XO Soused

For years now , and since Andrew’s visit to the brilliant Albert Adrià in Barcelona in 2017, Andrew and Albert have been talking about collaborating on a menu that meshes the world of dim sum and tapas and upends European industry norms about pastry.

Finally on Friday 7th July 2023 - after months of emails and calls - Albert arrived with his team and boxes of specialist ingredients to prep for a special weekend menu that is an industry first and marks an exciting new evolution in creativity for both chefs. On the eve of these dinners, Mukta recorded a live Q&A with Andrew and Albert to explore the collaboration from an XO Soused POV!

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

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In a new format for XO Soused, we welcome a guest!

Susan Jung - arguably the most powerful voice in East and South East Asian food and cookery - sits with Andrew and Mukta to explore;

* why apprenticeships are sometimes better than formal culinary education

* how a well-timed lunch can help launch a food writing career

* what makes Susan angry as a restaurant reviewer

* Susan’s favourite meal

* What fried chicken reveals about East and South East Asia

* the special artisanal ingredients that elevate East and South East Asian cookery

Susan’s book, Kung Pao and Beyond, Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia is available from bookshops and online at Hive.

Apéritif: Susan, Mukta and Andrew talk a little more about chicken

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Macanese gastronomy is reputedly the oldest fusion cuisine in the world and has been recognised by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.

This tiny territory - smaller than Hong Kong, which it neighbours - also has one of the most dynamic economies in the world where some of the best chefs using the finest ingredients cook for the very rich. How does Macanese food cut through this noise?

But how does a chef like Andrew - operating within a system of distinct yet connected regional Chinese cuisines - understand, embody, codify and cook a corpus that borrows so heavily from Portuguese colonial tastes and textures? And is fusion a problematic term or simply an imprecise word to describe complex alchemies involved in cooking food that lands well in a given context?

References

Boileau, Janet Patricia. "A culinary history of the Portuguese Eurasians: the origins of Luso-Asian cuisine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." PhD diss., 2010.

Das, Mukta. “One of Many Ways For Macanese Aluar” The Recipes Project, 2021

Jackson, Annabel. The Making of Macau’s Fusion Cuisine: From Family Table to World Stage. Hong Kong University Press, 2020.

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

From being the little princeling in the kitchen during his culinary training to asserting his creative and commercial voice - Andrew’s authority has not always been clearly exercised, reflecting the complexities with succession in family businesses.

Considering all these complex succession hangovers, why was Andrew so adamant that his own new venture - A. Wong - should be launched on the site of his dad’s previous restaurant? Why not a clean break and a new site?

What has remained of his father’s empire - the other businesses, the team, the network - and how has the family adapted to the new business? Or are there continuities in how decisions are made and dreams realised through all three generations of Andrew’s family?

Thanks for listening to our special miniseries. Normal service resumes with the next episode of XO Soused on Tuesday 2 May.

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Episode 2 goes inside Andrew’s family as they battle to carve a space in London’s hospitality sector .

As Britain’s Asian restaurant sector transformed in the lead up to the new millennium, so too did the ambitions of many a restaurateur -not least Andrew’s father, who constantly cast about for new ideas and concepts.

What kind of pressures, limits and opportunities did this present to the family? How did the teenage Andrew understand these forces as they impacted on his father in particular? What did it mean to have a family business in this patriarchal world, and where did it leave Andrew’s mother and Andrew when his father passed away?

Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics from 2008 - the present

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Introducing a special three-episode mini series of XO Soused.

One episode per generation, and one episode each day from Monday to Wednesday this week.

Andrew’s family have been involved in the Chinese catering trade in Britain for three generations.

Every generation of Andrew’s family had an ambition for their business. During the years that his grandfather owned these businesses, these ambitions were shaped by this powerful patriarch and his network in the midlands, and by the realities of baby boomer Britain and its effect on the Chinese cuisine on its shores.

And along came Andrew’s father with ambitions to start up in London, setting a course for Andrew’s family that still defines their lives today.

In this first special episode of this miniseries, Andrew and Mukta delve into these personal histories - into these sagas of competition and cooperation, of succession and discontinuity - of the 1970s and 1980s.

Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics in the 1990s-2000s

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

How do contemporary cooks interpret historically researched cookbooks? How relatable to contemporary dining are Song era historical recipes, and how far do recipe writers, cooks and chefs have to do this translation work? Andrew talks through a present day book of Song era recipes that he has been reviewing and researching as both he and Mukta explore how these recipes reflect Song dynasty social, economic, cultural and philosophical life.

How do these recipes draw from and sketch out the luxury markets that defined the era, as well as the clean-eating philosophies that developed in reaction to these rich diets? And, equally importantly, how does this cookbook - a complicated culinary snapshot of Song era cooking - capture the evolution of Han majoritarian cuisine against which all other Chinese cuisines have become ‘ethnic’, or ‘other’?

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio and video newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

How does a chef cooking Chinese cuisine incorporate bitterness into their dishes? Is bitterness truly necessary as sweetness, sourness, pungency and saltiness in Chinese gastronomy? Or is it trapped in a traditional medicine cul-de-sac? What did key Chinese gastronomic thinkers and writers think about bitter tastes and how did this thinking shift in recent centuries? What ingredients and techniques layer in bitter tastes and how have these changed over the course of Chinese food history?

XO Soused is now available as a video - watch below

Further reading on drinking bitter tea: Mei, Yuan, circa 1790. Wuyi tea [武夷茶] in Suiyuan Shidan [隨園食單], translated by Sean Chen, Way of the Eating, 2019

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

XO Soused is a fortnightly audio and video newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

What are braised bear paws doing on a (likely) imperial banqueting menu from the 1700s? What does the appearance of this exotic meat, and other dishes like steamed camel hump, tell us about the changing categories of ‘wildlife’ and ‘livestock’ in global food history, and about how Chinese heartland foods and peripheral cuisines are constructed?

Are there more to the names of these dishes than straightforward description, or can these names signal less about the central ingredient and more about the look of the dish?

As the skills and knowledge to cook such dishes remain accessible to Andrew and his chef network, how can he bring such complex ideas of edibility to his diners without crossing certain lines? What cross-cultural encounters about edibility and etiquette does his banqueting menu already contain and where else will he push out the envelope?

Further reading: Yue, Isaac, 2018. The Comprehensive Manchu–Han Banquet: History, Myth, and Development. Ming Qing Yanjiu 22(1):93-111

Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

After an unexpected hiatus, XO Soused is back to being a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

We kick off season 2 of XO Soused with an update from Andrew about the swap he has made to his evening menu - from à la carte dining to a fixed banquet menu - at his restaurant A. Wong. This has meant changing from catering for a variety of guests who bring different appetites: ‘some people eat more, some people eat less, some people…. have five or six different dishes, others just want to have a duck in the middle’ to serving 19 different dishes to every guest across four or five courses.

What do these changes now demand from Andrew’s kitchen brigade and how has this changed Andrew’s role at the pass? Is this different from the organisation of banquets in Chinese history? Can Mukta’s analysis of Qing-era banqueting menus help Andrew with new ideas for preparation and for dishes that buy his kitchen the time and fluidity it needs? How will Andrew integrate Mukta’s analysis into his future banqueting menus?

XO Soused has been a fortnightly audio newsletter. Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com