Feast of Mushrooms

With pictures of mushroom dishes flooding my social media feed, I don’t need further reminder that late summer/early fall marked the prime season for Chinese mushrooms. And I had the first taste of them this year at a recent dinner at Ming Court of The Cordis, with a series of vegetarian dishes by chef Yuet-faat Li using many kinds of seasonal fungus imported from Yunnan Province, as well as plant-based “meat” Omnipork introduced by the Green Monday team in Hong Kong.

Plant-based Tasting Menu

I was at Man Ho at JW Marriott in Pacific Place last week when their chef Jayson Tang was tasked with creating a tasting menu using Omnipork, the new plant-based “meat” developed and marketed by the Hong Kong-based Green Monday team. Most other plant-based products launched recently (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods etc) have been focusing their marketing effort in western cuisine – burger in particular – but it’s good to know there are ones like Omnipork targeting Asian palate and cooking. That's actually a sensible business move given the large Chinese market (twice as big as United States for food consumption), and pork has traditionally been the preferred meat choice in most Chinese cuisine and still formed the majority of all meat consumed in China by a comfortable distance (in fact, 3 times more than poultry which is the second most, as I found out from research reports)