In most Cantonese barbecue joints, hunks of marinated pork dangle over charcoal in large ovens, turning sticky and auburn as they roast.
This is the char siu Jonathan Tam grew up eating in Edmonton. It is a world apart from what he serves at Jatak, his Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen.
Like the original, Tam’s char siu is lightly charred and glistening with fat, but it’s cooked in a combi oven and then on a grill. Each thick slice of meat, sourced from an organic pig farm in southern Denmark, is velvety, not chewy, yielding to the softest bite.
Jatak’s char siu took months to develop as Tam and his team experimented with cooking and fermenting local produce to reverse-engineer Chinese pantry ingredients.
It’s layered with the familiar sweetness, saltiness and fragrant Chinese five spice, but also a delightful extra note of funk, thanks to the Chinese pantry that Tam and his team reverse-engineered. They replaced the traditional red bean curd, soy and hoisin sauces with a range of kitchen experiments, including blackened apples, beets and barley. Their reimagining also featured chanterelle miso, pickled wild roses, a beet juice reduction and shoyu that is brewed using woodruff, a local herb.
Since Jatak (a name inspired by the Danish equivalent of “yes, chef”) opened in 2022, Tam has chafed at labels such as “modern Chinese” and resisted being lumped in with the “new Asian wave” that’s swept Copenhagen. His ever-changing menu – inspired by the 24-term Chinese solar calendar – indeed draws inspiration from Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese cuisines, but is shaped by so much more.
“Being from an immigrant family and being an immigrant here, why can’t we use the local things and tell our stories with our technique and precision and creativity?” asks Tam, whose Chinese parents were raised in Vietnam before immigrating to Canada.
Tam’s journey from the Canadian Prairies to Jatak began in 2006. He had just begun culinary school in Edmonton, where he watched a documentary about Spain’s El Bulli, which topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list at the time. Tam became obsessed, frequently borrowing the book El Bulli: 1998-2002 from the public library, and soon devised a plan: After culinary school, he’d go work there.
Tam soon learned how naive he was. Chefs from Michelin-starred joints around the world jockeyed to work at El Bulli. He hadn’t even worked in the best restaurant in Edmonton.
The next year, only slightly adjusting his ambitions, Tam cold-e-mailed half the restaurants on the World’s 50 Best list, asking if he could apprentice in their kitchens. He received only one response, but it was life-changing. René Redzepi, the chef at Copenhagen’s Noma – and a leader in the “New Nordic” movement that centred local and seasonal ingredients – invited Tam to intern in his kitchen.
Through the grunt work of juicing horseradish and picking wild sorrel, Tam came to see the potential of the most humble raw ingredients. “His teaching was we want to have cauliflower, celery and carrots held in the same regard as caviar and foie gras,” Tam said of Redzepi.
Tam worked his way up from preparing snacks to becoming a chef de partie. After nearly three years, he left Noma – which by 2010 had claimed the top spot on the World’s 50 Best list and earned two of an eventual three Michelin stars – and used his experience there to get his foot in the door at other esteemed eateries including Corton, Momofuku Ko and Wd~50 in New York.
Later that year, he returned to Copenhagen to work in the kitchen of Relae, a new spot opened by one of his Noma mentors, Christian Puglisi.
Puglisi is a chef, but also an organic farmer. Vegetables unearthed from the ground in the morning would be on the menu that evening. Tam stayed at Relae for its entire 10-year run, eventually becoming head chef. When he decided to open Jatak, that reverence for hyperlocal, seasonal ingredients guided him.
There’s no walk-in cold storage at Jatak; instead, there’s a relatively small fridge along one wall of the warm, minimalist dining room designed by Tam’s partner, architect Sarah Frilund. It’s filled with ingredients from organic, sustainable farms in Denmark: rhubarb, kohlrabi, beef heart, blood sausage.
This June at Jatak, the menu was inspired by the “Grain in Ear” solar term. Brill, a flatfish caught off the Danish coast, was one of the openers in a two-and-a-half-hour parade of courses, paired with white asparagus that completely upstaged the fish. The vegetable had been poached in its own stock along with sencha tea, pickled elderflower and Danish kombu – making it sweet, earthy and crisp, like a newly discovered fruit – and was clearly inspired by Tam’s time at Noma and Relae.
The dish that earned Jatak the most attention, though, was Tam’s take on the Hong Kong egg tart, inspired by the ones he grew up eating at Edmonton’s Garden Bakery. His sous-chef had never tried the tart and there was nowhere in Copenhagen to procure one, offering an opportunity for reinvention.
The custard was a fusion of Chinese and English styles, poured into a large, savoury, golden tart shell and topped with a black tea glaze. It was served by the slice rather than in the traditional hand-held portion.
In its first weeks open, Jatak – and the tart – received an enthusiastic review from Redzepi, who posted a slow-motion Instagram video of a slice jiggling on a plate like a burlesque dancer. He predicted the restaurant would “go ballistic.” The reservation books quickly filled up with locals, tourists and professional reviewers. Six months after opening, Jatak received a Michelin star.
Despite its influence on the menu, Tam had almost no experience cooking Chinese cuisine until a few years ago. In 2021, he was invited to build a menu of Asian dishes during a chef residency in upstate New York, at farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Doing research and development from Copenhagen was tough: The Chinese and Vietnamese pantry staples widely available in North America were tough to track down. So before heading to New York, Tam stopped in Edmonton to get a crash course from his dad.
“What was beautiful was for that week, my dad said, ‘Let’s cook some food together,’” Tam recalls. “You become a more seasoned chef and you realize the stuff you grew up with was very special.”
When Tam told his father he wanted to make lo mai gai, glutinous rice chicken that is wrapped in bamboo and steamed, the elder Tam exclaimed, “I’ve got bamboo leaves!” and hurried off to retrieve them. He also taught his son how to melt sugar in oil to make an instant caramel before using it to sear pork to achieve a sweet, golden crust.
At Jatak, the last morsel on the Grain in Ear menu is the dim sum staple, mai lai go, which is a fluffy steamed cake. Tam’s version is topped with caramel and garnished with small pan-fried shreds of locally grown carrot that look like marigold petals. Like Tam, it is Chinese, Canadian and Nordic. And like so much of what he cooks, it’s both familiar and surprising.
