Honolulu Weekly

Kevin Chong, Lindsey Ozawa, Wade Ueoka. Their names may be unfamiliar, but these cooks helm three of Honolulu’s most recognizable restaurants in upscale dining: Chef Mavro, Nobu and Alan Wong’s, respectively. In this era of celebrity chefs, the relative anonymity of this trio attests to the real world of cooking: a job with long, anti-social hours, hot, physical work with little fame or money attached.

As chefs de cuisine, they are ultimately responsible for every plate that leaves the kitchen and reaches your starched white tablecloth. No matter if it’s the prep cook who oversalts a seafood cake or a line cook who burns a fish–internally, it’s the chef de cuisine who allowed that dish to go to the table, and ultimately takes the fall.

These chefs de cuisine are the keepers of the name on the front of the restaurant. You’re not likely to see the restaurant’s namesake cooking in the kitchen on a day-to-day basis–the stars trust the chef de cuisines to execute their visions.

All of this raises many questions: what exactly are the chefs de cuisine’s roles? How much creative freedom do they have? How is the cuisine created? Where do they go from here?

Kevin Chong, Chef de Cuisine, Chef Mavro

At age 33, Kevin Chong calls himself “old school.” With a career in fine dining that started when he was 15, he says he feels old already. The foundation for his approach to cooking was laid at Le Cirque, one of Manhattan’s hallowed institutions. The position at which Chong started, one he calls the “bottom of the bottom,” meant cooking for the chef’s dog. Unless the chicken was cooked perfectly, carrots seasoned flawlessly and tournéd (cut into an oblong shape with seven even sides), the chef would return the next day to report that the dog wouldn’t eat it.

When Chong talks of the notorius culture of abuse in the kitchen–speaking only when spoken to, and suffering humiliations–this is the “old school” experience of Le Cirque’s kitchen.

“Now, it’s different,” Chong says. “But I’m glad I worked in that era. I got to work with Sottha Khunn, who taught me everything.”

Chong says Khunn stressed the importance of learning the basics. A simple sauce of only three ingredients, once mastered, has endless variations; sugar can be substituted with agave nectar or ripe fruit, vinegar can be replaced with lemon or unripe fruit. These techniques and philosophies are applied to Mavro’s menus.

Chong worked his way up at Le Cirque, and at age 26, opened Le Cirque in Mexico City as chef de cuisine. If Le Cirque in New York was where Chong developed his culinary skills, Le Cirque in Mexico is where he learned to be a manager, the other side of being a chef de cuisine.

“In Mexico, I was young and a foreigner,” he says. “I had so many cooks [50]. With so many cooks you have to be tough. If not, people take advantage of you.” Most of his 16-hour days didn’t involve cooking; though he had assistants, he did everything from payroll to food costing so he could understand the numbers.

As soon as Chong got married, he knew he wanted to come back to Hawaii. Chef Mavro was exactly the kind of place he was looking for.

“I wanted to concentrate on the food,” says Chong. “I don’t have 20 meetings a day. I don’t have to talk to 20 different people. I get to get dirty and cook. Here you have more control. It’s a good crew, a tight crew. This is a freestanding restaurant, we don’t pay as well as the hotels. People who work here really want to be here. Not to make money. I don’t look for money or fame. It’s just what I love to do.”

Lindsey Ozawa, Chef de Cuisine, Nobu

In the rush of kitchen service, words are quick and to the point. So is Lindsey Ozawa.

“I can’t work for Nobu forever,” he says. “I have to branch out and do my own thing. The whole idea is to progess and move forward. How can you define yourself, define your style if you’re working under somebody, overshadowed, I should say. I run the restaurant, but at the same time I don’t feel as if it’s mine.”

He is allowed a certain amount of creative freedom in chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s kitchen. While the core menu is mostly the same in Nobu’s restaurants throughout the world (19 at last count), Ozawa and other cooks run specials in the style of Nobu, which is Japanese at its heart, with South American influences. It’s light with a lot of spice and acidity, which Ozawa has embraced with his current special, moi tempura. A whole moi is vodka-battered and fried, dressed with fresh lilikoi juice cut with amazu (sweetened vinegar) and ponzu sauce, served with onions, cilantro and chilies.

He only works with Matsuhisa a few times out of the year, but working day in and day out in his kitchen, it’s hard to imagine that Matsuhisa’s influence hasn’t affected Ozawa’s style. While Ozawa’s previous culinary experience involved the long-reduced sauces of French cooking, a combination of maturity and exposure has changed his food so that it’s “more rounded now, more refined. I try to keep things on the plate as simple as possible. You don’t need eight different things going on the plate. Four at the most. Keep it simple.”

As much as he has learned from working within the specificity of a focused style such as Matsuhisa’s, Ozawa hesitates to restrict his cooking style. His own personal approach he describes as “eclectic,” spanning cuisines from Chinese to Italian to Mexican, and he’s not afraid to play with more modern techniques, utilizing foams and liquid nitrogen. With an aversion to labels, he says, “if you define your style, I think you limit yourself.” But while jumping from cuisine to cuisine may seem haphazard, he knows that doing so many different things means doing each of them extraordinarily well. His culinary philosophy: “get the best ingredients you can and don’t fuck them up.”

Wade Ueoka, Chef de Cuisine, Alan Wong’s

Wade Ueoka has been at Alan Wong’s since Wong opened his flagship restaurant on King Street, almost 14 years ago. His only other restaurant experience was at Zippy’s. While on the mainland, this kind of run at a cook’s first restaurant might be unusual, Ueoka finds that the give-and-take of his long tenure with Wong has been instrumental in developing his culinary skills.

For Ueoka, cooking under someone else’s name isn’t a limitation. It’s the kind of freedom you get when you find something that you really click with, along with the familiarity and comfort of knowing your calling. What is restrictive to some is just a different brand of latitude: more focused movements in a well-defined arena, but with just as much flourish.

A special menu last week featured Ueoka’s dishes, inspired by travels around the world, from Japan to Germany to Singapore. The inspiration may come from outside the restaurant, but he ties it back to Alan Wong’s by using local ingredients and local flavors. And that’s what he loves about Hawaii Regional Cuisine: “There are no restrictions. There’s freedom to do utilize different cultures, different products…and incorporate it into your cooking.”

However, as comfortable as Ueoka is cooking with Wong, he finds that his dream of opening his own restaurant is stronger than ever now. “It’s not that you want to leave, but you feel like you want to try. You’re never gonna know until you try.”