EMPIRE OF THE SONS

The success of The Drawing Room took everyone by surprise, its owners included. Now, with a second restaurant – Hainan Shaoye – under their belt, TONY CHENG, KENNETH KING and JEFFREY MUI are on their way to empire.CHRISTINA KO digs in

ON THE SURFACE, it would have been difficult for The Drawing Room to fail. It had a recipe for success from the start – a pedigreed spot at Jia Boutique Hotel, where the acclaimed Opia once stood; a lauded chef by the name of Roland Schuller, the culinary genius behind Chez Roland and Roland’s Terrace, and more recently, Aspasia; and a guest list of elite customers, including the likes of Peter Lam and Henry Tang, who both had bookings before the restaurant had opened.

But as any great chef can tell you, even with the best of intentions and ingredients, great recipes sometimes fail. Luckily, this is not one of those cautionary tales.

The Drawing Room was born under serendipitous circumstances, the brainchild of a trio of bankers with an appetite for entrepreneurship and good eats. Anthony “Tony” Cheng, Kenneth King and Jeffrey Mui met in New York just two years ago, introduced by mutual friends. Back then, Cheng was a finance guy, looking to quit his job and return to Hong Kong to pursue his dream of opening a restaurant. As for King and Mui, they were still college students.

By the summer of 2008, at the height of worldwide financial turmoil, the threesome had relocated to their hometown, and began the arduous process of launching their restaurant project, no easy task given that none of them had experience running an F&B concern. King and Mui had taken on demanding full-time jobs with investment banks. Cheng, the full-time point person, had some culinary training – classes he’d undertaken concurrently with his university studies, thanks to some clever scheduling – but nothing that had been formally put into practice since his career took a turn for the corporate.

One of the early decisions to be made was the cuisine. “We settled on easy Italian,’ says Cheng, “because we thought the idea of pasta meshed well with people’s diets here, because of the high carbs.” Next, they had to find a chef whose idea of quality meshed with theirs, and so began a tour of eating – “research,” corrects Mui – that eventually led them to Aspasia.

The next concern was location, and this is where they decided to take a risk. “Opia had closed, and [owner of Jia] Yenn Wong was looking for someone to come in. This spot had been on the market for a while,” says King. “Before us, she approached Jacky Yu from Xi Yan, another Italian chef…they all thought this was a difficult spot to resurrect.”

“They wanted to bring in a big-name chef,” adds Cheng. “Someone with star power. And Roland has a following in Hong Kong, that reputation. And Roland’s cuisine, high-end contemporary Italian, matched the profile of the hotel, a high-end boutique hotel designed by Philip Starck.” But inasmuch as the location was fairly convenient, Causeway Bay wasn’t exactly known for its proliferation of fine-dining spots.

It was, however, a bit better than Kimberley Road, site of The Luxe Manor and its flagship restaurant Aspasia, where Schuller had been holding court. Which probably helps explain why an established, local-celebrity chef like Schuller would leave to join three novice restaurateurs with a combined five years of working experience, in total, between them all.

It also helps to meet this trio in person. While most recent college grads spend their days in cargo shorts and T-shirts or, at best, off-the-rack suits from Zara, these guys go designer-and-tailored, with suitably shiny timepieces to match. And then there’s the talk – cultured American accents that speak of good education and even better breeding. These guys grew up attending their parents’ dinner parties – that much is evident not only from their speech and demeanour, but also their taste in haute cuisine. If there’s any suspicion that these are just rich kids doing business on daddy’s dime, that’s easily quelled by their evident eloquence and passion.

The Drawing Room soft-opened in April 2009, and never saw a grand opening, because it was just too darned successful. Says Mui, “Roland’s being on Kowloon never helped him. The spending power is not there. So he basically just brought his food over and we packaged it. A lot of it also has to do with our families, our personal connections. We filled the restaurant for the first three weeks without doing any PR, all word-of-mouth. We all believe that’s the strongest way to do PR. If people enjoy the food, they’ll tell people about it, and they’ll come back. For the first seven or eight months you’d have to book a month in advance. If you wanted a Friday or Saturday table, you’d have to wait two months.”

Two months is a long time to wait, but wait is what they all did. And just when the gentlemen thought things were settling down, the most surprising announcement of all came. A mere seven months after opening the restaurant doors, The Drawing Room received its first Michelin star – a feat which essentially means that the restaurant was reviewed within its first month of opening, a time at which most joints are still working out the kinks.

“The day we found out was the day before the results were printed,” says Cheng. “There was a press conference, and I got two phone calls saying congratulations, and I was like ‘Huh?’ And then I saw it was confirmed so I called Kenneth and said ‘Hey, we got a star, believe it or not.’ It was always on our mission statement. But we never believed…”

“It was this far-fetched goal,” says King.

“I actually think we might be the fastest restaurant in Michelin history to get a star,” muses Cheng, beaming happily at his partners.

“We opened in April and they came to taste the food in early May. So if you count that, it was like one or two months,” enthuses Mui.

Opening one successful restaurant could be written off as a fluke. But then the boys made a surprise move. After gallivanting across Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing looking for inspiration (aka eating their way up and down each city), they settled on a mid-range chicken-rice shop as their second venture.

Named Hainan Shaoye, the chicken-rice shop took up a spot in the World Trade Centre, and boasted one very striking strategic similarity to The Drawing Room: an illustrious chef. This time, the boys enlisted the chefs from the Mandarin Orchard’s Chatterbox, Singapore’s most well-known chicken-rice eatery, to come to Hong Kong. It was another bold yet considered move.

“One goal of what we’re trying to do is to diversify across cuisine, price range and regions. If another financial tsunami hits, if we have something more friendly to the general public, it will help our bottom line as a group,” explains Cheng. Of course, on a more personal note, “the three of us, we really like chicken rice! And we all thought that Singaporean chicken rice was significantly better than Hong Kong’s, but no one could really explain why. It doesn’t make sense. The chicken itself in Singapore is chilled from Malaysia. So the chicken [quality] should be better in Hong Kong, where it’s fresh.”

And then there was the niche they chose: “We believed there was a market for Hainan chicken rice. It was either $38-50 at a cha chaan teng or Tsui Wah, or boom, $180 or $200 in a hotel. There wasn’t really a middle market. We identified that early on.” Hainan Shaoye’s chicken rice set is priced at $88.

The constant that they will to adhere to, as they open more restaurants (though there is no rush), is quality. “We’re still really confident in the quality of the food,” says Mui. “And we still really believe in word-of-mouth.”

“Basically, no matter what the cuisine is, we want to sell the best of it in Hong Kong,” sums up King. Even if it means giving up all their lives and waistlines to food. As a parting shot, they share the trials and tribulations of their two-day research trip to Tokyo, whose entire agenda consisted of Michelin-starred meals. “I think we did 12 stars in two days,” laughs King. “We planned it so that we would have lunch and then two dinners, but we didn’t realise that last orders at most of the restaurants is at 8:30pm.”

So after gorging on lunch, it was dinner numero uno at 5:30pm and then reservations at 8pm for dinner two. After all the other topics they’ve traversed, this is the only one that elicits a collective groan. “But wait,” pauses Cheng. “What was the name of that tempura restaurant again? That was so good…”

thedrawingroom.com.hk

hainanshaoye.com

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