SHADES OF GRAY

Known for his talent with flavours and an obsession with ingredients, chef GRAY KUNZ is taking things to the next level at Café Gray Deluxe. CHRISTINA KO gets a lesson in produce placement

GRAY KUNZ HAS had a very human career – “at times, humbling,” he adds. He’s seen highs as New York’s purportedly highest paid chef, and he’s seen lows as a chef sans restaurant during a more than half-decade hiatus. Right now, he’d say he’s on a high.

Kunz is running exactly one restaurant and one food-management company: Café Gray Deluxe at The Upper House and Kunz Food respectively, and both are operating smoothly. It’s all a man can hope for.

While Kunz is no stranger to Hong Kong, having worked at the famed Plume at The Regent Hong Kong (now InterContinental Hong Kong), more than two decades have passed since he left town to take on New York. Starting as executive chef at The Peninsula New York, he moved on to open the lauded Lespinasse at the St Regis New York, before controversially leaving the sweet spot (where he was rumoured to be the top-earning chef in the city) to launch his own venture. What ensued can be termed a series of unfortunate events.

When a president leaves office midterm, citizens are bound to be curious as to where he will go, and where Kunz went was nowhere. Proposals were made, real estate was scouted, leases were almost signed but, ironically, nothing came together for the chef whose chief expertise was in bringing disparate ingredients together in soulful medleys. Six years passed, during which Kunz wrote a book, helped Jean-Georges Vongerichten open Spice Market, and continued to mull. Then, with great fanfare, came the opening of Café Gray and Grayz, heralding the return of the prodigal chef. With considerably less noise, the duet of ventures closed down two years later – “you’re in the real-estate business, really,” he points out, because his cuisine has never disappointed (and he knows it), only failed to live up to its rents.

You could argue that in New York, Kunz was a victim of great expectations. Gastronomically, his reputation had reached legendary proportions, but while the man known in foodie circles as a “chef’s chef” may have known a thing or two about cooking and plating and ingredients and provenance, that didn’t make him the savviest businessman.

When he returned to Hong Kong to open Café Gray Deluxe, a “grand café” at Swire Hotels’ The Upper House, the infamous Hong Kong collective short-term memory knew him mostly as some guy from New York who used to cook at Plume. Initially, Kunz thought the idea of a Hong Kong address preposterous. “I said, ‘You’re crazy, how am I going to run a restaurant in Hong Kong when I’m all the way in New York?’ But I figured out a way and here I am,” he says. “There were probably a good dozen projects I was looking at, when I finally decided to close Café Gray. Two-thirds of them went away because of the financial crisis – just disappeared. And really, the beacon in all of this was Hong Kong.”

The Singaporean-born, Swiss-educated Kunz earned a name for his understanding of ingredients and flavours, gleaned from a multicultural upbringing and a lust for tastes. Way back when, some dared to call it “fusion” because of his artful application of French style to Asian product, a term considered messy and dated today, and one at which Kunz’s nose turns up in disgust.

“Fusion is just con-fusion in many ways,” he says. “I’m very cautious how I implement ingredients, and there’s a fine line there, but I believe it’s still based on classic French cuisine with an approach to all the things I can find here and in Southeast Asia.” American food critics thus invented another word for his talent: layered. Normally, that would be the equivalent of turning away from that other modern culinary profanity, “molecular,” and calling it progressive – a rose by any other name, so to speak. But what Kunz does actually is layered – flavours stacked to enhance, rather than jar; foods that won’t shock the palate, but lull it bite by bite into a state of comfort and nostalgia. It’s food you know, but bettered, given a seamless modern complexity. Asian ingredients are not the byword but more the helpful assistants, and sometimes absent – the signature braised beef short rib at Café Gray Deluxe, for example, is accompanied by polenta and Meaux mustard, with no hint of Asian influences.

And while once, Kunz’s culinary orientalism was a great gimmick (intended or not) to get bodies in chairs for a revelatory adventure, today it’s a more solid, less flashy experience, not least because in Asia, using Asian ingredients is more a question of practicality than showmanship. And Kunz has a new trick up his sleeve.

“We have this farm we’re going to be working with in China, called Providence Family Farm. The two owners came yesterday and I was mesmerised by their products. They gave me all these samples and I made a steamed vegetable plate and there’s no way I cannot put that on the menu. This trend [for sustainable organic vegetables] is still in its infancy, but I know that’s the direction it’s going to go in.

“I don’t know if we should be the leader in doing that or if other chefs will, but I think that we should not mention it on the menu, and it’s a given that we do all the research. I spend a lot of time every day researching better products, what’s on the market; it’s an intellectual approach to how I can find better product that will then reflect onto the customer’s plate.”

With his long-time love of quirky produce, it was really only a matter of time before Kunz became concerned with issues of provenance and sustainability.

He recounts how, at the height of the swordfish dearth, top New York chefs took measures to remove the species from their menus. In a few years, the swordfish population returned. That, he muses, is why he’s known as a chef’s chef. “The chefs realise who are the true guys in the kitchen. A lot of my colleagues are very good chefs but they’re running after the media. They’re running after TV shows, this and that. I always told myself my heart is with my team in the kitchen.”

So, no MasterChef appearances in the works, then? “I do have an idea about a show, but it’s not the chef that’s the star, it’s the product that’s the star. Please don’t get me wrong, we’ve seen a lot of people going around eating bugs in God-knows-where, but I would really like to focus on the product. The environmental aspect of it. Why it’s important to use that kind of product in that part of the world. The chef is an annex, a facilitator, not the primary. The constant worry for me is a diminishing source of ingredients we can use.”