The chef behind two-Michelin-starred A.Wong on merging heritage and innovation – and the power of Lee Kum Kee’s oyster sauce
Sitting just a stone’s throw from London’s Victoria Station, A. Wong looks an unremarkable, even modest Chinese restaurant from the outside. But once inside, it quickly becomes apparent that it is home to one of the most exciting, innovative and progressive British chefs of his generation – Andrew Wong.
2025 marks 40 years since A. Wong first opened its doors. Named by Andrew Wong’s parents Albert and Annie, who ran it for years as a traditional Cantonese restaurant, it was also always ahead of its time: Wong explains that it was one of the first ever Chinese restaurants to have a website, and his entrepreneurial late father first served hotpot – now a hugely popular phenomenon – way back in the 1980s.
Fast-forward four decades and A. Wong has innovated and evolved still more. It holds two Michelin stars and a place in history as the first Chinese restaurant outside of Asia to reach such a momentous milestone.
“My journey has been retrospective, questioning misconceptions about Chinese food,” says Wong. “The idea was always to make A. Wong a category of one, making it unique for us – and also the diner.” In doing so, Andrew Wong has helped to reshape views about Chinese cuisine like no one else in the UK – which is why Lee Kum Kee is so proud to be working hand-in-hand with Wong, enabling him to craft his innovative, elevated fare.
Few can match Wong for his profound immersion in the history and cultural context of the food that he serves. After dropping out of a chemistry degree at Oxford, he chose to study anthropology at the London School of Economics, then decided that the best way to truly immerse himself in Chinese cuisine would be to study at the source.
“When you talk about China, hear about it and taste it from a UK perspective, it’s very different indeed from the moment that you hit Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Sichuan,” he says. “It’s multi-sensory, you feel the energy, locality, culture – that was the one thing I never anticipated would have an impact on me.”
Wong started his journey in his grandmother’s home of Sichuan province in central China, and enrolled in culinary school to learn the cuisine. He didn’t speak Sichuanese – and so, remarkably, he relied mostly on his senses. “I was learning everything through sight and smell, I had to adapt to it without language – it definitely made it so much more interesting!”
His six months in China were a revelation, but he left clear in the knowledge that he didn’t even “touch the sides” of Chinese cuisine. “If you’re lucky, you may just have a glimpse, but you soak up the energy and culture and use that as fuel more than anything.”
For Wong, cooking has never been about precise measurements, but more trial and error. “Test it, try it, evolve it, adapt it, get other people’s input. Then, as you build layers of complexity, you get something magical.”
At A. Wong, the current evening tasting menu starts with an auspicious eight dishes on the same plate at the same time. They are hot and cold, multi-textured with different levels of umami, sweetness, sharpness, spiciness and bitterness. They are a deliberate entry point to dinner in the style of Imperial banqueting, to remind diners that Chinese food is all about balance, with lots of dishes together at once.
The next course is a celebration of dim sum, which also reflects the same approach:
“That style of eating in Hong Kong, to me, it's about texture: glutinous, crispy, fried, hot, and cold, all mixed together. So our har gau [shrimp dumplings] comes with layers of different flavours, a sweet chili sauce but also a light texture of rice vinegar on top. Siu mai [pork dumplings] come with black bean sauce for umami, but then pickled cucumber and crackling on top of that.
“That thinking is inspired in part by my Lee Kum Kee journey, when I visited their production centre in Guangdong. There was the serendipity of Mr. Lee Kum Sheung leaving the oysters to boil, making a reduction which he later turned into oyster sauce – serendipity kicked in and he ended up with that flavour!”
He smiles as he explains that seeing the production process first-hand reminded him of a whisky distillery – due to the combination of science, culture, love and appreciation of a historic project. Following his visit, and the more he spent time in Hong Kong, Macau and China, the more he realised that oyster sauce is one of the crucial bedrocks of Chinese cuisine:
“Lee Kum Kee originated it and gave the underlying umami foundation of everything we do, that roundedness which is so special. It also explains why Chinese food is so unique and consistent globally, supplying that baseline foundation of flavour.
It has so many different levels to it, it’s cross-cultural and universal. When I tell western chefs about it, the smart ones have known about it for years – a teaspoon of oyster sauce turns it from a delicious sauce to a mind-blowingly delicious one.”
Coming from a pioneering Chinese chef with very few equals, praise doesn’t come much higher, and Lee Kum Kee is proud to be able to do its part to enable Asian cuisine across the world.
