Bathing in rich British food at London’s top restaurants, new-to-the-city Alyn Williams wants to fly the British flag in Hong Kong
Alyn Williams, the new executive chef at Magistracy Dining Room, Tai Kwun’s palatial British restaurant, sees his arrival in Hong Kong as a mission to introduce veritable British flavours to the city, where previously the dining space has lacked true representation of the cuisine.
Packing a CV that has seen Alyn secure Michelin stars and national approval over three decades in the UK, his starry role cooking at a restaurant that once stood as Hong Kong’s Central Magistracy began in the gardens of London’s eastern neighbourhoods.
As opposed to Hong Kong, London’s farming community survives on passion, not financial gain, formerly counting Alyn’s father as a zealous member, serving his family greens and fruits with real heart.
“In East London, my mates were eating beans or cheese on toast for dinner, whereas my dad was cooking Italian casseroles with a chiffonade of fines herbes. He created a lot of great British dishes and he was a great cook,” Alyn tells Foodie at a table in the stately main dining room of the restaurant.
“Growing up in the neighbourhood of Barking [London], we were fortunate in the 1970s and 80s to be eating purple kohlrabi, Romanesco, fennel, broad beans, and turnips. We had a 120-foot-long by 40-foot-wide garden, with fertile land to plant pears, apples, and plums.”
A true rarity in cosmopolitan London, his father’s compulsion towards eating off their land translated to Alyn’s love of British fare and fresh produce. “If you’ve ever eaten a beetroot that’s just been pulled out of the ground, compared to one that’s been sitting on the supermarket shelf for two weeks, you’ll understand that the soul is ripped out of the one on the supermarket shelf.”
Alyn’s career in the kitchen began fortuitously at a London gentlemen’s club called Naughty Lunches, where his first hospitality foray saw him washing dishes, before assisting with vegetable prep.
Hospitality school came next, where the budding chef found himself undergoing a placement at five-star Claridge’s hotel in London. “Cooking at the hotel showed me the abundance of fine-dining and the prestige ingredients you can find.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Alyn worked with chefs Stuart Gillies, Marcus Wareing, and Gordon Ramsay, cherishing the discipline and organisation marking the standard of the UK’s top restaurants. Under the tutelage of chef Gordon, Alyn honed a passion for refined British cuisine.
“You have to really put your mind to [committing to Michelin-star standard],” Alyn comments about his past struggles and success under the three chefs. “You need to have a certain amount of talent. As the old saying goes, success is 10 percent talent and 90 percent hard work. The rest of it is hard graft – commitment, dedication, and sacrifice.”
Sacrifice is a theme prevalent throughout the early stages of Alyn’s career. “We were working 100 hours a week, arriving in the kitchen at 6:30AM and returning home at 2:30AM. The first two and a half years working for Gordon Ramsay, I worked with a maximum of three hours of sleep a night.”
As many chefs yearn, Alyn masterminded his own restaurant to manage and oversee, opening Alyn Williams at The Westbury. He served modern European cuisine with strong British influences.
Food, chiefly the recipes served by his father and found in East London, excites Alyn. “It never fails to excite me. Us chefs are food geeks at heart. We have this never-ending fascination with food and fascination with the styles, cultures, and flavours.”
About 9,500 kilometres away from East London and West Ham United FC, Alyn’s boyhood football club, the chef dials up his mission to proselytise British food at his new restaurant, Magistracy Dining Room. Inside the former Central Magistracy of Hong Kong, a vestige of Britain, his passion is shining.
Alyn is uniquely patriotic about British fare, sans the beige stereotypes of food coming out of England, Scotland, and Wales. “I love cooking all kinds of food, but I love the history behind British food. We grew up eating a lot of British classics. Fish and chips every Friday, shepherd’s pie, boiled ham and parsley sauce.”
Joining Black Sheep’s British emporium, Alyn is absorbed with the challenge “to explore more regional British cooking and elevate it to this dining room.”
The Magistracy dining complex, encompassing Magistracy Dining Room, Botanical Terrace, Prince and the Peacock, and Jack’s Racquet Room, opened in September 2022, but it now embraces a heavy infusion of British culinary culture from Alyn. Regional dishes across the UK now shine on the menu, including Dungeness crab, presented ornately in a metal crab-shaped container with curried mayo and served on crumpets, an age-old favoured British carbohydrate.
Roast beef is also shared on the menu, so too with a poached and roasted three-yellow chicken, a linking of Hong Kong’s garden towns in New Territories with Alyn’s youth spent in his father’s greenhouse.
The seafood section of the menu aptly mirrors the oyster-loving British diet, with additions of smoked salmon, Scottish razor clams, and Pacific blue prawn cocktail.
The changing narrative of British food in Hong Kong is what consumes Alyn’s mission at Magistracy Dining Room. “We simply want to make [British food] better than anybody else does here. Apart from the odd fish-and-chip shop that I’ve seen, it’s bizarre that Hong Kong doesn’t have great British food.
“The preconception of British food is that it’s always grey, dull, overcooked, and tasteless. We were a fighting nation, weren’t we? We went to war. We weren’t like the French, who sat around making soufflés,” Alyn says with a laugh.
“Historically, our food was more of sustenance, but we do have amazing regional dishes and grow great vegetables. British food is not a cuisine that’s common anywhere other than Britain. I want to change that here in Hong Kong.”
And found in the starters section of the new menu, Alyn serves the Chef’s Dad’s allotment spring vegetables salad, respecting the beginning of his food story traced to the gardens of East London.
Venture down to Magistracy Dining Room at Tai Kwun to savour what British food truly represents.
