Now in its 18th year of operation, Amber has long served as a training ground of sorts for the world’s best chefs. In the wake of a 16-hands dinner bringing together the restaurant’s global alumni, culinary director Richard Ekkebus reflects on the secrets of his approach to nurturing talent
“I cannot go to any restaurant in the city where there isn’t somebody that used to work in Amber. I cannot go incognito in Hong Kong,” Richard Ekkebus proudly declares. And for good reason: the culinary director of the Landmark Mandarin Oriental has, over an impressive 18-year span, steered the food and beverage programme of the luxury hotel towards becoming one of the most formidable restaurant portfolios in the city, with Amber, the forward-thinking French fine-dining flagship restaurant, as its crown jewel.
Indeed, for the sheer number of progenies that have trained and “graduated” from the school of Ekkebus, Amber can be counted in the same breath as other lauded incubators of culinary talent from around the world such as Per Se and Eleven Madison Park in New York, London’s The Ledbury and Le Gavroche, and French temples of haute cuisine like L’Arpège and Maison Troisgros.
“We were never trying to fit the mould of French restaurants,” says Ekkebus. “And I think that has attracted a particular type of people, in my opinion; people that want to be able to think for themselves and to understand within Amber how that works.”
The restaurant is certainly one of Hong Kong’s most decorated. Within the Tatler Dining Awards, Amber’s litany of achievements includes a place on the Tatler Dining 20 list of the city’s best restaurants for nine years running, while Ekkebus himself has won the title of Chef of the Year twice. Then there are the two Michelin stars plus a Michelin Green Star for its wide-ranging sustainability efforts as part of an ambitious revamp in 2019 that saw the kitchen eschew dairy entirely, while the dining room was at the same time reimagined into an altogether lighter and more feminine design to welcome a new generation of diners.
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As with any restaurant, the lifeblood of Amber is its team of chefs, cooks, sommeliers, floor captains and more, forming a team of 72-strong for a capacity of just 60 diners—translating to a top-of-class ratio of 1.2 staff to every diner.
So how does Ekkebus not only manage but nurture such a huge cohort of culinarians? That’s beside the point, he says. Instead, “you need to build a culture of passing on information, because I cannot nurture every single individual on a daily basis.
“With 72 people, there's always enough ambition that you can’t move everybody to the pace that everybody thinks that they deserve, so that’s a challenge,” he continues. “But in principle, we always [hire] at the bottom and push people through the ranks within the structure.”
Current chef de cuisine Terry Ho is one such example of this approach. A graduate of the Vocational Training Centre (VTC), Ho first joined Amber in 2017 as a demi chef, but made the rank of junior sous chef in just two years. After a stint abroad at L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Taipei, then coming back to Hong Kong to work at Arbor, Ho returned to the kitchens of Amber and sister wine-focused restaurant Somm as chef de cuisine.
In Ho’s mind, the greatest satisfaction has come from being empowered to blaze a trail for the Asian dining scene as a whole. “We don’t dabble in dairy at all, and that’s quite special and unique, but it also means that we’ve had to create things that are only found at Amber. With the way that people’s eating habits are changing across Asia in terms of vegan and vegetarian dining, it feels like we’re really leading the charge. In this respect, I have a huge sense of achievement and a sense of being able to learn something new.”
Read more: How Richard Ekkebus rewrote the rules of fine dining for the relaunch of Amber