“Do you know what Mono means?” asks Ricardo Chaneton. We are sitting in a private room in his restaurant, ensconced away from the tail end of the lunch service outside.
“Being unique, being yourself, making sense: [these are things that] will make you successful straightaway, because people hunger for unique things.
Mono, he says, is “a very singular restaurant—there’s nothing like it”.
This single-mindedness is a common theme throughout the career of the Venezuelan chef, whose journey has followed a precise arc to celebrity chefdom, made all the more remarkable by the cuisine—Latin American—and the place in which—Hong Kong—he has chosen to create.
Now, Mono, which received a Michelin star in 2022, has been crowned Restaurant of the Year in the 2023 Tatler Dining Awards, which were announced last month. It’s a remarkable achievement for the 34-year-old chef, who is also the world’s first Venezuelan-born chef-owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Chaneton’s culinary education began around the white-tableclothed meals of his childhood. Raised in a family of Italian immigrants—his grandfather fled to Venezuela in the wake of the Second World War—the young Chaneton was party to languorous lunches with relatives that could last an entire day. “I come from a family that was on the other side of the restaurant, as a customer. As early as I
