“COOKING JUST MAKES ME HAPPY”: A CONVERSATION WITH COCO KWOK
Illustration: Coco Kwok
Coco Kwok
Coco Kwok is a passionate chef who works in London. She was born in China and moved to the UK at a young age. After studying textile design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, she started working at a fishmonger, where she discovered her love of cooking. She currently works in the kitchen at St. John, and runs her supper club NEW GATE STUDIO from her home. We spoke with her about her food, the challenges of cooking Chinese food for a Western audience, and her plans for the future.
You are from Guangzhou, a city in the south of China, which is famous for its fantastic food.
Yes, although there are other places which are more famous. The way we eat in my city is very humble and down to earth, but so good. The produce there is very fresh and of amazing quality, so you really don’t need much to create a tasty meal. We use simple ways of treating the produce to enhance their natural flavour: We like to steam and poach — prawns, fish or vegetables. When I started my supper club I became aware of the differences in palette between my Western and Asian guests. A lot of people here seem to find simple dishes like boiled prawns boring. I guess what you like is embedded in the way you grow up, and what you know of how food is traditionally prepared there. That is sometimes a challenge for my way of cooking in this part of the world.
When I look at your Instagram I also see you serving offal, trotter, gizzard — all things that are not very common to eat in the West anymore. Is your clientele mainly from Asia, or do you also get Western Europeans?
Most of my guests are still Asians, but eating offal is by no means only an Asian thing. It used to be eaten in the West too, but it kind of disappeared. But take something like steak and kidney pie or sausages, and there it is — just hidden. (laughs)
That’s true. Liver, gizzard and lots of intestines, blood sausages or even horse meat were so common in Europe, and not even that long ago. While they never disappeared completely, they certainly got less popular in the last thirty years. With all the convenience food and pre-packaged and clean-cut meats, intestines almost got a bad reputation for being disgusting and cheap. People only want neat filet.
I know — I believe that is a mistake. Here, mainly the prime cuts are sold and the rest is neglected. Although I love seeing that some of the young, hip and creative chefs are now bringing offal back onto the menu. It’s the only sustainable way — if you kill an animal, you might as well use everything. I don’t want to waste it, but moreover, I think it’s delicious. You just have to know how to treat and cook it.
When people want to book a dinner at my house, I tell them in advance that I cook with offal, raw fish and cured meats. And sometimes I get people who are not brave enough to eat what I cook. Cooking is so personal: You have your own taste on one side and the guest’s taste on the other. You have to play with the boundaries so that people understand what you’re about — and that is a very delicate line to walk. But I do feel people should try things they don’t know or don’t feel comfortable with at least once. Otherwise, they are missing out on many experiences.
Do you think it has to do with texture, too? In Western food, it seems, texture is not as important as in a lot of Asian cuisines. Here, everything is supposed to be smooth and tender. People don’t even want bones in their chicken anymore. Something like tripe then seems impossible.
Yes, this is a huge difference between food culture in the East and West. I feel like people here are sometimes too lazy to eat meat or fish off the bone. These days, some high-end restaurants in China also started serving boneless meat, but generally, for us, this feels cheap. The flesh connected to the bone has the best flavour.
Has London influenced the way you cook? The food you serve now doesn’t seem to be strictly Chinese, especially since you use regional produce.
Yes, I like the mix of different cultures influencing my cooking. While things like Chinese spices and sauces are easy to find here now, I can’t get some of the beautiful produce I find back home. In the beginning it was more out of necessity, like, I can’t find freshwater fish, so I have to replace it with a regional product. That would maybe not have been my first thought for a combination, but then something different and untraditional comes out of it. This ultimately makes it interesting.
Did you learn to cook in China?
No. I taught myself during the foundational year before my bachelor. After boarding school, I was happy to finally have my own kitchen. I cooked for myself and my friends every day, which gave me the strong certainty that that was it for me: a life in food. This then led me down various paths, like the fishmonger, the restaurant, the supper club.
When I started cooking I remembered how my grandparents and my nanny cooked. They are no professional chefs, but they have been cooking like this for so many years, and that experience can’t be replaced. Through this repetition, you pick up something that almost becomes imprinted in your DNA. They never measured ingredients but knew exactly how much to use. Everyone in my family is a big eater, we all really like good food.
Did you get into curing meat yourself?
Yes, but it’s a bit challenging to do at home, because the humidity in a home fridge plays tricks sometimes. I like to cure meat by wind drying, as we do back home, but it’s too humid in London. I once tried wind drying some fish and it ended up getting infested by worms. One winter, it snowed quite heavily, so I marinated some beautiful big sardines and I hung them outside on the ledge of the window facing the garden. I like the fact that once you put them out there, you kind of can forget about it and let time do its thing. When I went to check on them three days later, all the sardines were gone. Some animal had eaten them and only left the thread. Since then, I do it in the oven.
What about pickling?
I do pickle sometimes, but I’m obsessed with fermenting. It’s not that easy to do and has gone wrong quite a few times — but I love it. When I started to cook in London I discovered anchovies and realised how similar they are in terms of flavour to a Chinese salted fish, but also to fermented black beans and dried vegetables. My nanny used to take me back to her village, where we would pickle cabbage by just sprinkling it with salt and laying it out in the sun to dry. When it was ready, it tastes really sweet and almost like horseradish, an amazing combination of sweetness and heat. We put it into soups and… I’m lacking the vocabulary to tell you what wonderful flair it brought to the soup.
Your Instagram is interesting. It feels very real, like the opposite of the average, popular Instagram food photography, where everything is colourful or cute. Your colours are very subdued, always in the same range. It’s very consistent, but really the opposite of food porn. Is there any thought behind that?
Hah… I’m not a good photographer. But I do everything myself. I cannot ask someone to come in to shoot the food when I have guests. I only have a small set-up, and it is convenient for me to do things by myself. So I decided to always shoot in the same spot and always have the same light, and just shoot when the food is ready to be served to my guests. I can’t lose time, because I need to get it out on the table before it gets cold.
What are your plans for the future?
One day, I will have my own restaurant. I want to work in the kitchen every single day, but that’s not possible with my supper club at the moment. I just love the adrenaline rush you get when you’re working in the kitchen.
Interview: Sandra von Mayer-Myrtenhain
Copy Editing: Charlotte Faltas
Photos and Illustration: Coco Kwok
