Chowa’s Hong Kong chef saw Guangzhou as a challenge. He reveals how he won the city over
Chef Louis Tam’s Chowa earned a Michelin star in Guangzhou, defying the city’s fine dining norms with his rebellious Japanese-French cuisine
When Hong Kong-born chef Louis Tam Wah-hin of Chowa won the Young Chef Award and his restaurant’s first Michelin star at the 2025 Michelin Guide ceremony in Guangzhou, it was a pointed triumph.
The win, when Tam was 31, paid off a two-year gamble – one that started in July 2023 when he opened his Japanese-French restaurant Chowa in Guangzhou’s Tianhe district.
It was a deliberate provocation in a city often dismissed as a “fine dining desert”, where pride in a home-grown culinary tradition routinely eclipses high-end, foreign flavours.
“I was a bit of a ‘problem child’ growing up,” Tam says, tracing the root of that defiance. That rebellious streak had him repeat grades three times at school, and his first kitchen job was manning the fry station at a KFC fast-food restaurant when he was 15.
After ricocheting through jobs in sales and construction, he enrolled at the Hong Kong Culinary Academy, but only because a friend pulled him along for the ride.
