How Hong Kong food stylist Gloria Chung creates a festive table at home

Gloria Chung Wing-han is best known in Hong Kong’s culinary circles as an itinerant food writer-turned-stylist and the founder of Foodandtravelhk, the Instagram-based media brand from which she shares her globetrotting adventures in gastronomy. So it’s all the more unexpected that the Hong Kong-born barometer of good taste has chosen to locate her food styling Batcave, if you will, in a sleepy private housing estate in Tai Tong, on the outskirts of far-flung Yuen Long.

For Chung, the studio – a former home that she renovated with cottagecore-inspired cabinetry and cream-coloured Smeg kitchenware – offers a place free of distraction to conceptualise and create her next tablescape, whether it’s a commercial shoot for the likes of McDonald’s, Marriott or Le Creuset, or a personal project, such as the Guanyin Buddha statue made from 10kg of butter that she sculpted for a joint food art exhibition with local artist Afa Lee Si-yu earlier this year.

Fittingly, the space feels Christmassy, albeit minimalistic, thanks in no small part to the centrepiece table setting that awaits our arrival: a food sculpture atop a silver-footed serving platter draped with a large bunch of red grapes, cloves of red garlic, maroon radishes and a gerbera daisy. In the middle is a towering arrangement of onions, a potato and an Italian radicchio pointed skyward and topped with a single Thai red chilli.

The result is deliciously quirky, “a bit more East-meets-West”, says Chung, who relishes the Christmas period for being “one of the most versatile styling occasions ever”.