Meet China’s youngest Michelin-recognised chef, who wows diners with his vegetarian dishes

Andre Li Feiyue was 15 years old when he learned to lie. The founder and chef at Plant-Based Kitchen, a vegetarian fine-dining restaurant in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, says that as a teenager in the northeast city of Qingdao, he could not get a kitchen to take him seriously. So he added a few years to his age, walked into a five-star hotel, and said he had just turned 18. When they asked for his ID, he told them he had left it at home. They let him stage (intern) anyway, since he did not ask for a salary. He just needed someone to give him a chance. In July 2025, when Li was just 23, the Michelin Guide Guangzhou recognised his restaurant in its Michelin Selected category, a distinction for venues without stars that the guide recommends. This made him the youngest chef in China to be celebrated by the guide. Previously, the youngest chef to hold that distinction was Li Zhanxu of Qu Lang Yuan in Beijing, who was 27 when she earned the Beijing Michelin Guide Young Chef Award in 2024. Li has never publicly disclosed his real age – until now. He will also do so during his appearance on the second season of The Divine Dish (also known as Chef of China), a cooking competition show premiering on July 29 that has been described as China’s answer to Netflix’s Culinary Class Wars. For the first time, Li is ready to tell the truth on record. “I used to worry that people would judge my food before they tasted it if they knew how young I was,” he says. “Now I’ve accepted that my age is part of my story. I don’t need to hide it any more.” ‘Become a Michelin-star chef by 25’ Li grew up in Weihai, a coastal city in Shandong province about 200km (125 miles) from Qingdao, where his uncle ran a mid-range local restaurant. His uncle’s no-frills, neighbourhood-style food did not interest Li at all. But what did was a Netflix show called Chef’s Table, which he watched obsessively when he was 13. He was hooked by the precision, the theatrics, the idea that a plate could mean something and that a chef could be respected for how they expressed themselves. And as he fell into the rabbit hole of fine-dining, Andre Chiang became his role model. He marched to his parents and announced he wanted to be like his culinary hero. They were not thrilled. He was their only child, his grades were good, and they had pictured a degree, a desk, a respectable profession – not their son coming home every night smelling of oil and onions. But Li had made up his mind. At 14, he had already written a note to himself on his phone: “Become a Michelin-star chef by 25.” Eventually, another relative convinced his parents by reminding them of the adage “every trade produces its master”. They relented, and just as Li wished, he was enrolled in a culinary programme in Qingdao when he was 15. But the classroom soon became not enough for him. He understood early that real learning happened in a restaurant kitchen. After practical training ended around 4pm, he would skip theory class and go knocking on restaurant doors, looking for a stage. No one would take a 15-year-old, so he had to start lying. “I knew I had to pull ahead of everyone else,” he says. “If I didn’t, what was the point of leaving school?” The work was not glamorous – peeling potatoes, scrubbing dishes, watching the real cooks from a distance – but through the half-open pass, he saw something he had never seen while at school: diners smiling at plates he had a part in preparing. “I remember thinking, this is worth it,” he says. “I never thought about quitting.” On the metro, he would write down every dish and ingredient he could remember in his notebook until he could read foreign cookbooks and English recipes. “I absorbed everything like a sponge. Those years were my real university.” During his second year, the school organised an exchange programme with The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The trip was expensive, and Li’s family did not have much, but his mother told him to go. “She said, if it helps you, take the chance.” In Hong Kong, he saw things he had never seen before: new techniques, more ambitious plating, a different relationship between chefs and their ingredients. “That experience stayed with me,” Li says. “It shaped the way I thought about what cooking could be.” After graduation, he moved through several cities before landing in Guangzhou, where he took a job at the Michelin-recommended French restaurant Li Chateau. He worked long hours, and his face and hands were often burned by splashing oil. At first, the work was the same as it had always been: carrots, potatoes, dishes. “But I never complained,” Li says. “I treated every scar as part of the learning.” Within two and a half years, by age 20, he had risen from an invisible apprentice to a chef in charge of his own station. From there, he moved to Avant, a fine-dining restaurant in Shenzhen, where he rose from chef de partie to sous chef in two years. It was at Avant that he first experimented with vegetarian fine dining, mainly as a request. Certain guests wanted plant-based menus, and Li stayed late to develop them. The more he worked with vegetables, the more he wondered what they could do on their own. He did not have an answer yet. So in 2023, he left Avant and went to a small temple in Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province. He was not there to become a monk, or even a vegetarian. He was there to ask: when you take away meat, animal fat, and the short cuts chefs use to build flavour, what is left? And can what is left be enough? “What I learned most wasn’t a specific technique,” he says. “It was respect for the ingredient, and restraint.” Embracing subtractive cooking In a commercial kitchen, the instinct is to add – more butter, more stock, more layers. The temple kitchen taught him to do the opposite: to subtract, and to unlearn nearly a decade of building flavour by accumulation. Instead of asking what a vegetable could be turned into, he began asking what it already was. “They treated everything seriously, from a leaf, a root, to the leftover vegetables from making stock. That changed how I think.” One dish in particular stayed with him: spring bamboo shoots stir-fried with Sichuan huoxiang, or patchouli, a herb so intensely aromatic it works almost like a spice. “It didn’t feel like I was eating a plain vegetarian dish,” Li says. “The flavour was clear, strong and unforgettable. That was the first time I understood that vegetarian food isn’t just what’s left after you remove the meat. Plants can build their own complete flavours.” The temple experience also reshaped the way Li designed menus. He no longer started with a form and then looked for ingredients to fill it. He started with the plant: where it came from, what season it belonged to, what it tasted like at its best. The technique came last. When he returned to Guangzhou later that year, he did not go back to French kitchens. Soon after, in July 2024, he opened Plant-Based Kitchen, the first of its kind in a meat-obsessed, fine-dining-averse city. He found an organic farm in Huizhou, about an hour and a half from Guangzhou, and began working directly with the growers. Between 70 and 80 per cent of his ingredients now come from that farm. “Organic is only part of it,” he says. “What matters more is that I can talk to the people who grow it. I can ask them about the variety, the maturity, the flavour. Those small differences show up on the plate.” The farm also ties his cooking to Lingnan, a geographic region in southern China to which Guangzhou belongs. The climate, the soil, the vegetables that thrive in Lingnan are not the same as in Beijing or Shanghai. “A dish can technically be made anywhere,” Li says. “But its relationship to the land gets weaker when you move it. I want to cook where the ingredients make sense.” His chargrilled lion’s mane mushroom epitomises his culinary mission. The mushroom is common, almost unremarkable, but grilled directly over charcoal, its moisture concentrates, its edges char, and the umami deepens into something guests do not expect. “I know I’m doing something right when they stop asking why there’s no meat,” he says. “They start asking how a mushroom can taste like that.” Guangzhou is not the easiest place to showcase vegetarian fine-dining dishes. The city loves chicken, roast goose and seafood. Some guests walk in sceptical, asking bluntly whether a meat-free meal can really be satisfying. Li does not try to convert them with philosophy. “For a chef, the most persuasive thing is still what’s on the plate. If a dish isn’t delicious, no idea can save it,” Li says. He never asks guests to become vegetarian; he only hopes they leave with a different understanding of a plant they thought they already knew. Today, Plant-Based Kitchen has an open kitchen with counter seats, and Li serves every dish himself. He explains each plate to the guest, then watches them take the first bite. The first time he did this, he thought of his 15-year-old self, standing in that Qingdao hotel kitchen, peeling potatoes, watching strangers smile through a half-open pass. “That kid probably wouldn’t have believed this day would come so soon,” he says. “But every time I put a dish down in front of someone, I remind myself: I’m not so different from him. We both just stayed in the kitchen because we liked seeing people happy from something they ate.” Plant-Based Kitchen, Shop 201, 2F, One St, 11-17 Xinsheng Road, Tianhe, Guangzhou. Tel: +86 181 4485 3101

Meet China’s youngest Michelin-recognised chef, who wows diners with his vegetarian dishes

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}He lied about his age to become a chef at 15. At 24, Andre Li is showing diners great dishes don’t need meat at his Plant-Based Kitchen

He lied about his age to become a chef at 15. At 24, Andre Li is showing diners great dishes don’t need meat at his Plant-Based Kitchen