Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong Introduces The Well Feeling Wedding Menu
There is no shortage of culinary talent at the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, seeing as it is home to the two Michelin-starred Sushi Saito as well as the French restaurant Caprice and Lung King Heen Chinese restaurant—both of which have earned three Michelin stars each.
So couples booking a wedding at the hotel can be certain that the food will wow their guests, as Chinese executive chef Chan Yan-tak presides over both Lung King Heen and the Chinese banquet menus. However, the team doesn’t rest on its laurels and last year the hotel launched its Well Feeling Menu—healthy yet delicious dishes available at the hotel’s various F&B outlets that were created in concert with a certified nutritionist.
From the sourcing to the cooking methods, the ethos behind the Well Feeling Menus has resulted in dishes with a healthy balance of vitamins, carbohydrates and protein; sustainable origins; and sparing use of diary and processed sugar. And now the culinary team is taking the expertise and applying it to the hotel’s wedding banquet menus.
Chef Chan, for example, now uses Kamei chicken—which comes from a local farm and contains no added hormones, antibiotics or chemicals—in his kitchens. He and his team have also flexed their creativity to create all-vegetarian banquet menus that are both flavourful and varied.
Creating the Well Feeling dishes has enabled the culinary team to sharpen their prowess in sourcing, having searched high and low for sustainable produce from honest, trustworthy suppliers.
“It is all about sourcing fresh, seasonal produce and using meat that came from sustainable sources and fish that was wild caught,” says executive sous chef Garry Chan, who works on the Western banquet menus. “For the Well Feeling dishes, we tend to use more olive oil, black garlic, as it contains more nutrients, and less processed ingredients to reduce the amount of monosaturated fats.”
Chef Garry Chan offers an example of a menu he and his team created for a wedding in March, where they used asparagus for the appetiser, as it was in season, and wild-caught sea bass for the main course.
When it comes to the desserts, executive pastry chef Ringo Chan takes care not to rely on dairy, and employs sweeteners such as raw honey, stevia powder and agave syrup where possible rather than processed sugar. “I also want to support the local organic farms as much as I can,” he says. He cites examples of healthy alternatives to some ingredients, such as coconut oil in place of butter, rice or soy milk in lieu of cream, and organic berries to add sweetness to his creations.
“The idea behind Well Feeling is all-encompassing,” says chef Ringo Chan. “It’s about ingredients that have optimal health benefits, and which are also produced or gathered using the most natural way possible.”
It seems that dishes with a high feel-good factor would find a welcome place on a happy day that celebrates love, and health-conscious couples will find an expert team at the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong ready to create a delectable menu of such dishes.