Snack Course: a quick Q&A with chef Andrew Wong

Snack Course is a new feature where we chat, informally, to the country’s best chefs to find out everything from their favourite restaurants to the fridge essentials they can’t live without at home.

First up is Andrew Wong, of London’s A. Wong, the first Chinese restaurant outside Asia to hold two Michelin stars. Wong opened the restaurant, which has been lauded for its elegant dim sum and exploration of regional Chinese cooking, with his wife Nathalie in 2012 on the former site of his parents’ Cantonese restaurant in Pimlico. The name A. Wong is a tribute to them: Albert and Annie. 

Hi Andrew, what’s your go-to quick and easy comfort food dish?

Instant ramen. I add everything that’s left in the fridge to it. Leftover lettuce leaves is one of my favourite things to add. 

What’s one thing that you always have in your fridge at home?

Fermented tofu. I like to eat it with congee. My wife likes to spread it on toast, but I find that a little bit too strong. I prefer to have it with various different congees that we might make. 

What food trend is past its sell by date and what would you like to see return?

Something which I never really quite understood is the obsession with sourdough. There are so many different types of bread in the world. For example, the bread that I love most comes from various different Indian kitchens – tandooried bread, whether it be a naan, a chapati, a bahtura, a roti, rumali roti. The world has so many different types of bread, yet for some reason in this country, everyone is completely fixated with sourdough and sourdough only. Sometimes I feel like, how did this happen?

In the UK now, one of the trends I would like to come back is quite traditional, family-run Chinese restaurants. I think they're dying out so quickly, or they're changing so quickly we're losing a solid starting point on particularly Cantonese food, but all kinds of regional Chinese food.

What’s the best restaurant you’ve been to recently?

I went to Luca last night. Their pasta was amazing. I thought it was really nice, delicious yet light, but really lovely texture and flavour. And then the dining room is beautiful. Service is chilled and amazing. It's the type of restaurant I enjoy going to, especially with my kids, who are 11 and nine.

What’s your favourite food city?

I love Hong Kong, I love Shenzhen in China, I love Melbourne. I’m a bit biased, they’re heavily saturated with Chinese restaurants; not just Chinese, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai restaurants, Singaporean.

What would your last meal on Earth be? 

A really simply steamed piece of sea bass, ginger and spring onion and seasoned soy sauce with loads of coriander and just some really nice steamed white rice – white rice that is fragrantly Jasmine, and it sticks just enough. It comes together on your chopsticks, but there's an incredible fragrance to it. You know that you're eating rice that has been really cared for.

What’s your biggest bugbear in restaurants? 

Sometimes, when I go to restaurants, I feel like they're making decisions which are P&L [profit and loss] related, as opposed to putting any kind of thought into how that translates to the customer experience. I've got no problem with chain restaurants [but] there are some restaurants that you go into and you can just see they sat in a meeting somewhere going, ‘Let's use cheaper this or cheaper that, or let's just cut the number of staff. Or let's not have two receptionists, let's have one. Or let's not use nice toilet paper, just use cheaper.’ And from my perspective as someone in the industry, I look at it, and those are the things [where] I go, ‘You know, what? If only they didn't do that, it would have been so much nicer.’

What is the most overrated ingredient in your opinion? 

I’ve never been a massive fan of truffles. I think I've only ever had one dish in my life where I thought, wow, I can understand why the truffles really make a massive difference to this dish, besides the fact that it’s just fragrantly fragrant, for the sake of being fragrant. We go through truffle seasons where they're meant to smell of petrol. I don't get it. When it’s got that kind of fruity, cacao flavour, I get it. 

And the most underrated? 

Rice. People think rice is rice. People think hom mali [jasmine] rice is just hom mali rice. It’s absolutely not. I’ve had a couple of meals at Japanese restaurants where you can just feel the love, where the rice has come from, what season, to the way that it’s been washed, to the way that it’s been steamed, to the way it’s been fluffed before being served. 

There are certain times of the year, for example, where, you know that it's kind of new season rice because it becomes really, really wet. And I hate this time of year because the rice become like porridge-y. In that time of year, we will probably, in the restaurant, begin to mix it with other grains in order to counter it. When rice is at its absolute pinnacle and you get some steamed rice where you can smell the jasmine coming off it – mindblowing.  

Thank you, Andrew.