Too many young chefs nowadays, with little or no grasp of cuisine, use fusion as an excuse to pass off haphazard ingredients with jumbled flavors. It’s a serious challenge to the "misunderstood" fusion cuisine as a license for blind and uninhibited plays on gastronomy. In cuisine, there are universal rules to follow, rules tested for centuries. It takes a master with a good handle on the use of ingredients to break them and get away with it.

Cheung with his Crab Claws in Tamarind Sauce

There are fusion chefs lauded for their daring. But in the case of Henry Cheung, he was lauded because he was a master. He grew up in the kitchen of a Hong Kong restaurant and had sampled cuisines all over the world. He was one of the first to introduce fusion cuisine to the country. His restaurant the Chinese fusion hotbed Good Earth Tearoom opened in 1994, but unforeseen circumstances forced him to close down. Now, the Good Earth has opened again, rapidly. The Good Earth now has several branches in the span of several months. This signaled the return of Chef Henry Cheung, and possibly of fusion cuisine.

Q: Fusion chefs are accused of not knowing enough. You need to master the cuisine first before you get to break its rules, do you consider yourself a master?

A: Master, I think so, you have to know real Chinese. You have to get the old traditions before the new one. Many people cooking today they don’t even know the old, they don’t know the traditional, and they have a different taste. I recently went to Shanghai and much of the restaurants there have food close to mine. The younger modern Chinese they like something new. And I think the old is going to fade out.

Q: On its own feet, Chinese cuisine is already satisfactory. So why do you need to fuse something that could stand on its own?

A: Because its already a different century. We are the new and we are the young. We need something different. In China, we had the Cultural Revolution; this time it’s the food revolution. Chinese cuisine has been around for five thousand years. For the next century Chinese food will become more western, but the ingredients the herbs are the same. I myself I still buy my ingredients from Chinatown and in Hong Kong.

Q: So, if the old cuisine fades out, what happens to it?

A: The old will remain, it’s just that the new style will be more popular than the old style.

Q: If you opened a Good Earth in China how would the people there accept it?

A: Depends on the province, in Shanghai I think it will be okay.

Q: I’m from Xiamen…

A: No, not there even the Jollibee there is not doing well, I have a friend who manages a Jollibee in Xiamen.

Q: You were born in Hong Kong, but you migrated to the Philippines. Why?

A: Would you believe it was because of a girl? I met her while I was studying in the United States in New York, then I followed her here.

Q: And did you…

A: Yes, I married her.

Q: The Chinese are normally traditional and conservative, but you’re married to a Filipina and you like to break the rules, why are you different?

A: Maybe, because I traveled too much in my younger days. I’ve seen a lot, traveled a lot. I lived in London, Europe, and Italy.