lIvIng legend

KEN hom

“Did I know about all the problems I’d have before I opened? No,” says a jovial Ken Hom, of his MEE restaurant in Copacabana, now recipient of an Asian Restaurant of the Year award and a Michelin Star in awarded in May 2015, one of only 6 Michelin Star restaurants in Rio de Janerio. “I opened there because I like to holiday there. I thought the restaurant would pay for my trips to Brazil.”

He is only half-joking, quite possibly not at all. These days, Hom says, most of what he does has some, more personal alternative motive - although he notes that Brazil is only at frst glance an unexpected location for the man who used TV to frst popularise Asian food in the UK to open a pan-Asian restaurant. Links between Brazil and China are on the up, while Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. Indeed, just one such problem - the prohibitive expense of paying chefs to move to Brazil to work at MEE - was solved by recruiting and training Japanese chefs in Sao Paulo. “Then there are all the frustrations of the regulations as to what you can bring into Brazil,” he adds. “No trufes, for example - so I smuggled those in. And then there is the fact

that, over there, they just know me as a chef. I don’t have the notoriety I have in the UK. That’s why the restaurant has to rest on its food - although being in the most iconic hotel in Latin American helps. It has one of the best pools in the world you know? Still, it’s down to the experience people have at the restaurant and whether they come back. But do I have plans now for other restaurants? Absolutely not.” Hom says that with a mixture of relief and glee. As his friend Alain Ducasse once told him, Hom is “’the smartest of us all - you’ve created a brand without having to have a restaurant’.” Indeed, such is Hom’s success in putting his name to products - his wok, most famously, of which to date some 8m have been bought in 69 countries - that is it easy to forget he is a jobbing chef, with a track record including work for Cathay Pacifc, the Peninsular Group and the Mandarin Oriental Group both as a chef and a trainer of chefs. Latterly he has produced a ready meal range for Tesco, successful, like other projects, he says, “because I have total involvement. I’m actually a pain in the ass before I sign of.” That has meant constant adjustment of the recipes, for example, not to mention pushing the supermarket giant to do what it didn’t really want to do. “I’m always fghting with these companies to put more favour into the dishes,” Hom says, somewhat exasperated. “They always under-estimate the British public and won’t make them spicy enough. And yet the sauces I’ve done where I’ve insisted that they are spicier have always been the best

sellers. But if you have a restaurant empire to run, typically you don’t have the time to get that involved in such a project, and that makes it risky. I don’t have an empire.” Not, at least, one of bricks and mortar. Perhaps, rather, his skill as a brand manager is equal that as a chef: he stresses the need to think long-term, and to be very picky. “Look at Keith Floyd - he slapped his name on everything and his brand became worthless,” Hom notes. That’s why Hom has rejected more ofers than he has accepted: that’s a no to the scented room de-odorants, bewildered. Then there was the CD. Hom is a big music fan. “They wanted me to do a CD of music to cook to, but didn’t want me to pick the music. So no,” he says. “I’ve been ofered license deals when I could have used the money, but they just didn’t feel right.” Despite this ability to manage his own credibility well, Hom insists, however, that he is no entrepreneur. He admits that he probably wouldn’t have launched a branded wok himself back then in the mid-80s - although he did reject some 20 companies’ approaches to endorse a wok before he found one he was happy to put his name to, and that in part because the company gave him total veto over every aspect of the product. “I’m happy just getting my royalty. I’m lazy,” he says, not altogether convincingly. “I don’t own the restaurant in Copacabana either - but then I don’t get the headaches. I leave those to professional people. In fact, just two weeks working at the restaurant was enough to convince me why I shouldn’t own it. I like to sleep well.” He even attributes the impact of his TV career more to luck than judgement, to, as puts it, “just being in the right place at the right time - there was a base that was interested in Chinese food, which at that time was something people were intrigued by but had nobody to make it acceptable to them, or open it up to them,” he explains. “It helped I think that I was more of a teacher, which I really had been, without being pedantic. Sometimes you need someone to translate a culture, to put it into a language people understand - much as, say, Antonio Carluccio did for Italian food.” It is, he adds, a process still on-going: “Absolutely Chinese food still has an image problem - it’s considered cheap and dirty,” Hom says, “in part because the people who frst made Chinese food here, and in the US, weren’t really cooks. But the knowledge behind Chinese cuisine today is changing immensely - China is more open, we travel more, and there’s a generation of chefs that have grown up with access to Asian

ingredients. And now we’re seeing the emergence of real Chinese food, and China’s regional foods.” All this said, for all that he might present himself as this easy come, easy go man in Miyake, spending his days reading and swimming, cruising between opportunities to eat out - he has heard about a must-book restaurant in London’s Chinatown he should try but, sweetly, doesn’t want to jump any queue - and opportunities to put his name to things, that still leaves room for him to get impassioned. Hom may be wealthy on woks now, but he grew up poor - really poor, learning to cook under his uncle because it ofered a means of escape as much because it felt like

his vocation - and even today waste upsets him. “It really bothers me,” he says - indeed, he is trying to get a TV series on the subject commissioned, but, despite its obvious timeliness, the un-glamorousness of the project is proving a stumbling block. “When I see what some restaurants put in the bin, all the shavings and skins that could be sauces and crisps, that’s their profts, and the same waste happens at home too. “Culture is so wasteful because we have such abundance,” he adds. “But when I eat out if there’s anything left I take it home, or give it to someone - that’s a normal thing to do in Hong Kong. And there has to be mold on food before I throw it away. Waste really pains me.”