On-Trade Interview – Hong Kong Foodie

06 February 2006 By db staff writer

“standfirst”>Matching wines with Chinese food is not for the faint hearted, but for Christine Parkinson at Hakkasan it’s her “dream job”. Robyn Lewis met up with her on a rainy night near Soho

LONDON. Christmas just over and unmistakably January’s weather. As Dickensian an alley as one could fancy around the back of Tottenham Court Road, tucked away behind the matrix of electrical stores advertising 50% off sales and the incongruous orange of Easy Internet. Snaking left, then right, the alleyway is a dead-end, there is just a designer-clad doorwoman, who is reading a newspaper and emitting tiny plumes of warm breath, to signify I might be in the right place. I am.

Hakkasan, Chinese restaurant for the capital’s über-cool crowd, has a formidable reputation for both its design and food and its grubby backstreet location only adds to the cultivated aura of destination. “You have arrived,” confirm the sleek slate steps, red glowing lights and gargantuan glass doors as you descend. Sadly though, I am not here to dine with Madonna, Kate Moss, Jude Law and whoever else preoccupies the diarists and gossip columnists of the Evening Standard this month. I am here to meet Hakkasan’s group wine buyer, Christine Parkinson who, fortunately, not only turns out to be probably a whole lot nicer than anyone on the above list but makes for just as fascinating company.

Starting out as a chef before dabbling in hotel management, Parkinson realised early into training that it was the food and drink side of things that she was interested in rather than bed linen and customer complaints. She calls her position in Alan Yau’s restaurant group – for which she is concerned with two of the most famous, Hakkasan and Yauatcha – her “dream job” and has managed to create a fêted wine list out of a difficult food-matching proposition. As she says, “Matching Chinese food with wine is challenging. Not only has the cuisine developed without wine in mind, there is the added complication of the style of eating. There are any number of smaller dishes involved in any one course, so specific dish and wine matching is not really very relevant.”

Instead, Parkinson says, she con- centrates on flavours and groups of flavours and does an awful lot of tasting with food, “especially the red wine. I insist every red wine is tasted with the food and I am more and more coming back to the idea of tasting every single white wine with the dishes as well. There’s a lot of sweetness in much of the food, which can cause difficulties,” she continues. “The upside of what I do is that there’s no received wisdom about what goes with what, so we can try anything. Generally, I would say red wines have to have soft, ripe tannins to work and the aromatic whites are in the right direction, though I find that Gewürztraminers (which have been readily accepted as good matches for Chinese food) have to be chosen carefully as they can overpower. I’d say Riesling, particularly German, is a better bet.”

Despite the difficulties though, the wine list at Hakkasan (and its sister restaurant Yauatcha) are carefully designed to fit the restaurant because, as Parkinson explains, “Customers come to a restaurant and probably spend a quarter or a third of the bill on the wine, so shouldn’t the wine list be as directly expressing the philosophy of the restaurant as the food, as everything else does? That does take a lot of thought but it is quite a creative process and very rewarding. So, when I’m buying wines there is a masterplan if you like, there has to be a reason to buy them as well as the fact they’re great. Alan [Yau] talks about modern authenticity and that has to be part of the wine list too. When we started the list here, you know, we thought we were so avant garde. We brought in wines from all around the world, it wasn’t a very traditional, French-inspired list, it was very eclectic and we felt quite brave. Now, of course, that is completely standard and lots of places do it, so you can’t start with one set of values and sit there and not let them evolve.” Part of that evolution for Parkinson, is looking at how the wine list, “communicates itself” as she puts it.

“And that’s a subtle issue as obviously the sommeliers do a lot of the communication and they have a vital role. There’s no point in the wine list overlapping with what the sommelier does but nonetheless our list has got about 300 wines on it and I don’t want customers just to look at it and think ‘Well I’ll ask the sommelier because I don’t know where to begin’. I’d really like them to look at it and spend maybe just one or two minutes and start thinking about the potential for an adventure. Obviously we don’t want to force that – if someone comes in and wants to drink Penfold’s Grange that’s fine but if there’s potential to get them excited and trying new things, then I want both the wine list and the sommelier to make the most of that.” The format for the new wine list is yet to be decided; it is currently done traditionally by country but Parkinson is looking for a more unusual approach.

Thematic approach
“I want to look at it thematically,” she says. “I’d like to use a theme that opens the door a crack and gets people interested.  I’m not going to list purely by grape variety or by style,” she pauses and thinks. “For example, we did some small experiments with the Champagne list. We realised that people were quite fixated on brands and then when you thought about it how couldn’t they be? If you didn’t know anything about Champagne how would you know that non-famous Champagnes are worth drinking? So we very simply listed not by style in terms of flavour, but we listed sections for Blanc de Noirs, Blanc de Blancs, late disgorged, grower Champagnes and so on and it definitely shifted our pattern of Champagne consumption away from just the brands. It made it broader and I thought that was terrific. So with the main wine list I’m thinking about themes to do with terroir or maybe producer or native grapes, we’ll see how it comes out.”

Parkinson has a team of five sommeliers at Hakkasan (there are none at Yauatcha) and she is in charge of the training of staff at both restaurants, devising her own training scheme rather than relying on existing courses out there. “The intensive 12-week course we developed ourselves because I felt that what was already out there was very product-oriented learning, rather than it being service and customer-focused, which we needed. We involved existing institutions, so WSET come and teach a session on how to taste, we take them down to Plumpton College so they can see a vineyard and a winery and learn how wine gets to be what it is in a way that means something, and we have people come in to do tastings as well. It is very much to our own recipe, for us it has to be customer-oriented. You know it’s often the case that someone has read and learned about wines but isn’t really that sure how to pronounce them and aren’t confident to talk about them, let alone describe them, we can’t have that. From the outset our course was about talking, describing and explaining. Also we concentrated on service skills and did things like taking them out as customers to Fino and Lindsey House so they learn what standard is expected of them. Because how many restaurant staff know what it is like to eat in a Michelin-starred restaurant? How many of them know what that expectation is like – how much people look forward to it and how much they therefore expect from it? Very few, but ours do now.”

So does Parkinson prefer to employ staff with no previous knowledge and train them herself, or for staff to arrive with some existing wine education? “What we’ve found with the sommeliers in particular, is that it is best to appoint internally because very few Michelin-starred restaurants have such a high volume of turnover and such a big team. Many sommeliers are used to working alone and in smaller, less frantic, environments. Anyone who knows our restaurants would accept that they are very unique, different experiences and that is key to our success. It is vital all our staff understand and can deliver that.”

And so they do – if the critics and constant stream of customers are to be believed though not for me on this day as I have to head back to an afternoon in the office.  It is but a quick transition up those grey slate steps from the world of the über-cool to the mire of somewhere behind Tottenham Court Road.  db February 2006