It’s not hard to understand why Andrew Wong’s ever-evolving, impossible-to-get-a-table culinary concept A. Wong behind London‘s Victoria Station stands out from other Chinese fine dining establishments. The presentation and the portions are tempered with care to appeal to a predominantly Western audience.
Still, when you bite into his freshly made dim sum, looking slightly different and more elevated than those one gets in Chinatown — with rice vinegar foams adding a layer of acidity to Har Gow; ginger-infused vinegar droplets dripping from a watch-out-for-the-hot-soup Xiao Long Bao, or Peking duck rolls decorated with caviar and truffles — even the pickiest Chinese food connoisseur would instantly appreciate Wong’s masterful understanding of traditional flavors and textures, which often become an afterthought at places that command a similar price point, especially outside of East Asia.
It’s been more than 12 years since Wong took over the spot that used to host his parents’ Cantonese restaurant, Kym, on an unassuming street in Pimlico, right opposite a busy Sainsbury’s supermarket. He scored his first Michelin star in 2017 and added another in 2021, making A. Wong the only two-star Michelin Chinese restaurant outside of Asia as of 2024.
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To Wong, his steady ascend to become the face of Chinese fine dining in the U.K. is the result of constantly learning new ideas, reformatting ingredients and cooking techniques through a faithful East-meet-West approach, so that Western audiences get a true taste of the finest Chinese dishes without going out of their comfort zones.
“We grow as chefs, and your preferences change. Your cooking style becomes more grounded in your understanding of what you want to cook and the experience you want to offer. A lot of the time it’s trial and error,” says Wong, who at the time of the interview was about to take his entire family to a private island operated by Soneva in the Maldives for the summer.
Ultimately, Wong hopes people can appreciate dim sum as an art form, like the cult status sushi has achieved on the world stage.
“Too often you see people eating Chinese food without a care in the world. It’s almost like it’s a pastime for them, stuffing two or three dumplings into their mouth at the same time, and there’s no appreciation for the technique or the work that’s gone into each of those creations,” Wong says.
“The intention for us as a restaurant every day is about trying to refine every detail of the dining experience. I’m not saying that we have better dim sum chefs than anyone else in London, but we don’t need to make 500 Har Gow a day. I want every one to be exactly the way that I want them to be. I want additional texture, acidity and sweetness in there so that when you eat that dumpling, you eat it as a single identity,” he adds.
A third-generation British Chinese born to a family originally from Hong Kong, Wong says he has become more worldly as a chef as he has worked with some of the inspiring trailblazers within the hospitality industry, as well as talking to chefs across China, asking them all sorts of questions and bringing those insights back to his kitchen in London.
Last summer, for example, he collaborated with Alan Lo’s contemporary art-filled, Michelin-starred Cantonese restaurant Duddell’s in Hong Kong, where he found a way to present the highly prized, but hard-to-look-at sea cucumbers to Westerners.
“They love doing stuffed sea cucumbers at the moment in Hong Kong. It’s a delicious dish. But it’s overwhelming for a Western palette. What is this rubbery texture? Why does it look like a dildo? So what we did with it is that we did exactly the same dish, but made it much smaller, and added a thin layer of roasted suckling pig skin on top of it,” Wong says.
“I know it seems like a very trivial thing to do, but it becomes a completely different textural experience. There’s crunch and then there’s that melt-in-your-mouth lardy texture. Then you get the gelatinous texture of the sea cucumber, and then you get the crunchiness of the stuffed prawn, which is different from the pig skin,” he continues.
“Just by doing that, you take that dish and you make it a lot more understandable. Pork and seafood are so well understood in London. It’s about trying to get our guests to think about all those different things and all those decisions that we’ve made as chefs, to try to make that one mouthful very relatable, but still delicious and still true to the original chef and his original technique,” he adds.
Similar nods to originality can be seen across his menu at A. Wong. The egg noddles he serves alongside king crab and spring onion oil are pressed with a long, firm bamboo pole, a traditional technique that’s still commonly used in the Cantonese-speaking regions in Southern China.
Some dishes, like the scallop and pork Cheung Fun, might look like nothing you would expect them to be. Wong serves it as if it’s a mille-feuille, but it might be a tribute to the almost forgotten dish that few alive today would have tried, called Golden Coin Chicken, which is comprised of layers of lean pork, pork liver and fatty pork with zero traces of poultry.
“I always tell my team that we are representing gastronomy that is 3,000 years old,” Wong says. “I’ve got to say that it’s the first time in the last two or three years that the restaurant is beginning to create what I like to think of as our cuisine, as opposed to just being Chinese cuisine or trying to copy dishes from around China. It is our celebration of the flavor profiles and the techniques and dexterity that exist within a Chinese kitchen.”
Even though Wong hasn’t been able to visit China in person since the pandemic hit in 2020, he is keeping up with the latest culinary developments there thanks to the popular social commerce platform Xiaohongshu, where chefs and critics become content creators and share new, bold ideas.
“When you look at the fine dining restaurants here, there is a certain type of cuisine that’s been produced. But when you go onto Xiaohongshu, people are filming everything that they’ve ever tried, some of them good, some of them bad, but the level of innovation on some of them is absolutely amazing,” Wong says, adding that he even helped the much-celebrated Spanish chef Albert Adrià of Enigma sign up for Xiaohongshu so that he can, too, learn about Chinese cooking techniques remotely.
“They [chefs in China] are no different from us. They’re trying to hone down an exact list of techniques and flavor profiles. It’s about bringing them back to the forefront and making people aware of them,” Wong says.
These online videos also serve as a constant reminder that Chinese chefs should be prouder of what they are capable of.
“We recently started looking into Youtiao, [a snack that’s often compared to the Chinese version of churros,] and if you look at the ones in China, they make 50 of them, and they’re exactly the same when it’s been puffed up. That’s the equivalent of having croissants that are identical. You go to Cédric Grolet, and there’ll be beautiful croissants, but they’ll all be slightly different from one another. To me, that’s art, science and innovation all rolled into one,” Wong adds.
In the next 12 months, Wong is planning to embark on a trip to China, where he can meet like-minded chefs on the ground and taste their cooking.
On the top of his list is Ru Yuan, a restaurant that scored its first Michelin star this year. Situated within the botanical garden in Hangzhou, Ru Yuan offers elevated local dishes such as West Lake fish with vinegar sauce, pagoda-shaped braised pork belly and fish balls soup made with techniques Wong has never seen before.
“We always put pork fat into fish balls, but the way Ru Yuan does it is that they chop the fish on top of the back of a pork belly so that it mixes into the fish in a unique way,” Wong says.
He is also curious to try Xin Rong Ji, the Chinese fine dining chain with more than 15 Michelin stars under its belt, which is known for its simple way of cooking, as well as getting a better understanding of Shanghai, where he plans to do a crossover project next year.
“I have been doing a little bit of research about Shanghai as a place. The fact that it’s a completely man-made city in the 1800s. It was built out of mud and the cuisine that you’ve got out of there is completely manufactured. It means that the idea of Shanghainese cuisine is completely fictional,” he says.
“Shanghai as a city has been colonized by the French and British. At the same time, it is a staple for modern China. I find it fascinating that cuisine coming out of Shanghai sometimes is an homage to France or Britain, and sometimes it’s what I perceive to be classical Chinese cuisine. There are little restaurants here and there that serve things like Swiss chicken or egg white souffle. For me, it’s about going to these places to understand the journey that food takes,” Wong says.
