Profile | Asia’s Best Female Chef 2021 DeAille Tam on winning the award, her Michelin star and why ‘food is edible art’
- Tam initially studied to be a civil engineer, but switched to the culinary life after cooking for her friends at university revealed where her true passion lay
- She won a Michelin star in 2018 working with Alvin Leung of Bo Innovation and is now executive chef and co-founder of Obscura in Shanghai
You left Hong Kong when you were nine years old. Do you have any food memories? “My dad had a cha chaan teng and he’d make French toast for me. Another is cheung fun from the street stalls. I remember the snap snap snap of the scissors cutting the tender rice rolls. I ate a lot of seafood – the hot oil poured on top of steamed fish with soy sauce and thinly sliced scallions, and Cantonese-style garlic chilli prawns. Just eating the garlic fried with rice is so delicious.”
How did you come to study civil engineering? “Originally I wanted to be an architect, but my mum found a lot of people within the profession to talk to me and tell me there is not a big career development, it doesn’t have a big scope. She suggested I consider civil engineering, where I could deal with buildings, too, and I went into engineering to satisfy them.”
How did you switch to cooking? “I studied all the way till my fifth and last year and I just couldn’t do it any more. I was struggling with what I wanted to do with my life. The University of Waterloo [in Canada] has a work-study programme and I tried many kinds of workplaces, but none gave me the same drive as when I baked for my friend’s birthday or made food for my classmates. I’d stay up late looking up recipes and spent a lot of money on tools to make a birthday cake. It was something that made me happy.
“I told my parents I wasn’t going back to school for a short period to try these culinary classes and see how it turned out; maybe I’ll like it, maybe I won’t, but I wanted the opportunity to try. I paid for the schooling so I believed I had the power to say what I wanted to do.”
How was culinary school? “I loved every moment in culinary school, at George Brown College [in Toronto]: classes on nutrition, chemistry, interaction of heat and changes in proteins – it was like applying what I knew in science to something I love to do. Nothing seemed too complicated, except things like how to use a knife, or whisking hollandaise sauce until my arm fell off.”
