Kay Ng, who worked his way up the Amber kitchen from commis to junior sous chef over a span of six years, and who now oversees the culinary programme at MO Bar and PDT, agrees: “What Richard has taught us has been more strategic because of his role [as culinary director] in recent years. He’ll give us the space to figure out how to do something better, and he’ll encourage us to keep trying until we attain a result that’s better than what we initially thought possible. But more importantly, he also knows how to joke around.”

It’s a far cry from the way that Ekkebus was trained as a young chef under legendary names like Pierre Gagnaire, Alain Passard and Guy Savoy—and that’s very much by design. 

“I think the way that I grew up through the industry was not the most labour-friendly, so to speak. It was a ‘we break you down and we build you up’ kind of environment. In a way, that traumatised me a little bit as a young chef, and I always felt that there must be other ways [of training young chefs].”

The Dutch native found an answer of sorts when he began to work for Savoy in Paris. “He had a very strong quality of building teams and building excitement within the team, and he did that through sports,” recalls Ekkebus of the rugby sessions that would take place every Friday and Saturday involving the entire kitchen team.

“That became sort of a guiding principle for me: that people need to come to work, but they also need to feel like they’re part of something special; because they know that they will learn something and contribute to something rather than just delivering an 18-hour day.”

Still, Ekkebus admits he’s anything but soft on his team. “I can be very tough at the right time because to build a leading restaurant, we always say that you’re only as good as your last meal, so you need to have that discipline and desire within the team to be consistent.”

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Clearly, the chef has done something right as, over the years, the alumni of Amber have gone on to attain (or retain) Michelin stars at culinary establishments in all corners of the globe. In Hong Kong, familiar names like Nicolas Boutin of Épure and Maxime Gilbert, chef-founder of the recently shuttered Écriture, attribute formative chapters of their careers to time spent at Amber. Overseas, former executive sous chef Florence Dalia led the two-Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Taipei before opening 16 By Flo; and in Amsterdam, former executive chef Sidney Schutte has been lauded for his technically complex vegetarian cuisine at two-Michelin-starred Spectrum. 

“Amber is a machine [to meet] the demands of a restaurant that runs at two-Michelin-starred level seven days a week—I am not sure there are many restaurants in the world that are able to keep up with that balance of quality and quantity,” says James Baron, who worked at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental as chef de cuisine from 2020 to 2022 before taking up the post of head chef at the Krone Säumerei am Inn in La Punt, Switzerland, which was awarded one Michelin star just three months after opening. 

Baron’s stint was crucial to imbuing his working style with more structure and a greater respect for the administrative side of running a professional kitchen—a skill that might seem diametrically opposed to the art of cooking, but crucial nonetheless to functioning at the highest levels of gastronomy.

Precision and consistency are common threads in the experiences of Amber alumni—Francisco di Marzio, who worked as chef de partie in 2014 and held the title of chef de cuisine at Anne-Sophie Pic’s La Dame de Pic in Singapore, compares Amber to a “Swiss clock”; while Luca Piscazzi, former junior sous chef in 2015 and the head chef today of one-Michelin-starred Pelagos in Athens, recalls: “Even with his job as a culinary director, Richard was at every service in the kitchen. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a chef so precise and dedicated to his job.”

On September 18, Amber welcomed Boutin, Gilbert, Dalia, Schutte, Baron, di Marzio and Piscazzi back for a 16-hands dinner over three nights to celebrate the restaurant’s proverbial coming-of-age. Over ten extravagant courses, the seven alumni chefs reacquainted themselves with the considered marriage of French technique with Japanese, Asian and even local Hong Kong ingredients that has become a calling card for Amber’s distinct cuisine.

“These people were all shaped here, and they all have their one or two Michelin stars today,” says Ekkebus. “They all brought something from Hong Kong, and they still love Hong Kong, so to ask them to come back was not even difficult.”

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Ekkebus himself attributes the success of the Amber method to the restaurant’s manifesto, which greets every person who enters its state-of-the-art kitchen (this includes almost all the guests, who eat one of the courses at a standing table inside), as well as being hung on the kitchen walls at regular intervals. It lists seven qualities—including “progressive”, “conscience” and “collaborative”—that serve as the basis upon which every aspect of the restaurant is built.

“I have hired people in the past, very good chefs, but who were absolutely not structured,” Ekkebus explains. “I need a manifesto because I need that structure."

“With me, everything has checks and balances, a spreadsheet, a system, a SOP [standard operating procedure] or a PMP [project management process]; so everybody who has come and worked with me has definitely built a form of structure within their operations.”

Certainly, all these would mean nothing if there was a lack of new talent entering the F&B industry—an issue that is perhaps the most pressing in a post-pandemic society. To this end, Ekkebus, who is an honorary advisor at the Vocational Training Council’s International Culinary Institute in Pok Fu Lam, as well as a judge at the upcoming Hong Kong edition of the global Young Chef Young Waiter competition, believes that normalising a work-life balance in the kitchen is the key.

Gone are the days where you would be in the kitchen from 6am until two in the morning, asserts Ekkebus, who at the time of our interview had just returned, fresh-faced, from a weeks-long family holiday in Mauritius. “If people think that that is what it takes to be at the top of the restaurant industry, then that’s not true. I have shifted in a very different direction to look after myself much more—because if I look after myself, I can look after my guests, and I think that for the staff, it’s exactly the same.”

Perhaps, beyond the glitz and glamour of an award-winning restaurant, that commitment to equitability and sustainability is the true legacy of the school of Ekkebus—an unyielding belief that anyone who walks through the doors of Amber’s kitchen could someday head their own Michelin-starred restaurant, given enough structure and guidance and high-minded manifestos.

“In the industry, we are always talking about how many stars you have, but nobody ever talks about how much talent you produce,” he observes. “How much are we an institution that really shapes and develops the future of people?” The answer to that question, it would seem, is something that Ekkebus has already devoted the past 18 years to writing.

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