Chef Bradley Hull in his Shanghai restaurant kitchen. PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

A Canadian chef in Shanghai eagerly embraces the Eastern flavors he learned to love in Vancouver, but 'fusion' is not his game, he tells Mike Peters.

You can admire his ginger salmon or his Chinese cumin chicken. But don't say the word "fusion" around chef Bradley Hull.

"What I do is very much Western cuisine — it is not fusion," says the Canadian-born chef at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai. "But I enjoy the Asian flavors a lot, and use the techniques I know to take advantage of them."

The techniques of his training are based on French cooking, so he will make a beurre blanc (white butter) sauce with the traditional reduction of vinegar and white wine into which cold, whole butter is blended off the heat to prevent separation. But Hull will add soy sauce to the base as well as the traditional garlic and shallots. His braised pork belly is likewise "not Asian food done in a Western way" but a Western dish augmented with Sichuan peppercorn, another of the Asian flavors he's happy to play with.

That sensibility was probably inevitable for a young foodie growing up in Vancouver.

"I could go down a street and find a lot of food there that's very, very good — especially Asian dishes and ingredients. There was a huge market across from the first hotel I was working at, and a buddy and I were always stopping in shops, see some new ingredient, and ask 'What the heck is that?'" he remembers. "Then we'd get a taste and try to figure out how to use it."

Cheek and squash gnocchi (left) are among Bradley Hull's favorite creations.

The results could be startling — Hull once made a wasabi sugar to create crystal flowers for his beef carpaccio — but his work leans more to the classical than, say, the trendy molecular approach.

"Foam can be an enhancement to a dish, but never the centerpiece," he says. For instance, he likes to top a hearty pea soup with "Parmesan air" to "lighten it up", but the essence of the dish is traditional and robust. "You can't serve a bowl of air."

Hull says he thinks aloud about the creation of dishes.

"Every day there may be three or four flavors that come together in my mind," he says. "Then I have to figure out how to get there."

The young chef says his enthusiasm for food began literally when he was still playing in a sandbox.

"Years later, my dad showed me a kindergarten report card he had saved, where the teacher had noted that 'Bradley shows a very strong interest in cooking'," Hull. "Of course I don't have any memory of what prompted that comment. But my father was a chef, and my mother was a pastry chef, so from a very early age I was relaxed and at home in the kitchen."

Since those days, Hull has found himself in more hectic commercial kitchens from Vancouver to Toronto to Birmingham, England, but in the Tables restaurant at the Shanghai hotel he comes across as a calm force in any storm.

He's found relief from stress in the sport of boxing, which he took up during his previous Shanghai stint at the 1515 West, Chophouse & Bar, when he and a co-worker decided their occasional game of squash wasn't enough to keep fit. That hobby so intrigued Shenzhen Satellite TV that the broadcaster sent out a crew to film him sparring in the boxing ring at his gym.

"When I first came to Shanghai, I wasn't as active as I've been all my life," he says, recalling his youth in Vancouver that was filled with activities like skiing, snowboarding and hiking. Tasked with opening a new restaurant in China, he got very caught up in work, in a big, very urban environment where outdoor recreation wasn't in easy reach as it was in Canada.

"Boxing sounded fun — and it's a really good workout. But I'm not really doing it enough to train for a fight like Brawl on the Bund," he says a bit wistfully. "The guys getting ready for that train seven days a week, and with my work schedule I'm lucky to get down to the gym twice a week."

Hull has never been the comic image of a stout chef made famous in movies like Who's Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

"I've always had a high metabolism, thank God!" he says when asked about the challenge of a professional life surrounded by butter and cream.

"Sure we're tasting food all the time," he adds, "but many days we never really have a sit-down meal. At the end of the day you may be hungry, but it's still an effort to do more than have a drink and hit the bed. Most chefs I know are on the lean side."

Another diversion he's found outside work: archery. "You have to let your mind go, have to focus on the target," he says.