Foraging in Hong Kong With Denmark’s Most Famous Chef

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/dining/foraging-in-hong-kong-with-denmarks-most-famous-chef.html

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HONG KONG — Mads Refslund, a chef known for his almost manic dedication to natural food, could not have been farther away — physically or spiritually — from the Danish forests and beaches where he first learned to forage for ingredients.

A slight man in a chef’s jacket, gray jeans and sneakers, he waited beside a stage at the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. As guests clinked Champagne flutes at the opening of a food and wine festival, Mr. Refslund asked for tips on foraging in one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

“I'm looking for anything that you can eat — trees, leaves,” he said.

When it was Mr. Refslund’s turn to address the audience, he tried to explain the philosophy that defined Noma, the Danish eatery that he co-founded in 2003 and that in 2010 knocked El Bulli in Spain off its throne as the world’s most critically acclaimed restaurant. More recently, Mr. Refslund has brought his cuisine to Acme in New York.

“Nordic cuisine is not about Nordic things, but about a way of thinking,” Mr. Refslund said, as he discussed sustainability and local products.

Several days later, he emerged from the Ritz-Carlton’s air-conditioned confines for the first day that he would be free to forage. “I’ve been here almost a week, and I’ve barely been out of the hotel,” he said.

A bellboy in a top hat and white gloves ushered him, his New York girlfriend and his Danish publicist into a black van that deposited them at the gritty Graham Street Market.

He was joined by Peter Find, the Ritz-Carlton’s hulking German executive chef, who has worked in Asia and the Middle East since the mid-1990s and who regularly scours local markets and streetside stalls.

Mr. Refslund was finally in his element. Squinting into the subtropical sun, he happily took photos of a fishmonger and a pig butcher, both hacking into slabs of squirting, bloody flesh.

“In Europe, we have all this special equipment. We have fish knives,” he said. “Here, absolutely everything is done with one cleaver.”

“I saw meat hanging outside in the heat,” he said. “An American would look at that and think of bacteria, but I think people don’t get sick if they’re used to it. We’ve gotten totally clean, too clean.”

He picked green papaya flower buds, a large yellow cucumber, preserved mustard roots and a cluster of longan, a lycheelike fruit whose name means “dragon eyes.”

He poked at snails, crabs and local “flower shrimp” at the Yiu Fat fish stall.

At the Wai Kee Congee Shop, which specializes in congee, a rice porridge, and other blue-collar breakfasts, he coveted the machine used to make cheung fun, paper-thin layers of rice pasta.

Mr. Refslund took a piece of fried dough wrapped in cheung fun and dipped it in fish congee. “Starch in starch served with starch. I don’t know how this would play in New York,” he said as he randomly added sauces — plum, soy, chili. “I have to add a lot of chili.”

Back in the market, he passed on the congealed pig’s blood, stinky tofu and salted duck eggs packed in charcoal. He returned a durian when the hotel publicist reminded him that the fruit was banned from the premises because of its foul odor. He balked at the shark’s fins, criticizing the inhumane way they are harvested. And he shook his head when he heard that open-air food stalls were falling victim to redevelopment across the city.

“In this case, New York is far ahead of Hong Kong,” he said. “New York is getting into organic foods, farmers’ markets, foraging. Why go to a supermarket and buy a cucumber when you can go to a farmers’ market, or a beautiful field?”

He said it took him two years to get used to life in the New York borough of Manhattan. “I love it, but it’s hard. I’m used to nature,” he said. “In Denmark, nature is outside your door — 10 minutes on a bike and you’re at the beach or in a forest.”

He has found some solace in New York at the Union Square Greenmarket, where he has befriended local farmers. Now he is sourcing wild ingredients from the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border, up through the Hudson Valley and into New England. “New England is a little similar to Denmark,” he said.

He does it with the help of two foragers, including Tama Matsuoka Wong, who has written field guides and cookbooks based on wild ingredients.

Ms. Matsuoka Wong, who lived in Hong Kong for 12 years, had warned Mr. Refslund about the hazards of foraging here.

“Wild breathtaking landscapes are amazingly accessible to the Hong Kong people,” she wrote by e-mail from New Jersey, where she forages on her own 28 acres, or 11 hectares, of land. “But of course there are a lot of poisonous plants in a climate like Hong Kong.”

Mr. Refslund said his approach toward cuisine was based on a sense of limits and restraint.

“We have such long winters in Denmark, we have to learn to salt, ferment and age,” he said. “I don’t use strawberries in the wintertime. In winter, I use wood — bark from the oak tree, fermented birch.”

“When you’re limited, you start to create,” he added.

That was certainly the case in Hong Kong.

After the market, Mr. Refslund took a ferry to Cheung Chau, a car-free island. He walked up to two fishermen in a scene that looked beautiful from a distance — all blue water and sky — but smelled terrible up close because of the cheap diesel used by local fishing vessels.

“It makes for a nice picture,” the publicist said.

“I don’t care about the picture,” Mr. Refslund said. “That water is disgusting.”

Few in Cheung Chau village appeared to know much about foraging, so Mr. Refslund made his way up to a hiking path, where he met an elderly woman willing to give him tips. He returned — red-faced and sweating — with a smattering of flowers, herbs, green figs, dried pods and moss. He seemed particularly happy about toothwort, a flowering plant whose root has a horseradishlike bite.

When the fishing boats returned from the relatively cleaner waters of the South China Sea, he bought a bag of small fish and carried them, still flopping, to the open-air Hoi Fat Seafood Restaurant, which charged a few dollars to flash-fry them in garlic and chili. The waitress set down cold Tsingtao beers, tiny clams sauteed with fermented black beans, spicy calamari and whole prawns, which he and his publicist ate, shells and all.

Back at the hotel, Mr. Refslund threw a chef’s jacket over his hiking shorts and spread out his findings. He ruminated over the green figs and set them aside.

“I have no idea if they are poisonous,” he said.

He declared the yellow cucumber slightly stringy and cut it into rounds. On top he placed thinly sliced raw abalone, then piled on emerald seeds and bright orange blossoms.

He crisped tiny zebra fish he had bought on the island and left one hanging from his lower lip, as a farmer might a stalk of grass. He arranged the rest as if they were swimming through an ocean of herbs and greens.

For a final touch, he spooned on powdered dry ice, which sent up wispy white plumes and turned the plate into a miniature Nordic landscape.