Dubai-it: From his grandmother’s kitchen in Chengdu to Hutong Dubai, Chef Ren Dingxu finds a place to call home

Dubai: When Chef Ren Dingxu was eight years old, his grandmother had a problem. There were 30 people in the family, a celebration to prepare for, and far too much cooking for one person. Chinese New Year was particularly demanding. In Chengdu, the capital of China's Sichuan province, the family would gather for the festivities, and Ren's paternal grandmother was responsible for feeding everyone. There were dumplings to make, vegetables to prepare and an assortment of traditional dishes that required hours in the kitchen. Her grandson was expected to help. “My grandmother was always cooking the food, cooking the jiaozi (dumplings) and the traditional Chengdu dishes,” Dingxu tells Emirates 24/7. “My grandmother was training me, she was cooking food for everyone.” However, at eight, he was just a boy helping his grandmother, because he could see her exhaustion. “No, eight years, no understanding,” he says when asked whether he had already discovered a passion for cooking. “She wanted my help. So, yes, okay, I help.” More than three decades later, at 41, he runs the kitchen at Hutong Dubai, the Chinese restaurant in DIFC recognised in the Michelin Guide Dubai selection. By his early teens, he was cooking for his family himself. At 16, he enrolled in culinary school. He had learned to cook, he liked doing it, and there weren't many other options that appealed to him. “So no other choice,” he adds. He spent two years at culinary school and went on to train at the Shangri-La hotel in Chengdu. A Sichuan chef discovers the world Chef Dingxu’s early professional training was rooted in Sichuan cuisine, with its formidable reputation for chilli, peppercorns and bold flavours. Mention Sichuan food to most people, and they think of heat. “Oh, spicy hot pot,” he says. But the cuisine of his childhood is considerably more complicated. “Sichuan cuisine is chilli and Sichuan peppercorn,” he begins, before listing the other ingredients, “…there are pickled chillies, pickled vegetables, fermented bean preparations, ginger and garlic.” Sourness matters. So does aroma. The heat is only one part of the experience. “We put a lot more of it in the sauce,” he says of ginger and garlic. Professional life eventually took him well beyond Chengdu. Singapore was his first overseas posting, working with Sichuan cuisine. Malaysia followed, and then came India. He spent two years working at the Taj hotel in Udaipur, a city whose culinary preparations used heat as much as his native Sichuan. By 2018, he reached Hong Kong and joined Hutong. The restaurant was already known for a menu drawing on several Chinese regional traditions. Chef Dingxu explains that its culinary identity was built around the cooking of Beijing, Sichuan and Xinjiang. A year later, Hutong was preparing to open in Dubai. “My boss told me, in Dubai we open Hutong restaurant. You want to go?” He was keen. “I said yes. Go.” Why Dubai? It is a question he answers easily. He had heard about the city before he arrived. He had seen pictures and was intrigued by the number of nationalities living here. “I knew of Dubai, before,” he says. “Wow, I thought. It's a beautiful and international city. Open city.” For a chef who had already worked in Singapore, Malaysia, India and Hong Kong, the international character of Dubai was extremely appealing. He would be cooking for people from different backgrounds, many of whom might have little or no familiarity with his regional Chinese food. There was also another key factor - safety. Ren recalls an incident after arriving in Dubai when he left a bag in a taxi. “I took a taxi, lost my bag. They called me back,” he says. He compares it with places where losing something might mean never seeing it again. The incident stayed with him. There are other things that matter too, including the sense that everyday life is easy and that a family can settle without constantly struggling with language or administrative difficulties. He has lived in several countries, and he knows the difference it can make. But arriving in Dubai also presented a tough challenge. How do you cook for a city where the people sitting around one table may have grown up eating entirely different cuisines? His answer was to eat out to understand what people ate. Dubai-It in pursuit of culinary perfection When Hutong was preparing its Dubai menu, Chef Dingxu didn't simply assume that dishes popular in Hong Kong would work equally well in DIFC. He visited other restaurants. He paid attention to what people appeared to enjoy. “We go and taste at other restaurants,” he explains. “We check the menu. Which dishes Dubai people like?” Internationally, Hutong had established dishes whose recipes needed to remain consistent across the restaurant group. But there was room to develop dishes for Dubai. The research continued after opening. For the first six months, he studied the restaurant's ordering patterns. He was relentless. “Open for the first six months, I will check the system, w