seasoned chef and a confident man, and he says that he has big things planned – “You’ll have to come back in a month or two to do another feature when I change the menu,” he teases.

“We’re a monthly,” I lament. “You can’t change these dishes or this feature will be a waste of time. Unless the dishes are bad. Then change them immediately.”

“They won’t be,” he promises. And with a supremely phlegmatic smile, he exits the private room to cue the first dish.

Tin Lung Heen’s private room has a ceiling two floors high, and is expansive enough that a fire-exit sign needs to be dangled curiously down to mid-air, mid-room, pointing out the exit. It’s no palace chamber, but for one bowl of soup to fill the entire space with aroma is still kind of a big deal. The bowl is a small and inconsequential coconut, but the mixture of its thick and milky flesh with a tonic of fish maw and chicken broth produces a scent that’s simultaneously sweet and savoury, a thick and heady fragrance that approaches the intoxication levels of musk. Perfume companies have been barking up the wrong tree with their research on pheromones and the molecules of desire – lather a man’s pulse points with this juice and I’d devour him instantly, so intense and primal is the olfactory exhilaration.

I’m hesitant to taste the broth, because there’s little chance that it could live up to its other sensory distinction. Perhaps it doesn’t, because no impact is as strong as that love at first scent, but the flavours are pleasantly complementary, and strangely, though the combination of ingredients is far from uncommon, I cannot remember ever tasting this precise execution and blend of creamy soup. The secret, I’m told, is in the freshness of the coconut, beheaded only just that morning – and, of course, every chef has a secret-recipe chicken broth. Everything is boiled for three hours until the essential flavours have been released and have had ample time to mingle and consummate.

The dish that follows is also strong in flavour, a steamed crab claw with egg white that’s imbued with the strength of hua diao wine. It’s steamed to exacting standards, so that the crab is thoroughly cooked but juicy, with meat that peels off in chunks with each bite. Because of the short steam, the taste of Chinese wine is still pleasantly heavy.

This isn’t the only shellfish to grace the table today. Sautéed lobster with vegetables in superior sauce is a dish name as immodest as its creator, but it certainly lives up to the grandiloquence. Only lobsters that weigh less than one catty (0.6kg) are selected for slaughter, as their flesh is deemed most supple and moist – but because they each yield no more than six chunks of meat, a minimum of two specimens must give their lives to the dish. The superior sauce certainly is, for lack of a more apt term, superior, mostly because it’s a light and viscous fluid that offers warmth and texture without masking the natural flavours of the seafood. The mark of a good Chinese chef is often in restraint, and here the execution is visible in both presentation and taste.

Chef Lau’s former station was at the helm of The Peninsula Hong Kong’s Spring Moon, an esteemed position that he left, he says, in order to seek new challenges, to reach ever-greater heights in his standards of cuisine. So when I spot a sautéed Wagyu beef with asparagus in XO sauce on the menu, I take the opportunity to rib him a bit – after all, The Peninsula Hong Kong’s XO Sauce is legendary, bottled and often procured by locals and visitors for home use, and as gifts for in-the-know foodies abroad. “It’s my thing,” Lau shrugs. “I can’t not have it on the menu.”

It turns out that he can, for although the dish is well seasoned, it is by no means the highlight of today’s programme. Each chef has a unique formula for XO sauce, and Lau’s is light on the economy ingredients such as har mi, while heavy on the pungently aromatic conpoy; it’s also refreshingly smooth, without the traditionally found seafood strands and tidbits that act almost as a garnish. Where the lobster was treated with calculated diffidence, the Wagyu is barely cooked and doused in the sauce, which admittedly offers an invigorating bouquet. The colours of the dish are marvellous, and the crunch of the asparagus offers a nice juxtaposition with the tender beef, but I’m much more excited by the next dish, pan-fried Kurobuta pork filled with foie gras. One portion of six pieces is not nearly enough to feed one greedy food writer and two hungry bystanders-slash-photo assistants, whose eyes get so big they might actually start salivating.

Indeed, it’s the perfect ending to our session, a dish that fails to satiate, but instead demands we return for more of Lau’s simple revelations. One bite introduces a trifecta of winning textures – the thin, rough, chewy pork; followed by the brittle crack of a single sliver of onion; then the melting sensation of foie gras that fills the mouth with a kaboom of beautiful tastes.

When I finally leave the restaurant, out the doors of the private room and down the Mardi Gras-ish hallways decorated with wine and champagne bottles set into the wall alongside blasts of red and silver glitter, I almost forget to look out the windows at the stunning views that have been the jewel in The Ritz-Carlton’s crown. Because I can’t get that darned pork roll out of my head. And I know that I need to get it back in my mouth.