We fell for Ken Hom long before we fell for Nigella, Jamie or Gordon. And even though he says he isn't a celebrity chef, the Chicago-born cook has been famous for his food - and his books and TV shows - for more than 20 years, writes Louise East
At home in his Paris apartment, Ken Hom is making lunch. Into the wok goes a scattering of finely sliced garlic, followed by chunks of rice shoot bamboo and a dash of rice wine. A pile of Chinese mustard greens is sluiced with water and thrown in, too. With his other hand, Hom stirs a translucent broth that started simmering 24 hours ago.
Despite his championship-level multitasking, Hom is a picture of calm, drinking a glass of red wine and describing St Patrick's Day in Chicago, his home town. "I guess I'm used to talking as I cook, from all the years of teaching cookery," he says with a smile.
"Teaching cookery" is Hom's humble description of more than two decades of making the West wok-happy. Long before television gave us Nigella or Jamie or Gordon, we fell in love with Ken stirring bean sprouts with a pair of chopsticks. Since his first outing, in 1984, there have been five television series, several books - the first, Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery, sold more than a million copies - as well as numerous sidelines in cookware and food consultancy.
"I am not a celebrity chef," Hom says firmly. "I've just been very lucky to do what I love. What I couldn't have imagined is that it would take me down the roads it has." Truth be told, Hom is an unlikely TV guru. Despite being born in Chicago, English is his second language, after Cantonese, which he spoke to everyone until he was six - and still speaks to his 83-year-old mother, who lives in Chicago's Chinatown.
Now a young-looking 57, Hom started to cook at the age of 11, when he got a job in his uncle's restaurant. He later moved to California, where he taught at the prestigious Culinary Academy. Just as his career took off there, he got a call from Madhur Jaffrey, fresh from her own stint cooking Indian food on television.
"She said her bosses at the BBC were looking for another face that wasn't white, and she had recommended me," Hom says, laughing. "Everything would have turned out so differently if it wasn't for that phone call."
When his first television series started, even basic Chinese ingredients, such as bean sprouts, had to be tagged with the words "or you could substitute . . ." All that has changed now that Asian food is so beloved in the West. Hom is often asked by Tony Blair to cook for visiting heads of state - Bertie Ahern ate cod wrapped in rice paper and Asian duck confit - and he has made a sizeable fortune advising airlines, hotels and restaurant chains how to cook Chinese food.
For Hom, the most welcome change of the past two decades has been the growing awareness of good ingredients. "I really believe you are what you eat, so why would you put bad food in your body?" he says, looking mystified. "A happy pig will make a delicious meal. It's as simple as that. In the 1980s you couldn't talk about food like that. People would dismiss you as a hippy."
Hom now spends the winter in one of his two houses in Thailand and the summer in his 11th-century villa in southwestern France or his apartment near the foot of Sacré-Coeur, in Paris. But wherever he is, he goes to market before he cooks, finding his inspiration from what's on offer. For our lunch he set out to find fresh crab and stumbled across bunches of rice shoot bamboo in Paris's Chinatown. He had never seen the ingredient outside China; it proves deliciously meaty, with a light grassy taste. Ironically, the most costly ingredient was the geriatric hen that he used as the base for the velvet-soft broth. "They're much more flavoursome but very difficult to find and rather expensive," he says with a smile.
Hom has long done battle with the idea that Chinese food is heavy and greasy, pointing out that its preferred methods of cooking - steaming and stir-frying - use little fat and leave vitamins intact. "I tend to cook the things I like to eat, and I just hate that feeling of heaviness. Mine is what is described as a Cantonese palate, in that I don't like things which are oily or greasy or heavy."
The exception to all this good living is Chinese New Year, which this year begins tomorrow. Hom describes it as "like Christmas, New Year and Easter all rolled into one. It's a festival where you do nothing but eat". This year he's advising Ed Cooney, of the Cellar Restaurant at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, on the menu for a 10-day Chinese-food extravaganza.
"The Chinese are superstitious, and there's all sorts of rituals to the food eaten at New Year. Fish for prosperity, chicken for fortune and always noodles at the end. There's one particular dish, of dried smoked oysters with seaweed, which is considered particularly propitious. It tastes delicious, but it does rather resemble some one's toupee."
The Merrion Hotel's Chinese-food celebration runs from February 8th to February 19th