Turban Development: A Morning With Chef Chakall

Most people who only have one name are recording artists, or at least pretending to be. Bono. Madonna. Sting. With that in mind, perhaps I could be forgiven for thinking I was meeting Chaka Khan (yes, that's two names, I know) this morning (Sep 21). In reality, I had the pleasure of meeting superstar celebrity chef Chakall (aka Eduardo Andrés Lopez), who has just filmed a new television show for CCTV called Walking Chopsticks here in China. Chef Chakall was stopping by the St. Regis Beijing to make preparations for his stint as a guest chef at the hotel in October, during which he'll be cooking at a series of events at the hotel's top-end restaurants, including Astor Grill and Garden Court. Sporting his trademark turban and some seriously blue peepers (he's married, ladies), he was good enough to answer some questions for us ...

On why he only has one name:
"Dogs have only one name, gods only have one name, and they live very good lives - why can't I live a good life? So only one name."

On turbans:
"I have around 500 turbans ... I keep them in a bag. I don't wash them. You don't wash the turban."

On DJs:
"I'm a mixer. In my last cooking show, I am cooking here and making music there, mixing."

On brand endorsements:
"I'm the only chef Pepe Jeans and Puma have ever sponsored. We are very much the same."

On other chefs:
"There is no one chef [that I admire] ... But on TV, I like Anthony Bourdain. He is very real."

On Chinese food scandals:
"Sourcing is hard everywhere. If you see how they make the sausage in Germany, you'll never eat sausage again. I was working with a producer of pork products. I asked 'What do you do with the bones?' They said, 'We send it away to make sausage.'"

On making Western food more accessible for the Chinese:
"[Chefs here] should make everything to be eaten with chopsticks. If you make a steak, you should cut it."

On his Gallic cousins:
"The French ... they only like French food. They are chauvinists. I am not a chauvinist."

On being ten years younger:
"When I was 29 ... I bought a Land Rover, drove over Africa for two years, 70,000 kilometers. I was almost killed a few times. But I survived."

After all that excitement, we asked him to show our readers how he fashions his own turban from a simple scarf:

Chef Chakall will be cooking at the St. Regis Beijing in October. Stay tuned to TheBeijinger.com for news on dates, events and prices.

Photos: Chakall.com and Susan Sheng