Eating out is passé, hiring a private chef is the true sign of class: how Hong Kong embraced the ultimate foodie luxury – fine dining in your front room
- When the pandemic brought eating out to a halt, enterprising hobbyists grasped the chance to take their culinary skills into other people’s kitchens
- Former fashion entrepreneur Marissa Lau runs MMKitchen and Nero Ip ran a luxury floral design business before founding Nero’s Kitchen – and in the new normal they remain busier than ever
It’s ironic that traditional delicacies that require a high degree of skill and long hours of labour are disappearing from menus at established Chinese restaurants pushed to the edge by Hong Kong’s pandemic-era restrictions – only for those things to be offered by hobbyists who cooked up careers out of viral demand during those same dine-out restrictions.
One such newly minted private chef is Marissa Lau, who’s been busy adding dishes such as eight treasure duck and taro-smoked duck to her menu – items that require hours across several days to prep, and which she perfected in her spare time during last year’s social restrictions.
Lau had already been cooking up comfort food and delivering it to paying customers for some time by then. Initially, she launched the @themmkitchen Instagram account just to document her culinary experiments, “and then slowly, I got more followers, and then someone approached me if I can go cook at her home,” she remembers. “It went pretty well, she [the client] posted it on her Instagram too, and then from there it was word of mouth.”
Before becoming a private chef, the Hong Kong-raised Lau was an entrepreneur who ran a fashion business, and is often spotted at brand and society events. After cooking for a special someone from the Rosewood Hotel Group, she was invited to do a four-day pop-up at their Hong Kong property in 2021 – a real challenge given Lau is used to doing everything from the morning market run and mise en place, to plating and serving, alone and at home.
Guests were treated to many of Lau’s signatures: hairy crab roe yellow croaker fish dumplings in sour pickle fish soup, Thai-style steamed wild Macau sole, Spanish red prawns with noodles and hairy crab roe fish maw claypot rice (the last of which has inspired quite a few copycats around town, Lau has since noticed).
The self-taught chef enjoyed having a full kitchen to work with – the complexity of the dishes she can prepare at others’ homes is occasionally compromised by the limitations of their kitchens.
Another private chef raised in the city, Nero Ip, says he enjoys the challenge and interactions he has when cooking in other peoples’ homes.
Ip, too, was a fixture on Hong Kong’s social scene. Prior to launching Nero’s Kitchen, offering home banquets featuring Shunde-style cuisine, which isn’t so often seen in high-end restaurants in the city, he ran a luxury floral design business with floral artist Kirk Cheng, which saw a dip in clientele when events all but stopped in 2020.