Austin Hu, 30, never intended to become a chef. After hopping from continent to continent as an expat brat and double-majoring at university, Hu was set to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an international businessman – until he started his first internship. “I felt like an inconsequential tiny part in a big machine,” says Hu. “I decided I didn’t want to go down the corporate path.”

Some serious soul-searching made Hu realise he had the most fun when he was in the kitchen. From cooking for his friends at boarding school in Japan to baking baguettes in his dorm’s ill-equipped kitchen, Hu felt at home wearing chef’s whites, so he enrolled at the French Culinary Institute and hasn’t looked back since.

After almost a decade of slaving away in some of New York’s best kitchens – including a stint as junior sous chef at Gramercy Tavern – Hu has returned to Shanghai, the city where he spent his formative middle school years, and opened a restaurant of his own. Located in Vargas Grill’s former space, Madison has spent the past two months churning out locavore food on a level that Shanghai has never seen.

Chef Hu laughs off the idea of being the poster boy of Shanghai’s local food movement, but his reputation for sourcing domestic ingredients is the talk of the town. From drinks to desserts, Chinese products are on the menu – and the surprising part is: they’re good. The Wagyu beef from Dalian (which comes dressed in a Zhejiang huangjiu reduction sauce) is a hit with customers and Madison is the only casual fine-dining restaurant serving up pints of Sinkiang Beer, a regional favourite.

Finding quality local products isn’t always an easy task, but the chef’s passion for the local food movement keeps him motivated. “Eating local produces better quality food. If you get a peach from California, they have to pick it six days before it’s ripe, ship it, then spray it to give it back its colour,” says Hu. “Sure it will look good, but it won’t taste the same. It’s supposed to be bruised – it’s a peach!”

Chef Hu’s interest in the local movement isn’t just about making his food taste better; it’s about maintaining the dwindling network of artisanal suppliers in today’s increasingly mechanised world. “By purchasing their food, I want to tell these suppliers and farmers that we value their work and they won’t be replaced by machines,” says Hu.

Hu’s gone far out of his way to locate the domestic suppliers who care about their product and stand behind what they do, sourcing ingredients like tomolives from Yunnan and naturally sparkling water from a spring in Heilongjiang to get his menu just right. But he also knows that local, seasonal produce is unreliable, so he takes advantage of what’s around when he can get it and tries to remain flexible.

“If you’re locked into a menu, then you have to be satisfied with sometimes having inferior products. That’s not acceptable to me,” Hu says. “If I have a supplier with six kilos of good snapper, I’ll take it, put it on the menu for one day and take it off the next.”

Chef Hu concedes that there are some imported essentials that he cannot live without. His butter, olive oil and chocolates are all from Europe, and so are some of his cheeses, but he spends his free time scouring China for suitable replacements. His gouda already comes from a Dutch cheesemaker in Shanxi province, mozzarella from Shanghai’s very own Solo Latte and his ricotta is supplied by Alpie, an Italian-Chinese joint venture.

Maybe one day Chef Hu will be able to cook from a 100 per cent local menu in China, but for now, he’s blazing the trail for the city’s local food movement by putting the proof on the city’s plate. 

Madison. 3F, 18 Dongping Lu, near Hengshen Lu. Tel: 6437 0136