Evoking sweet memories

Walking into the restaurant, the dim light from above your head and the black rocklike walls surrounding you make you feel like you are eating in a canyon. Many dishes need to be eaten with your bare hands, and you can hear birds singing and waves crashing on a beach as you nibble.

The food is designed to highlight the original flavors of the ingredients, which are mostly delivered fresh from a nearby farm on a daily basis.

All of the food, drinks, decoration and sound effects are the creations of 30-year-old Lin Minyi, the executive chef of Voisin Organique in Shenzhen, who seeks to create a memorable－and natural－dining experience for her customers.

Tapping into her experience as a florist and jazz singer, Lin's dishes combine her understanding of art in practically every sense.

Jazz singer to chef

During Lin's childhood, she remembers her father was always busy running his restaurants and her mother was always in the kitchen.

"She would finish preparing all the ingredients before 3 pm, take a rest, and start to cook at 5 pm," Lin recalls.

She remembers when she was not as tall as the cooking bench, she wanted to imitate her mother cooking. Even though she was not allowed to get near to the flames, she stood on a stool, broke her toys into small parts and put them into the pot and stirred them around, pretending she was frying a dish.

While on summer vacation during third grade, Lin got her first chance to "cook". She was burning some paper in an empty flowerpot and suddenly realized she could use the fire to try her hand at cooking.

Her mom had finished preparing the ingredients for that night's dining and was resting, so Lin sneaked into the kitchen with some chicken and seasoning.

"I put the chicken in the pot and added some salt and soybean sauce like my mother did, and it was tasty!" Lin says. "Then I felt like I needed to make some staple food, so I continued to boil a pot of porridge."

Since the age of 14, Lin has cooked a large dinner for her whole family every week.

She never stopped cooking, even when, in 2007, she began studying vocal music performance at Guangdong ATV Vocational College for the Performing Arts in Dongguan.

As well as practicing singing and dancing, each weekend she would travel back to Shenzhen and return with a week's worth of fresh ingredients.

"One small electric cooker can make a lot of things, such as cake and steamed buns," says Lin.

Cooking was always a hobby for her, as she performed jazz in bars and planned to carve out a career in music copyright management.

In 2012, she moved to London with her brother and sister to study English. As well as enjoying the fare in some of Europe's best Michelin-starred restaurants, her favorite hobby became wandering around local markets.

"I saw many ingredients that you wouldn't find at home, and the local farmers were so confident about their produce that they advised you how to get best the flavor," Lin recalls.

"I've never had a professional teacher in cooking, but I learned a lot in those markets," she says. "They showed me how getting to know the ingredients is like getting to know a person－and finding the best way to present them."

Lin always travels alone, and she enjoys eating alone while writing down her personal reviews.

In 2014, her family's business went bankrupt and she had to move back to China to find a job. "I had 120,000 yuan ($17,000) left and I decided to spend it all on sampling food in Europe," Lin says.

Her first chef job was at the Ritz-Carton Shenzhen, starting as an apprentice and learning from the executive chefs about how to run a kitchen. Then, one day on a search for ingredients, she met Chen Min'er.

Chen, who owns Voisin Organique, was running a farm near Shenzhen. She opened the restaurant in 2018, with a view to bring the ingredients from her farm directly to the table－while offering a dining environment without boundaries or distance between the food and the people.

Chen invited Lin to come and work with her at Voisin Organique.

Lin's approach to creating the dishes for Voisin Organique combines traditional Chinese cooking methods with the sense of ceremony that comes with fine dining.

"More than 50 percent of the success or failure of cooking a dish depends on the original flavor of the ingredients. I respect the characteristics of each ingredient and try to unearth their potential flavors," says Lin.

As well creating raw or simply cooked fare, Lin has also been experimenting with different techniques to work with the ingredients, such as drying, marinating, fermenting and smoking.

Most of the plates and bowls at the restaurant are handmade by artist Xie Fan and, as previously mentioned, many of Lin's dishes are eaten by hand, as she wants diners to feel the beauty and simplicity of the natural ingredients.

"I want diners to feel like they are in the forest and to enjoy the freshness and vitality of the food," she says.

She created her first menu named Memory Fragments last year, which she hopes will spark shared memories of food.

Sum of its parts

Lin updated the menu after the restaurant moved to a new location in November.

Decorated by Yang Dongzi, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, the design of the space is based around the concept of walking through a valley, which is enhanced by the effect of the simulated natural light.

Lin occasionally updates the menu to reflect the season, most recently to feature autumnal memories and flavors.

The foie gras wafer is her signature dish, which juxtaposes two of her favorite ingredients, creating a wonderful combination.

The foie gras is marinated in red wine and is stuffed into the wafer after dried black currents are added－the crunchiness of the wafer pairs perfectly with the creaminess of the foie gras.

Lin has also created a vegan version of the foie gras which is a mix of peanut butter, sesame sauce, white wine, coconut oil, cashew nut and matsutake powder.

After the foie gras wafer, Lin selects several fresh vegetables and asks diners to eat them raw. "I name the dish 'the sound of your chewing is melodious', because if you listen carefully you will enjoy the crunchiness of the vegetables," she says.

Lin likes to explore the possibilities of each of her ingredients to the full. Her tomato sonata, for example, combines dried tomato, tomato jelly, fermented tomato soup and fresh tomato.

There is one chapter of the menu titled Sea Wave, which literally transports her diners to the beach to enjoy the sound of the waves.

The first dish in the chapter is oyster and hairy crab. Lin marinates fresh oysters from France for 48 hours and then slices them open and stuffs them with frozen crab roe and crab meat with homemade pepper vinegar. She also uses the juice from the oysters to make a seawater smoothie. One bite of the dish immediately sparks memories of the sea.

The second dish is crab porridge, which features crab meat boiled for hours in a chicken soup base with clam juice and rice milk.

The menu features another signature dish by Lin: sea cucumber with egg white. The dish is a combination of the traditional Cantonese dish of steamed egg white, crab and stewed sea cucumber, and a mix of French-style seafood.

Lin chooses shrimp from Ecuador, sea cucumber from Iceland, and organic eggs, pork and vegetables from the farm.

The sea cucumber is stuffed with shrimp mousse, which is cooked with the egg white in the Cantonese way, and Lin uses seafood chowder as the sauce to make the dish more flavorful.

When the dish is served, waiters spray yellow rice spirit on top to smooth out the flavor with the aroma of the liquor. The next chapter is titled Flame, where Lin cooks beef and chicken over an open fire.

There were also two desserts for the autumn season: a bowl of chestnuts with Osmanthus, and Cantonese sponge cake with salted caramel and matsutake ice cream.

"Chestnut is my memory of autumn in Beijing and the Cantonese sponge cake is a childhood memory of mine from Guangdong province," Lin explains. "These fragments of memories are not only mine, and I hope every diner can rediscover their memories during their meal."