Chef Talk: Avalon's Hilary Ambrose Jr.
Despite being the youngest in the group of exceptionally talented chefs who have made their way to Shanghai via New York City this past year, Hilary Ambrose Jr has mastered kitchen techniques that extend well beyond his 26 years.
A native of New York, Chef Ambrose was raised on the Caribbean island of Antigua where he studied at the feet of his grandmother, a baker, and started his culinary career as a teenager in the kitchen of the five-star Carlisle Bay Resort. But at 20, he was ready for the big time and headed back to the Big Apple where he found a job working the line at Jean Georges’ Spice Market.
After a year of getting a taste of haute Asian street food cuisine, Ambrose decided it was time to sample the goods firsthand, so he packed up his knives and headed to Hong Kong. But after almost two years, Ambrose was tired of the cooking game and decided to head back to Antigua, until a detour to Ohio and a chance meeting with Thomas Keller introduced him to molecular gastronomy.
With Keller’s Cooking Under Pressure in hand, Ambrose started exploring a world of new culinary techniques. “I bought a bunch of additives and started cooking at home,” he says. “I fell in love with molecular gastronomy and sous vide – the idea of taking a powder and turning it into something or cooking something for three days. I’m just excited to see what’s gonna happen.” Inspired, Ambrose headed back to work, this time as the executive sous chef at David Bouley's notoriously tough kitchen, but when the opportunity to return to Asia came up, he leapt at it.
He landed at Avalon with more than an immersion circulator in his suitcase. Ambrose is also a proponent of Fergus Henderson’s “nose to tail” eating philosophy, and strives to make full use of the entire animal at the restaurant. These techniques might be all the rage in New York, Paris and Madrid, but residents of Shanghai are still getting used to the idea of chowing down on half a pig’s head that’s been sous vide, then grilled.
While some of Ambrose’s dishes might be too adventurous for Shanghai’s still-maturing culinary scene, he’s ready to challenge the city’s palate. “I’ll sous vide a tree. I just like the most extreme way to do a dish,” he laughs. “I won’t lie. Sometimes it’s awful, sometimes you amaze yourself.” His latest foray? Trying to make sous vide bread and dissecting the brains of a chicken, lamb and pig, then “morphing them together so they look like one brain.”
When he’s not playing mad scientist, he’s behind the grill, serving up dishes that match up with Avalon’s wood grille description – a pastime that takes him back to days of cooking on the beach in Antigua.
