Since Hopewell Mall’s Food Parc opened a year ago, r é n has, in a way, found a new home through our monthly Chef Demos at their Chefs’ Stage. Each month, for two or three Thursdays, we invite one of our partnering chefs to guide our beneficiaries through a cooking demonstration, providing a valuable learning experience for our youths. But none of this could happen without the support of chef Charmaine Cheung, who oversees Food Parc’s operations, and who has now become one of our social enterprise’s closest friends and supporters. 

“I have loved cooking ever since I was a child,” she recounts. “When I was young, my parents loved throwing parties, two or three tables at a time, and I really enjoyed them. Back in those days, the chefs would come with live chickens and a big chopping board, and I was so fascinated with all that was happening. My mum loved to cook and my dad loved to eat – it was a perfect combination – so every weekend she’d be cooking and I’d be watching her in the kitchen. My dad would drag me out of there and I’d just go straight back in. I was drawn to all this ever since I was young.”

She also shares her memory of her first teppanyaki visit with her parents, which she looks back on fondly. “I had never seen anything like that – meat flying around, the butter sizzling on a hot griddle, and the smell of freshly ground pepper –  it was all so mesmerising.”

Around seven or eight years old, she moved to the US, and brought her curiosity in the culinary arts with her to the new continent. Funny enough, it was the subpar quality of the food in her school canteen that inspired her to first explore cooking and making her own food.

“It was really terrible,” she says with a laugh. “So I told my mum I’d prepare my own lunch, and I started making these sandwiches. It was like that episode in Mr. Bean – I’d pack the salad and the sauce and the bread separately, and when it came lunchtime, I’d construct my sandwich in school. My schoolmates saw how delicious my food was and started asking me for a share, so I began charging them for my sandwiches, $1.50 USD per. I basically ran a sandwich shop in school ever since I was around 8!”

Though she was already practically running her own catering business since she was just a child, it wouldn’t be until later in life after graduation when she finally decides to take the leap into cooking as a profession. Her mother had opened a beauty salon for her after she left school on Tang Lung Street, coincidentally the street r é n’s previous office was situated on.

“That was obviously not my cup of tea,” she chuckles. “I was there 10 hours a day, so to spice things up, eventually I created this small kitchen at the back of the salon. I’d cook up these healthy, nutritional meals for the women who came – set A, B, C – and they could either dine in or take it away. Eventually, the television channels caught wind of what I was doing and came to film me, because no one was doing what I was doing at the time. It was then that I realised and told my mum, ‘Enough, I want to be a professional chef.’”

Off to a stellar start, the first position she interviewed for was at The Peninsula’s Japanese restaurant Imasa. They had never hired a female chef before, but they were impressed with her self-taught cooking skills and decided to take her on board. “They decided to give me a chance, and I was ecstatic – I put on my chef’s uniform and stood in front of the mirror looking at myself for hours. But in a way, it was also an opportunity for me to test the waters. It was one thing cooking as a hobby, but it’s entirely different when you’re in a commercial kitchen. As it turned out, I absolutely loved it. It was tiring and stressful, and my legs would be numb from standing all day, but I was still so excited and energised to go to work every single morning.”

From there, she went on to work at multiple reputable restaurants until she joined the Norwegian Seafood Council, where she was tasked with doing food shows and demonstrations all around the world. She’d also compete in international culinary competitions, representing Hong Kong. “It was the best decision I ever made, I should’ve done it earlier,” she says of the experience. “I encountered so many new experiences and people from all over the world, and I learned so much from them. Through food, I learned a lot about life and different cultures.”

Today, after all the adventures she’s had, she leads the culinary team at Food Parc and ParknShop as executive chef, and runs regular “Buy n Cook” sessions for the supermarket’s customers. “Food Parc focuses on premium ingredients, but not everyone is so aware of that fact, so we came up with the idea of the Chefs' Stage. When people try the food, then they can tell immediately that the produce is of high quality, so we launched “Buy n Cook.” Shoppers can buy whatever ingredients they want at the supermarket and I’ll prepare and cook them a meal with it. I share the method with you, and you can go home and replicate the recipe at home for your family too.

“I love this kind of interaction with my guests and diners, to have this kind of back and forth. It can be very demanding at times too – there was one time we had more than 60 orders in an hour and I was spinning around the kitchen, that’s why they call me the dancing chef now. There’s no time to turn, you gotta spin!”