REALITY BITES

After sampling Yin Yang's cuisine, CHRISTINA KO joins owner MARGARET XU YUAN for a day on the farm, discovering there's a place in Hong Kong where the grass, and vegetables, are greener

AN HOUR AND a half after leaving the sanctity of urban organisation, our green taxi pulls up by the side of a road in Yuen Long’s rural sprawl. “Let’s wait here, someone will come out to escort us in,” says Margaret Xu Yuan. A second later, she adds, “I hope you’re not scared of dogs. They like to bark. A lot.”

I tell her that I, too, own a dog. I’m not just a city gal, you know. Thirty seconds later, two German shepherds, a crazed black chow and a few vicious mongrels (that are surely part wolf) hurl themselves at flimsy wire fences, growling with a vibrato that would make Domingo’s cower in shame. My fat and domesticated corgi wouldn’t stand a chance. Come to think of it, neither would her fat and domesticated owner. I’m starting to think that Aesop’s tale of two mice was mistold. Surely it was the countryside that scared the city mouse, and not the other way around.

Xu, the chef and owner of Yin Yang in Wanchai, is also proprietor of the farm to which we are headed. When we finally make it past the canine security system, we come upon patches of neatly groomed land, carved into rows by varieties. On the right, Xu picked a sprig of green and hands it to me. “Sniff,” she instructs. I assent. “Mmm. Pizza…” 

“Basil,” she laughs, using the proper herb name. She hands me a small bunch of fatter leaves with razored edges. “Chinese shiso.” We continue through the farm, sniffing and labelling. There are cucumbers, individually wrapped to prevent bug attacks; turgid purple eggplants; sweet corn hidden shyly beneath feathered husks. Near the end of the row, large stalks protrude from the ground, dotted with odd little pockmarks that crown in sharp green furry vegetables. These are lady’s fingers, I’m told. I stare blankly, but bite in regardless. Okra.

A little while later, from the safety of my red taxi, heading back to the concrete jungle, I wonder how a nice city lass like myself ended up at a farm, quaking at dog barks. But as the cab swings down Johnston Road past Ship Street, I remember Yin Yang, and the smoky depth of its signature baked chicken.

In the food chain of life, that chicken would never have made it to the table without that farm. It’s not because Xu breeds chickens, because she doesn’t. But before there was Yin Yang, there was Cuisine X. And before Cuisine X, there was a farm. A creative at an ad agency, Xu started her farm as a hobby. She liked growing things and she liked making things. So with her armloads of fresh produce, and a do-it-yourself oven, she launched a private kitchen in Yuen Long – the aforementioned Cuisine X – that earned high praise in its heyday, before the concept outgrew its location and she moved into a heritage building around the corner from The Pawn.

Even now, Yin Yang serves only three tables, and Xu has no plans to expand. As everything else in the world gets bigger, the most desired commodities become the small-scale operations – the mom-and-pop stores, the smelly tofu hawkers, the lady who grows her own veggies and fruit in Yuen Long. Predictably, Yin Yang’s three tables are invariably booked.

Patrons at Cuisine X came not just for the home-grown greens and sustainable meats (which is great for the earth, but not always for the taste buds), but also for the excellent baked yellow-earth chicken, the fragrant iron-pot rice and the viscous “waterless” soup. And as the word spread, the restaurant grew – in scope if not in size.

Now, as long as you’re nice, Xu pretty much offers any service you want. Two baked chickens and half a pig for takeaway? Not a problem, she’s been doing it for friends for years. If you want to buy her organic veggies to cook at home instead of sampling them in-house, you can do that too, although selection depends on what they harvest that week. Posto Pubblico’s Todd Darling has just launched the same service, under the moniker Homegrown Foods, and it turns out the two are old friends.

The two have attitudes that seem similar, and they are, but their approach is in actuality quite different. While Darling, who came later to the game, takes a mass-market mobilisation strategy, Xu is more of a soft sell. Ask her about saving the world, and she’ll tell you how she’s doing it; she likes organic stuff, but she isn’t selling it. It’s more like a one-woman mission, and you just happen to be along for the ride.

The ride gets even better if you’re willing
to gamble a bit and go for the blind omakase menu. You can request a menu up front, but that doesn’t exactly mesh well with Xu’s go-with-the-flow temperament. Just a few weeks ago, she went to the market to prepare for a friend’s omakase birthday dinner and happened upon a giant shellfish, the size of
a sombrero.

“I used some of the meat to make a soup, and then I gave the shell to her as a present,” she says. What this tells us, besides the fact that this restaurateur has strange taste in gifts, is that the meal is best dictated by the produce available that day, and judgment left to the deft and funky chef.

Whether you have the guts or the prescience to gamble on an omakase, the regular menu is good enough for most. Xu’s kitchen looks endearingly disorganised, filled as it is with jar upon jar of substances in various stages of pickling; hanging straw baskets; and vintage cooking accoutrements; including a 1950s-era fridge, a Spanish guitar repurposed to make noodles and an oven made from two giant terracotta plant pots.

This weird-looking contraption is where the yellow-earth chicken is baked. When it’s done, its crispy skin crackling like thunder, the meat is removed – ideally, it’s ripped off the bone with bare hands – and plunged into a gingery oil-based dipping sauce. The menu changes monthly and at whim, but this chicken is a mainstay, alongside other experimental dishes that add interest and boggle the mind.

In our case, there’s a simple steamed fish that gets a jarring visual makeover with sauce made from stewed purple cabbage. The resulting azure liquid makes a simultaneously natural and unnatural abode for the creature, with shavings of scallion to create a web of seaweed that drapes haphazardly.

Xu is looking further to challenge her limits, but the results won’t be for her own menu. As part of a series she’s working on with Now TV, she’ll put together a segment in which she recreates dishes that are described in Chinese literature. So far, she’s earmarked treats mentioned in Dream of the Red Chamber and one of Louis Cha’s seminal kung-fu novels.

It’s certainly not her first time cooking on TV – “I caught myself on TV the other week. They always pick the strangest shots. I saw myself playing with spring onions, saying that they’re brothers,” she cringes. “But this will be fun, and a challenge, because no one has ever made these dishes in reality.”

Margaret Xu’s reality took me out of my comfort zone and into Yuen Long; out of my stiletto heels and into sneakers; out of a mindset filled with McDonald’s and into a happy, green place filled with fresh okra and cutely cool cucumbers. It made a country mouse of this city mouse.

And even if the only way for me to return to the farm would be to hopelessly follow the symphony of dog barks, I know that I can grasp at some vestige of that reality in a little private kitchen in Wanchai. As long as I can get a reservation.

www.yinyang.hk

This is an edited version of the original, which appears in the October 2010 issue of Prestige Hong Kong.