Zenku: Serves food, but not as you know it

Christian and Judith Yang present me with a plate of cold soba noodles with frozen foie gras at their latest dining brainchild Zenku. 

Frozen foie gras powder is spread all over the side of a plain white bowl. A dainty pile of soba topped with jullienned vegetables sits in the center. It looks like someone's noodles had an accident with their face powder. I'm hesitant to touch it.

The taste is of dry clumps with a hint of foie gras combined with some slippery slivers of cucumber. I'm not so sure about this. 

But the couple instruct me on how to mix up the ingredients in the dish and get a mouthful with a bit of everything in it. And the taste is improved. I'm warming up to it.

"This dish took a lot of experimenting," says chef Christian Yang.

"I came up with using frozen foie gras which we grated on top of the soba noodles. This maintained the wonderful foie flavor and creaminess without having to be in a pate or steak form. The early versions still included ponzu sauce for dipping but we quickly realized that the fozen foie would come off and form an unappetizing mud with the sauce. The trick is to keep the dish dry and so we transformed the sauce into another noodle by using gelatin."

This guy is nuts. All that for a bowl of cold noodles? But such is the spirit of creativity at the kitchens of Zenku.

The Yangs took advantage of lowered rent at the end of 2009 and opened their first restaurant in Causeway Bay. Called Bang Bang Pan Pan, the restaurant serves do-it-yourself okonomiyaki, a novel concept in Hong Kong at the time.

Everything about that place, from the name, the casual trendy atmosphere, the location, to the cook-your-own-meal concept, was about having fun with food.

Now the Yangs have opened Zenku, with the same idea of serving fun food, but in a considerably more grown-up manner.

Whimsical dishes on their Japanese-inspired menu, like the cold soba with frozen foie gras, or the tonkatsu mille feuille, or the sake jelly with strawberries and pop rocks, sound like pipe dreams from a cooking school dorm room.

We met with Mauritian-born, French-trained, Hong Kong restaurateur Christian to talk about what inspires his playful food for grown-ups.
Zenku, 2/f Nexxus Bld., 77 Des Voeux Road, Central, tel +852 2899 2216 www.zenku-hk.com

CNNGo: Tell us about the foie gras. What made you want to create that dish?

Christian Yang: Conventional fine dining would see dishes with a certain ingredient at the center of attention. So for a dish that features foie gras, the foie would be under the spotlight.

I wanted to present a new direction in eating foie by using it as a flavor. Though we love it, we wanted to leap from traditions where you would typically see foie gras either seared or in a terrine where you get a whole mouthful of foie gras. It becomes such a guilty pleasure. We wanted it to be lighter and introduced into a Japanese context.

Taking the idea of how grated cheese offers its creaminess to pasta dishes, I wanted to introduce foie gras to cold soba noodles.

The version we now serve at Zenku comes with some pickled onions, fresh slices of tomatoes and cucumbers.

When I tried the dish, we realized that the first thing you taste is the foie gras, then as you chew, you would taste the freshness of the vegetables and a hint of acidity from the pickled onions, then all of a sudden, you are met with the savory taste of the ponzu sauce as the jelly melts on your tongue.

CNNGo: Why Japanese?

Yang: I've been exposed to a lot of French cooking and when I was 20 I had the opportunity to work in the Restaurant Miyako in Geneva that catered to the Japanese embassy.

I learned the absolute need to respect original tastes of the ingredients and to use only the freshest produce, something that was similar in my French culinary training.

Japanese cuisine is so exciting because it covers such a wide range of cooking from serving raw ingredients to barbecuing, using the griddle, frying, boiling, stewing, noodles, dumplings, the list goes on. There is so much space to be creative in.

CNNGo: How would you describe the food at Zenku? 

Yang: We do traditional cooking with a surprise.

We want to give creative space to our staff. Some of our chefs really rise to the occasion -- and some don't. Some feel a bit lost in the face of our experimentation.

Some of our ideas are a little out there. Like, we want to make ice cream sushi, where we put raw fish on rice ice cream. But then, do we still call this sushi? 

We also were thinking of making tom yum kung jelly sushi. As you might have guessed, it's taking some time to develop it.

We can't just serve something just because we can. Its all got to taste good. And our menu has to have continuity. We are based in Japanese cuisine at Zenku, so we can't stray from that. 

CNNGo: So are you a subscriber of molecular gastronomy?

Yang: Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal both agree that the term "molecular gastronomy" is not an accurate title for the craft that they do and that they also agree that it is a very difficult term to define -- as in, where does it start and where does it end?

Cooking is where art and science meet. We know from experience what will happen to an egg if you put it in boiling water for five minutes. This is science. Using soy lecithin to create foam in liquids that usually will not be able to, well that's also science and can be considered "molecular."

But someone somewhere in time invented a marshmallow, something I find requires a lot of science yet everyone has accepted that this is a normal everyday household treat. To me, that could be molecular.

We are modern Japanese and we use our traditional training as a platform to present dishes that may be slightly different yet taste good.

Some of the techniques really changed the face of dining entirely. Like, sous vide is an awesome way to cook meat.

There is still a lot of place for the rustic and traditional, but creativity needs to stay up to date with current trends.

But everyone here has to have a good grasp of the foundational first. If a chef can't braise meat properly, they should not be playing with sous vide.

CNNGo: What are people's reactions to your 'surprises?'

Yang: A group of my mom's friends came in and said "just give me your craziest stuff." So I did.

They saw the dishes and were really sizing them up before tasting.

One woman tried the pop rocks dessert. She started to cry. She said that it reminded her of when her son was still young and they ate that kind of candy.

I couldn't have planned these emotional connections for people.

CNNGo: Tell us about your formative years in France.

Yang: I started out working in hotels from the bottom up, literally peeling potatoes at the Kowloon Shangri-la when I was 16 years old.

Then I left for Paris when I was 18. It was an entirely different world. At the Shangri-la, people bent over backwards to accommodate me. But in Paris, it really was a fresh start.

Washing pots, I was given only one gift from my chef: a spoon.

He said "you don't need uniforms, aprons, waterproof shoes, even knives, but you need to taste." It is one of my top philosophies now.

CNNGo: What made you come back to Hong Kong?

Yang: We want to invest in Hong Kong, have a stake here. We believe this is a truly creative place and we want to show that to the world. Whether its about pulling creativity out of our staff, or just pushing the envelope, we want to invest in our craft in Hong Kong so that it may rise up to a challenge in creativity.

CNNGo: What are you excited about right now?

Yang: Right now I'm really excited about a sustainable bluefin tuna that is farmed in Croatia by Japanese.

Bluefin tuna is just such a superior fish that even if you compare the farmed and the wild version, you would be hard pressed to find the difference.