Ahead of his appearance at Blenheim Literary Festival, Katherine MacAlister catches up with globetrotting celebrity chef Ken Hom

I’m a very lucky man,” Ken Hom tells me more than once and I can’t say I disagree with him.

After all, he’s talking to me poolside at the Copacabana Palace Hotel in Rio de Janeiro where he’s having breakfast, a luxury destination most of us can only dream of.

But he’s made his own luck, learning to cook from the age of 11 in his uncle’s Chinese restaurant in Chicago after school and then hosting cooking lessons to help pay his university fees while he studied history of art at Berkley University.

In fact it was Madhur Jaffrey who recommended him to the BBC when they were looking for a Chinese chef, having seen him giving lessons in California, heralding the start of his UK TV career over here with his first series Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery, airing in 1984 when his fame and fortune exploded. “It was about being in the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunities presented,” he says.

And yet, initially, cooking was the last thing young Ken wanted to do after working in his uncle’s restaurant. “Why would I want to be a chef? Anything but that,” he chuckles. “And yet ironically I love what I do. This word celebrity chef came a lot later but basically I’m a teacher and I would say Delia Smith and Madhur Jaffrey are as well.

“But we also need to entertain because you need to get people excited so can never be boring.

“And everybody has a different style – mine is just who I am.”

It means Ken has survived in the dog-eat-dog world of TV chefs for decades, so what’s his secret? “When I started out in the 80s it was a very different time so you have to evolve.

“I keep my mind open and keep up to date by travelling and eating different food and meeting new chefs, but cooking is what I know how to do and I think the answer to a lasting career is to stay true to yourself.

“So although I know a thing or two about Italian and French food, I stay in the sphere of Asian cooking professionally because that’s what I’m known for.”

But Ken Hom is so much more than the man you see on TV. He has homes in France, Thailand and Brazil, is hugely cultured, and loves travel, architecture and art. So why not America? “I’m more at home in the rest of the world,” he says diplomatically. “l think because I didn’t speak English until I was six I feel more British than American, and Great Britain has been so wonderful to me.”

Apart from cooking and travelling, Ken, now semi-retired, devotes a lot of time to his two favourite charities, and is an ambassador for Action Against Hunger to whom he is leaving his world goods, and Prostate Cancer UK.

“Action Against Hunger is the right charity for me, a chef. I’ve made my money in food and it’s very important to give something back, to put my money where my mouth is – it’s the Chinese side of me coming out.”

He also has a very special relationship with Oxford, as a founding patron of Oxford Gastronomica: Oxford Brookes being where the Ken Hom Library, and its Oxford Gastronomica who will be interviewing him at the Blenheim Literary Festival next week alongside one half of BBC2’s Incredible Spice Men, Cyrus Todiwala.

“I’ll be talking about the food of my childhood and how I feel about it because food memory is so important, it informs your whole being. So when I’m at home in France I cook for masses of people. It’s like a restaurant for my friends, but I also get to sit down and enjoy it with them, to be part of the party.

“I love to cook. I know it’s my profession but I do actually enjoy it. As I said, I’m a lucky guy.”

Blenheim Palace Literary Festival runs from September 25-28.

  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.