Jason Li - The Rise of the Shanghainese Chef
Jason Li
Have you eaten at a supperclub in the chef’s home? Jason Li has been hosting private dinners since 2003. By day, he is an assistant sales director at a 5 star hotel in London. By night, he runs the exclusive “Dream of Shanghai” supperclub, specialising in Shanghainese cuisine. How did a young man from Shanghai, speaking little English, become the most well-connected Shanghainese chef in London?
While growing up in Shanghai, Jason watched TV cookery programs and his mother cook for her father and his VIP guests. Aged 10, Jason was responsible for food shopping under his mother’s beady eye. At 14, he was promoted to scaling fish. He relentlessly practised cooking in the school holidays. He tested them on his grandfather. He was thrilled whenever his grandfather asked for more rice, as that meant that his dish was up to his standard.
Jason came to England to study hotel management in 1993. He couldn’t afford to eat out very often. Inspired by dishes he had eaten at a restaurant, he would improvise them at home, consulting his mother when she was in England in the holidays.
In 2001, Jason was a manager at the Michelin-starred, achingly glamourous Chinese restaurant, Hakkasan. He wrote recipe manuals by translating recipes from the Chinese chefs into English. He would memorise the recipes and practise them at home, honing his cooking skills with tips from the chefs.
He worked in other Chinese restaurants, such as Royal China, Min Jiang and China Tang at Dorchester Hotel. These culinary establishments gave him access to wealthy customers. When the customers first asked him to cook for them at home, he suggested his mother. In 2002, she cooked for a Shanghainese entrepreneur’s family and friends including the acting legend, Jackie Chan and the late Sir David Tang (who founded Shanghai Tang and China Tang). By 2003, Jason had started cooking private dinners with his mother.
2013 saw the launch of Jason’s “Dream of Shanghai” supperclub. Unlike other supperclubs, his is by invitation only, reserved for those who appreciate Shanghainese dishes. “I choose the customers, I am sorry”. He proclaims: “I normally do dishes you don’t normally find in restaurants in England. They are of better quality with a bit of a twist”.
Jason explains that Shanghainese cuisine uses seasonal produce. He reminisces: “In March or April, you can get Knife Fish [daoyu] in Shanghai. You suck the juice [from the fishbones] of the Knife Fish that you buy before Qingming Festival (Tomb-sweeping Day) which are very soft. After the Festival, the [fish] bones are very hard. You need to be careful.”
Each month, different vegetables and fish become available in Shanghai. At the beginning of the season in June (in the Chinese calendar), “the hairy crabs are tiny with lots of egg yolk. In September and October, the crabs are more meaty. We eat the female crab in September and the male crab in October.” “Wosun” (Celtuce) is a seasonal vegetable, “its leaves look like lettuce and its inside is very crispy like cucumber.”
Jason uses local ingredients, supplemented by specialities from Shanghai such as ginseng. At his supperclub, I enjoyed his double-boiled chicken soup with wild ginseng (cooked over 8 hours). Ginseng is very popular among Chinese people for its perceived health benefits. He tells me that the ginseng was from Changbai Mountain, near the border of North Korea. He proudly annouces that the soup had no MSG. It had a deep earthy flavour with a slight sweetness. All this doesn’t come cheap and his charges are at the upper end of supperclubs, but it is on a BYO wine basis.
Jason says that he enjoys meeting different people who have respect for Chinese food. He relishes feedback from the diners, who often post photos of his dishes on Instagram afterwards and rave about them. He loves the whole experience.
Jason’s recipes have appeared in The Daily Telegraphand his cooking prowess was proudly mentioned in the local press, Love Wapping. He occasionally holds Shanghainese cookery classes. He has done cookery demonstrations on Chinese international TV channels, CCTV-4 and Phoenix channel.
He promotes Chinese cuisine in the UK. As part of a charity project set up by the Ming Ai (London) Institute, he and other chefs, including Andrew Wong (the Michelin-starred chef of A Wong and Kym’s Restaurants) and Jeremy Pang (founder of School of Wok) taught students Chinese cooking and trained food technology teachers in various schools around England.
Jason also found time to support and showcase his cooking skills at the Chinese regional food tasting event, Bitesize China: Tiny Tastes of Regional Chinese cuisine, during Southbank’s China Changing Festival in October 2018.
With 25 years of experience in the hospitality industry, and through his supperclub, he has created a vast web of connections with many people including the chefs, Ken Hom OBE and Ching He Hwang, Andrew Wong, the restauranteur, Alan Yau OBE (who founded Wagamama, Hakkasan restaurants and others) and the Chinese cookery writer, Fuchsia Dunlop. You can see the face of Jason, the supreme networker, appear at endless hospitality events and Asian food award ceremonies.
Jason admires the inventive wunderkind, Heston Blumenthal and Chef Tong Chee Hwee (Executive Head chef of Hakkasan group). He is inspired by Chef Tong’s creativity with his new ideas on Chinese classics. He learned from him while he was at Hakkasan. He similarly observed his mother cook. She read recipe books every day, researched and tested the recipes. “I am lucky, cos I watched a Michelin-starred chef cook”. Jason misses his mother who sadly passed away recently. Perhaps his Dream of Shanghai supperclub is his way of continuing her legacy and reminds him of his childhood days in Shanghai.
It looks like that Jason is ready for much bigger things. His next project is going to be a 60-person 2-day supperclub event at a London public venue in 2019. What next for someone who is so well connected, talented and ambitious? A cookery book, a restaurant? Watch this space.
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