Andrew Wong did not set out to be a chef. He studied anthropology at Oxford, then went to China and spent time eating, reading and researching the food cultures of a country with a culinary tradition so vast and so varied that most Western interpretations of it — including the vast majority of British Chinese restaurants — represent a fraction of a fraction of what actually exists. He came back, took over the family's Cantonese restaurant in Victoria, stripped it back, rebuilt it, and opened A. Wong in 2012.
Fourteen years later it holds two Michelin stars and is, in the view of most observers of the British Chinese dining scene, the restaurant that has done the most to demonstrate what Chinese food at the highest level can be in this country. It is also, by the account of the chef who runs it, the product of something that most restaurants are not: a genuine academic discipline applied to the question of what a cuisine is, where it comes from, and what it means.
"The anthropology background is not a story I tell because it sounds interesting," Wong says. "It was actually formative in the most practical sense. Before I cooked anything I wanted to understand the food — its geography, its history, its social context. Why do people in Sichuan eat the way they eat? What does Hunan food tell you about Hunan? Those questions matter to the cooking."
The Rebuild
The restaurant that became A. Wong was, in its previous form, his parents' place: a functional, comfortable Cantonese restaurant serving the dishes that the British Chinese community had been cooking since the post-war migration wave that built the Cantonese infrastructure of this country's Chinese food scene. There was nothing wrong with it. There was also, in Wong's assessment, a ceiling — a ceiling defined not by the skill of the people cooking but by the framework within which they were cooking.
"My parents' generation built something remarkable under difficult conditions," he says. "They created an industry. They fed a country. What they couldn't do, in that economic and social context, was stop to think about the full depth of what Chinese culinary culture contained. They were cooking to survive and to serve. That's honourable. But it left something unexplored."
The rebuilt A. Wong explores it. The tasting menu — which runs to multiple courses drawing on regional Chinese cooking traditions that most British diners have never encountered — is an exercise in cartography as much as cuisine. A dish representing Yunnan is followed by one representing the coastline of Fujian. The cooking techniques, the flavours, the specific ingredients are all rooted in research. The resulting meal is, for most guests, a recalibration of what they thought they knew about Chinese food.
The Dim Sum Dimension
A. Wong's dim sum — served at lunch, revered by critics and by those who consider themselves to understand what dim sum can be — represents the restaurant's most direct engagement with the Cantonese tradition that shaped it. Wong has spent years researching dim sum's historical roots, many of which have been simplified or lost in the journey from Guangdong tea houses to British Chinese restaurants.
"There are dim sum forms that have almost disappeared from the mainstream offer because they're labour-intensive, or because the skill to make them hasn't been transmitted, or because British customers in the 1970s and 80s wanted something familiar and the market responded," he says. "What I've tried to do is go back to the forms and understand what they were supposed to be, and then make them properly."
The result is a dim sum offer that several visiting chefs from Hong Kong and China have described as matching or exceeding what they experience at home — a compliment that Wong receives with visible satisfaction.
What Comes Next
Wong is characteristically measured about the next chapter. There is no announced expansion, no second site in preparation, no licensing of the concept. The restaurant is the work, and the work is ongoing.
"I've been asked many times about doing more of this — more sites, licensing, television, whatever the model is," he says. "My answer is always the same: A. Wong is what I do. If I'm doing it properly, I can't also be doing a dozen other things. The food comes from attention, and attention is finite."
A. Wong is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday. The tasting menu is £155 per person.