XO Soused Andrew Wong and Mukta Das

For years now , and since Andrew’s visit to the brilliant Albert Adrià in Barcelona in 2017, Andrew and Albert have been talking about collaborating on a menu that meshes the world of dim sum and tapas and upends European industry norms about pastry.
Finally on Friday 7th July 2023 - after months of emails and calls - Albert arrived with his team and boxes of specialist ingredients to prep for a special weekend menu that is an industry first and marks an exciting new evolution in creativity for both chefs. On the eve of these dinners, Mukta recorded a live Q&A with Andrew and Albert to explore the collaboration from an XO Soused POV!
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
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In a new format for XO Soused, we welcome a guest!
Susan Jung - arguably the most powerful voice in East and South East Asian food and cookery - sits with Andrew and Mukta to explore;
* why apprenticeships are sometimes better than formal culinary education
* how a well-timed lunch can help launch a food writing career
* what makes Susan angry as a restaurant reviewer
* Susan’s favourite meal
* What fried chicken reveals about East and South East Asia
* the special artisanal ingredients that elevate East and South East Asian cookery
Susan’s book, Kung Pao and Beyond, Fried Chicken Recipes from East and Southeast Asia is available from bookshops and online at Hive.
Apéritif: Susan, Mukta and Andrew talk a little more about chicken
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Macanese gastronomy is reputedly the oldest fusion cuisine in the world and has been recognised by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.
This tiny territory - smaller than Hong Kong, which it neighbours - also has one of the most dynamic economies in the world where some of the best chefs using the finest ingredients cook for the very rich. How does Macanese food cut through this noise?
But how does a chef like Andrew - operating within a system of distinct yet connected regional Chinese cuisines - understand, embody, codify and cook a corpus that borrows so heavily from Portuguese colonial tastes and textures? And is fusion a problematic term or simply an imprecise word to describe complex alchemies involved in cooking food that lands well in a given context?

References
Boileau, Janet Patricia. "A culinary history of the Portuguese Eurasians: the origins of Luso-Asian cuisine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." PhD diss., 2010.
Das, Mukta. “One of Many Ways For Macanese Aluar” The Recipes Project, 2021
Jackson, Annabel. The Making of Macau’s Fusion Cuisine: From Family Table to World Stage. Hong Kong University Press, 2020.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!





This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

From being the little princeling in the kitchen during his culinary training to asserting his creative and commercial voice - Andrew’s authority has not always been clearly exercised, reflecting the complexities with succession in family businesses.
Considering all these complex succession hangovers, why was Andrew so adamant that his own new venture - A. Wong - should be launched on the site of his dad’s previous restaurant? Why not a clean break and a new site?
What has remained of his father’s empire - the other businesses, the team, the network - and how has the family adapted to the new business? Or are there continuities in how decisions are made and dreams realised through all three generations of Andrew’s family?

Thanks for listening to our special miniseries. Normal service resumes with the next episode of XO Soused on Tuesday 2 May.
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Episode 2 goes inside Andrew’s family as they battle to carve a space in London’s hospitality sector .
As Britain’s Asian restaurant sector transformed in the lead up to the new millennium, so too did the ambitions of many a restaurateur -not least Andrew’s father, who constantly cast about for new ideas and concepts.
What kind of pressures, limits and opportunities did this present to the family? How did the teenage Andrew understand these forces as they impacted on his father in particular? What did it mean to have a family business in this patriarchal world, and where did it leave Andrew’s mother and Andrew when his father passed away?

Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics from 2008 - the present
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com

Introducing a special three-episode mini series of XO Soused.
One episode per generation, and one episode each day from Monday to Wednesday this week.
Andrew’s family have been involved in the Chinese catering trade in Britain for three generations.
Every generation of Andrew’s family had an ambition for their business. During the years that his grandfather owned these businesses, these ambitions were shaped by this powerful patriarch and his network in the midlands, and by the realities of baby boomer Britain and its effect on the Chinese cuisine on its shores.
And along came Andrew’s father with ambitions to start up in London, setting a course for Andrew’s family that still defines their lives today.
In this first special episode of this miniseries, Andrew and Mukta delve into these personal histories - into these sagas of competition and cooperation, of succession and discontinuity - of the 1970s and 1980s.

Tomorrow: British Chinese cuisine - Wong family dynamics in the 1990s-2000s
Intro and outro music: 遊子 [wanderer] by mafmadmaf.com
XO Soused is a fortnightly audio newsletter. We’d be grateful if you can share XO Soused with your friends!


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit andrewwongandmuktadas.substack.com