DEAILLE TAM
A new-look Chinese cuisine
With a newly minted Michelin star restaurant in Shanghai, DeAille Tam tells Cat Nelson about innovating Chinese cuisine and her lightening-speed journey to the top
F
rom behind the bar at Obscura, DeAille Tam hands over a ceramic bowl. Crafted by a young artisan she discovered in China’s ancient porcelain town of Jingdezhen, its rustic appearance belies its featherlight weight and my hand jumps suddenly. “It’s kind of like our food,” she
says. “It’s not what you expect it to be.” Surprises punctuate Obscura’s menu,
an innovative modern Chinese restaurant in downtown Shanghai that she and her partner Simon Wong opened in late 2020. Savory ice cream is made from siu yuk, Cantonese roasted pork belly; fatty slices of otoro tuna mimic the classic
Shanghainese pork dish hong shao rou; delicate handmade noodles in a dashi broth elevate the street food dish liang pi. The flavors are definitively Chinese, the dishes decidedly not. Garnering a Michelin star within a year of its opening, Obscura is ambitious, unconventional and full of imagination. Its meteoric rise mirrors Tam’s own. Just 10 years ago she was only just finishing culinary school. Now, she’s just been awarded Asia’s Best Female Chef of 2021 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, only three months after opening her own restaurant, where she’s co-owner and chef, in China’s most cosmopolitan city. When she arrived in Shanghai with
Wong in 2016, high-level Chinese fusion was almost non-existent. “Five years later we still saw that there weren’t a lot of people doing what we do,” she says. Their multicultural, transnational upbringings set the stage for what they are setting out to achieve at Obscura. “Because of our unique background, we have the ability to swim between Western and Asian culture,” explains Tam. “We wanted to continue to put forth those ideas for everyone – to be the pioneer for this.”
Adventures in the kitchen Born in Hong Kong, Tam grew up in a rich food culture, stopping by her father’s cha chaan teng (diner) and local breakfast spots before school, surrounded by Cantonese cuisine. At age 9, her family moved to Canada where she describes sampling poutine, steak and fries. “But when we went home, if we ate what my mom was cooking, it was always Chinese.” Despite having a father in the
restaurant world, it wasn’t until university that Tam felt a calling to the culinary arts. Living in the school residences for an engineering degree in Toronto, she started cooking for herself – and enjoying it. These little adventures
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