role models: the mentors behind our top chefs
“Behind every great chef is another great chef, as Kate Gibbs discovers when she speaks with some of Australia’s leading food talent about who inspired them along their way.”
Dan Hong started cutting up vegetables for his mother, Angie Hong, in their home kitchen as a nine-year-old. She asked him where he’d learnt to use a knife “like a professional”. From television, he told her. “From Jamie Oliver. He emulated what he saw this cool chef doing. I realised, ‘oh, Daniel is quite good’.”
At the time, Angie worked long hours at her Thanh Binh restaurants in Sydney’s Cabramatta and Newtown, and Hong junior cooked for his siblings at home – “mostly burgers, fried food, and pasta like Jamie Oliver”. He went on to work at top kitchens, such as Tetsuya’s, Longrain, Marque and Lotus, his mentors including Martin Benn, Martin Boetz, Mark Best and Justin Hemmes. Now one of Australia’s brightest young chefs, the culinary brains behind Ms G’s, Mr Wong and El Loco, he insists it was his mother, an “accidental mentor”, who made him the cook he is today.
“She didn’t take me under her wing as some kind of protégé, but I developed my palate through her balance of flavours,” he says. “I took it for granted at the time.” Later, as a young adult, he worked in her Newtown restaurant. “I was in charge of rice-paper rolls and if they weren’t perfect I had to do them again. She never wrote down recipes; it was ‘three parts this to one part that’, so I learnt flavour balance quickly, and how restaurants work.”
Read the rest of my story, a feature story published in delicious. magazine, here.