The newest opening under the ZS Hospitality group marks a significant step forward for vegetable-centric cuisine in Hong Kong
"Vegetables are not just a garnish on the plate, they are the main event," American chef and food activist Alice Waters once wrote. Bringing this ethos fully into fruition, Feuille (pronounced feuy) is a new vegetal fine-dining restaurant by French chef David Toutain that introduces the vegetable-forward tasting menu of his two Michelin-starred Restaurant David Toutain in Paris to Hong Kong.
As Toutain's first project outside of his native France, the menu at Feuille—meaning 'leaf' in French—inspires pure palatal delight while sparking a reconsideration of the underutilisation of vegetables as the main character on the typical fine-dining plate; in Hong Kong, where sustainable restaurants number just in the handful, it's already making a splash.
The idea for Feuille came about as a result of a visit to Restaurant David Toutain by ZS Hospitality restaurant group founder Elizabeth Chu. Afterwards, she struck up a dialogue with Toutain, and following a preliminary visit, the French chef was convinced that Hong Kong was the right place to grow his culinary philosophy.
"It was very exciting for me as a chef, because some products I didn't know about—it was very new for me," Toutain tells Tatler Dining. "We don't have the same [ingredients] in France. It was a big reason why I wanted to come here, because I want to learn too. I just [want to] come back to zero."
The chef's appreciation for local ingredients—and his urge to highlight them throughout the vegetable-centric opening menu—makes itself immediately apparent, with at least 80 percent of the menu comprised of produce sourced within the territory. During his visits to the city, Toutain scoured wet markets for suitable vegetables to take the leading role in dishes throughout the degustation, such as lotus root, yam and bamboo shoots.
"I’m always interested in what I call the grandmother way. How do they do it? It's very important to come back to traditions—traditional is yummy, it's tasty, it’s comfort, it’s sharing, it’s love."
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On the other side of the equation, Toutain has also taken steps to ensure a through-line in the style of cooking to his Paris restaurant—Feuille's executive chef Joris Rousseau and other members of the kitchen team spent five months immersed in the daily workings of Restaurant David Toutain during the development process.
Underpinning the cuisine at Feuille is a degustation that transposes the traditional structure of a meal onto the biology and life cycle of a plant: appetisers are centred around a beginning of seeds and grains; entrées around leaves, stems and roots; and desserts around flowers and fruits. "We need to respect these rules to make the new dishes happen, so that we have a link between when you arrive and when you are leaving," says Toutain.
A respect for nature is embedded into the fabric of Feuille. Asked about vulnerabilities in the supply chain from small-scale local producers, who are often at the mercy of the elements, Toutain calmly shrugs it off: "I'm sure Mother Nature will speak and decide for us. We cannot control that. It is very important to respect the quantity that nature gives to us, and if you don't have that, you do something else. We have so much seafood, so many vegetables and fruits, so we make it happen."
This extends to the zero-waste approach that informs every dish, with ingredients often making repeated appearances at several points in the menu, or in multiple variations as part of the same course. Prime examples include the dill pil-pil sauce, made by boiling down turbot bones to extract their gelatinous collagen, which is then blended with dill oil into an unctuous, mayonnaise-like accompaniment to the bread course (the turbot flesh reappears in the fish course with a side of winter melon). Meanwhile, the main course of pigeon, beetroot and hibiscus iterates upon the root vegetable in a trio of fuchsia-pink gnocchi, a mille-feuille sandwiched between beet leaves, and a beetroot consommé flecked with pigeon lard using a rosemary branch.
"We use everything, either in a bouillon, an infusion or a vegetable stock. It's good not to waste the products, to keep the flavour and make it stronger," says Toutain. "When we have extra, we just make our on vinegar so we can preserve the fruits and vegetables. We have lacto-fermentation to give the acidity on the plate. It’s always a concentration of flavour in the same products."
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