Famous French chef Jean- Georges Vongeritchten will open his Jean-Georges Shanghai restaurant in the luxurious retail complex Three on the Bund earlier next year.
Superstar chef and restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongeritchten, world-renowned for his innovative cuisine, is preparing to open a restaurant in Shanghai. Reporter Michelle Qiao meets the man behind the legend.
"This is the reception area. Over here is the champagne and cocktail bar," says Jean-Georges Vongeritchten, one of a handful of celebrities that needs only be identified by his first name. "Come, sit at the bar, you can see the bright, open kitchen. I especially love the balcony where you can see the beautiful curve of the Bund."
The internationally acclaimed French chef loves Shanghai's signature sight so much. He has already decided that the balcony, where he's standing now, will be the spot from which he will make his speech when Jean-Georges Shanghai restaurant opens.
Vongeritchten boasts a host of magnificent restaurants, from Hong Kong to Las Vegas, but this is not -- yet -- one of them. Sporting a white safety helmet, he is standing in on the fourth floor of a building still under construction. Three on the Bund is the seven-story period building that, in addition to the Jean-Georges Shanghai, will house three other restaurants, an art gallery and two floors of high-end boutiques when it opens early next year. While the French chef owns several restaurants, only one other bears his name -- the original Jean-Georges, located in Manhattan's Trump Tower. Jean-Georges Shanghai is in heady company: The hard-to-please New York Times selected big brother as one of only five 4-star restaurants in the Big Apple.
The 1,500-square-meter Shanghai restaurant may be little more than a dusty, noisy concrete shell, but to Vongeritchten -- clearly a man of both vision and imagination -- it's already a dining paradise. The passion of this diminutive chef, as he conjures up a sleek eatery from a construction site, is obvious. Dressed in a trendy black suit and a crisp white shirt, his eyes twinkling beneath thick eyebrows, he confesses that Jean-Georges Shanghai is his favorite child. "I love it best," he admits, "because the design is so exciting!" His final stop is the "kitchen," currently an empty, none too clean box. "You stand there, I stand here and we will pass food from this direction," he instructs Eric Johnson, the restaurant's executive chef. "He is very open-minded, creative and extremely cool," comments Johnson, who has worked with Vongeritchten for seven years.
Born and raised in the outskirts of Strasbourg in Alsace, France, Vongeritchten's earliest family memories are all about food. His home was centered around the kitchen, where each day his mother and grandmother would prepare lunch for almost 50 employees in their family-owned business. "I would wake every morning to the most wonderful smells," he recalls. "I tasted each sauce and dish, recommending seasonings -- adding a little salt here, some more herbs there." When Vongeritchten was 16, his parents took him to the 3-star Michelin Auberge de l'Ill for a birthday dinner. "Ever since that day, I've known what my interest is: Food, service and restaurants," he says. "My father wanted me to inherit the family business from him but I chose not to, and I've never looked back. I've now been cooking for 30 years." Vongeritchten apprenticed and worked with a pantheon of superstar Michelin-starred chefs like Auberge de l'Ill's Paul Haeberlin, as well as Paul Bocuse and Louis Outhier. Beginning in 1980, he began working at an array of five-star hotels in Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong, and a new love was born.
"Asian food is my passion," he says. "I'm fond of finding new spices and new ingredients and I love to blend things together. It was a rare thing in the early 1980s, though, when people almost never used Asian spices in Western dishes." Vongeritchten was instrumental in changing that. In 1985, he arrived in the United States, and started opening a series of successful restaurants. Today, his eateries include the charming bistro JoJo, Vong, which uses 150 different Asian herbs and spices in its dishes, the stylish and casual Lipstick Cafe, the innovative Chinese restaurant 66 and the high-end Jean-Georges. "Classic French cuisine uses a lot of cream and butter, which makes you feel happy while you're eating but full for the next three days," he says. "The cuisine at Jean-Georges Shanghai will be very light French food instead of classic dishes with thick, heavy sauces."
In keeping with the "think local" philosophy of the great chefs, Vongeritchten says he will use mainly locally-grown ingredients, with exceptions like wine, chocolate and seasoning. "I will bring seeds from America and plant them in a local organic farm,'' he says. "I will use local seafood, which is so fresh that the fish is killed in the morning. I have to -- Chinese have sensitive taste buds and will detect immediately if you have them eat a fish that's not freshly killed."
The chef says that he will be in the kitchen of his restaurant for the first three weeks, cooking for Shanghai dinners. In order to better understand his customer's taste buds, he reported that he has been busy sampling street food around town after arriving last week for his latest visit. He has eaten typical Shanghai breakfasts in five small local restaurants, ranging from "sheng jian mantou" (fried steamed buns stuffed with minced pork) to wonton. "Excellent dim sum," he says. "Then for lunch, I had hairy crabs, which were cooked an unbelievable eight different ways. Really fascinating." For Vongeritchten, putting seemingly disparate ingredients together to create new flavors is one of his motivating forces -- the process of creation, he says, is what he loves. "This is my role, to bring new flavors to the table," he says. "I love cooking and still cook six hours a day." It's true. "Every time I tried to find Jean-Georges in his restaurant, he was in the kitchen," says Handel Lee, co-chairman of Three on the Bund. "When I told him that we were having a cocktail reception for him, he said, 'Great, I can cook for you all'."
Sure enough, Three on the Bund staff were often foiled in their attempts to introduce Vongeritchten to Shanghai's movers and shakers at the reception, as the celebrity chef kept ducking back into the kitchen. Vongeritchten explains it: "The nicest thing for me, what gives me the greatest pleasure, is to have a guest leave with a satisfied smile. "He shrugs his shoulders, adding modestly, The only thing I know is about food. I don't know anything else. If I quit, I will retire in Asia and grow some rice," he chuckles.
(eastday.com September 30, 2003)
