NESPRESSO FOCUS
Following his trip with Nespresso to Colombia, one of the world’s key coffee producing countries, chef Vicky Cheng reflects his learnings about quality and the parallels he has found in his own culinary eco-system
A common misconception is that chefs merely cook, a convenient simplification of a wildly complex system that hinges on hundreds of factors and moving parts. In a fine dining restaurant such as VEA, the brigade is dependent on a carefully honed choreography that must be repeated, consistently, day in day out, with feeling. A dining experience is more than the sum of its parts—a transcendent one is the result of consistent execution and utmost dedication to quality.
As chef ambassador of Nespresso Hong Kong, Cheng visited the famed coffee producing region in Colombia to see firsthand the effort that goes into creating the simple cup of coffee that many take for granted. He observed different styles of farming from a couple of producers, including a traditional farmer who had been in the coffee business for decades. “The trip really was a way to open our eyes,” he explains. “We look at it from our point of view, and we also saw the differences and similarities in how chefs and farmers work.”
See also: Vicky Cheng On How A Cup Of Coffee Inspires His Craft
The systematic ways in which the crops are grown and harvested, for example, was familiar to Cheng. “It was a matter of everybody harvesting, then everybody screening, and pulping. It was one by one by one, just like in the kitchen where you need to have an efficient workflow.” He gives the example of working on filleting fish, instructing his cooks to focus on completing each stage of the process (cleaning, scaling, filleting, pin-boning) for all necessary fish rather than work on one fish at a time. “There’s a lot of screening involved in between, like in the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality Programme,” he observes. “Though the programme is on a much larger scale, essentially it is the same in the kitchen.”
Every day at 4:30pm, the sous chef will perform a check on all elements of the day’s dishes. This is followed by a second chef check at 6:00pm. “This is all to confirm that the acidity is right, the thickness, the balance, the richness, the saltiness,” Cheng explains. “It’s a daily job and doesn’t change. It’s the most important part of the day. This constant quality check—a check for consistency—is the most important in any business, I think.” Every chef is trained to carry out these minute quality checks daily, to ensure that the restaurant is performing at its best at every service.
