Whenever you ask a chef about what brought them into the kitchen – especially one with European roots – you’ll often hear about the hours upon hours their grandmothers spend in the kitchen creating magic using fresh seasonal produce plucked right out of their own gardens and farms. But for chef Loïc Portalier, who helms PMQ’s stunning Michelin-starred French restaurant Louise, his origin story is rather different despite his upbringing in the French countryside. In fact, it’s surprisingly relatable to many of us born and raised in Hong Kong.

“I’m not like other chefs that have parents or their grandmother cooking for hours at home. My mom was a working woman and not a stay-at-home mom, so after she gets home at 6pm, she wasn’t going to cook for four hours, right? She did cook for us, and it was always nice.

“But for me, it was more about the moment of coming together for a meal than what’s on the plate. My childhood relationship with food is more about being reunited around the table than a specific product or a recipe.”

The chef might say that, but there’s an obvious glint in his eye when the word cheese is mentioned. “Oh, I love absolutely any kind of cheese,” he says with a grin. “Every single day, I needed to have my cheese. It’s really something I grew up with, and I’m still a huge fan of it. I think one of the biggest disasters of my life would be if I had to go dairy-free one day!”

Another signature dish from his childhood was his mother’s tomato tart, something he calls a ‘super classic.’ “It’s like the easiest recipe ever made: puff pastry, Dijon mustard, tomatoes, and some fresh thyme on top. Pure simplicity – basically takes 30 seconds to do – but everyone loved it. Just fabulous.”

Whether his mother had time to cook up something overly elaborate or not, it’s clear that food – or the act of having meals together – left a strong impression on young Loïc. He tells us he’s always loved eating, and sure, he had his preferences, but there was never anything he wouldn’t eat.

“I think it was just something I was always curious about,” he reflects. “I wouldn’t say I was 100% passionate about becoming a chef though. It was more like, as a kid, some wanted to be footballers and some wanted to be firemen, and for me, I was curious about cooking.”

Regardless, his curiosity led him to enroll in culinary school at the age of just 14, attending École Hôtelière Savoie Léman where he was taught by some of the most talented chefs in France, many of which were Meilleurs Ouvriers de France. It was during his education here that he began to fall in love with the idea of working in a kitchen.

“Ever since I was a kid, I liked it when people were very straightforward and say the things they wanted to say, and in the kitchen, it was 300% like that,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a bit much, but I like that way of working. Yes, it was very stressful, but in a good way. I never found stress to be a bad thing – if you choose to see stress in a good way, I think it can be an enzyme, you know?”

In fact, he found culinary school not nearly as stressful as he needed it to be, and so he began working in professional kitchens, part-time at first, and then full-time after cutting his education short.

“Some of the kitchens I worked for were very old school, and people insulted you every day,” Loïc recounts. “Honestly, if you didn’t get punched, you were lucky. But I was only 15 at the time and I knew I had to push through it, and it helps that I’m very stubborn. I fought a lot with my chefs too; if I knew I was right, I would always argue back, and I think in a way some of those chefs liked that, because it showed my character and my will. It was a sign of my passion.”

The toughest restaurant he’s ever worked at, he says, was actually his first: the then three-Michelin-starred Paul Bocuse. He had landed the role after a mentor had referred him, and it was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down.

“But it was the hardest three years of my life,” he confesses. “If I had been a little bit weaker on any one night over those three years, I would’ve quit. But the guy who got me the job told me he had put himself in a position to recommend me, and I couldn’t quit on him, so I didn’t. It really resonated with me, because this guy found me a job out of nowhere in this extremely prestigious kitchen. I owe him everything I had and learned, so I took responsibility. It was really, really hard, but I had never learned so much in my life. If I have strong fundamentals in the kitchen now, it’s all thanks to them.”

From there, he’s continued on to other exceptional restaurants, including Epicure at Le Bristol Paris (where he met fellow chef Daniel Calvert, who asked Loïc to join him in Hong Kong for the opening of Belon) and chef Julien Royer’s Claudine in Singapore.

“I didn’t speak English, and I never lived aboard,” he recounts. “But when Daniel asked me to come, I thought, sure, let’s try it and go for six months, a year, and we’ll see. It’s been eight years.”

Quite an unexpected change of plans, I suggest. How does he look back on this eight year journey?

“I think if I look at it professionally, I could have been more serious. But if I talk about whole experience and meeting people, I think that was the most enjoyable part, just being independent. I moved out of my parents’ place when I was 14 so I grew up having my own apartment and taking care of myself, but Hong Kong was really a whole different level. You go to a place and you don’t speak the language, you don’t know the culture, you don’t really know anything, and you have to build everything from scratch – even something as stupid as registering for a number at a phone company. When you don’t speak the language and you have someone yelling at your face? Honestly, it was quite rough at the beginning, but I learned a lot from that period.

“I adapted a lot, and I think this is something every single person from France should experience. I think we are too much on the ‘I do what I want and not what people want’ philosophy, which can be a good thing sometimes because you build your own identity that way. But at some point, you need to listen to the people that are coming to your restaurant. The biggest thing I learned here is to adapt to the local community. Because if I wanted to do 100% the French way, half the restaurant would be empty.”

One of these adaptations came in the form of La Terrace by Louise a year or so ago, transforming the ground floor of the two-storey restaurant into a more casual, French bistro-styled eatery. Combined with the original Louise on the second floor, the establishment now offers both refined French dining for discerning gastronomes as well as laid back, sharing-bites for the brunch-goers. Having grasped our culture and adapted to our tastes in Hong Kong over the past eight years while leading and transforming Louise for the past two, what’s next for the young French chef?

“I think I’ll still be here for a couple of years, but I’m also interested to see what’s outside of Asian again,” he ruminates. “There’s a lot of different cultures in the world, and I’m very curious how people and things work in different places, just meeting new people and discovering new cultures. I think that makes you grow very differently than if you just stay in the same place. I’m not the kind of person that really likes comfort. When I’m too comfortable, I feel stagnant, I feel like I’m not learning anything anymore, and I want to move on.”