Vong in Hong Kong is under provisionary Chinese rule though, right?

JGV: Yeah, but it's better than ever. The Chinese are building a new airport there. They took actually a little island next to Hong Kong, which was an island only a volcanic, all hills. They cut the mountains to the level of the water. So I think the Chinese are going to make it the capital of China. They're going to make it bigger than ever.

They already changed the Hong Kong dollar. The queen was on it, they removed it and put a lion instead. Same thing. Same face (Haha).

A lot of your food is low in fat. What advice would you give a cook at home to help cook low in fat and still have high flavor?

Like we talked before, buy your ingredients first, buy seasonal. Right there you have more flavor. If you buy strawberries in December, you're not going to have the flavor of a strawberry that you're going to buy local from June to September. To get a lot of flavor, to start good cooking it I think it has to be seasonal. Then, you can use butter, of course, but I wouldn't cook with it. I would add at the last minute just to melt to give some nice buttery flavor, but not to see anything in the pan. A lot of people don't know that butter is not that bad. I think there's 15% saturated fat in butter. There's about 14 in olive oil. So it's not the way you consume butter, it's the way you cook with it. If you put butter in the pan and it gets dark brown, and sautÚ, that's when it's bad. When butter fat burns, that's where the butter is really bad. It's the way you use it. If you use butter raw on a roll, there's nothing wrong with it. Because you still need a little fat content in your diet to fix the protein and the elements to your body, you need a little fat.

But we use very little. We cook a lot with grape seed oil, which has only 5% saturated fat. It's neutral, it has no flavor. That's what we use to flavor a lot of my spiced oil. It's the lightest oil you can buy. A lot of oil is between 8% and 14% of saturated fat. And grape seed oil only has 5%. It doesn't smoke. It's really the healthiest thing. It has a seed from the grape which is very good for digestion. It's the best oil. I'm actually talking to some people in California because they throw the grape seed away over there. All the grape seed in California. All the grape seed we buy in America is from Italy, France and Spain. In California they throw it back in the field after they make the wine. So I'm talking to a winery over there to start the first California grape seed oil. Because it's the best oil you can buy. And they're using a lot of grape seed oil in cosmetic. It's very good for your skin.

And I think on the question of health ... lots of vegetable. That's the most important. You can eat as much meat and fish I think as you want, it has to be in balance. There has to be a balance. And the vegetable has the fibers and the vitamins are just doing the trick.

What can you do to make the vegetables taste fresh and as good as you do?

JGV: We slice them quite thin and we cook them very quickly. In the old days we were cooking vegetable whole. Your broth where you cooked your vegetable had more flavor and vitamins than your vegetable. So I changed the technique for that reason. I slice my vegetable very thin. And I heat them very quickly so they stay crunchy and keep all the vitamins.

I think to eat healthy ... not eating a steak isn't better than eating a steak, but then you should eat a big amount of vegetable next to it. You should not have a baked potato with sour cream again because they are about the same food. It's the component of how you eat things. It's not only what you eat, it's how you eat it. People forget sometimes that acidity of food is very important. Like lemon juice, lime juice, different vinegars. It's very important to balance your food with acids because it helps digestion. It catches the grease, the fat. That's why eating salads is very healthy. The acid component of the vinaigrette catches the grease. A lot of people use pineapple for diet. Why? Because of the acidity of the pineapple helps you to breakdown your fat. So the balance of acidity is very important. Just like when you eat fish with lemon juice. It's very good to eat mustard with meat because it breaks it down. When you eat a steak, it's great to eat a salad with it because the acidity breaks down the fat content. In Belgium they are eating French fries they are squeezing vinegar on them. There is a reason for it.

So I think salads are important. Salads, vegetable, but acidity is important as well. Sometimes you when you eat there's something missing and it's just a drop of lemon juice that makes it taste better. We put always a drop of lemon juice in the 27 vegetable. It just brings up the flavor. It makes it lighter, just a couple drops.

What is your favorite ingredient?

JGV: My favorite ingredient?... lemongrass.

Where do you see yourself professionally in five years?

JGV: I don't know. Rich ... on the beach. (Haha.) Food is like phases too. Like clothes. One year you dress a certain way, you eat a certain way. You have phases and I have phases too. One year you are into stews, the next year you are into vegetable. Like now, I was in my big years vegetable juice -- I use them a little less now. Everybody has phases, so five years from now, I don't know. I think food is going to have to change. The way we are eating. The way people are consuming. There's going to be less and less in the ocean. Everything is going to farm very soon. I think tofu is going to be a big bean product. It's going to be big again. It's a very good substitute for meat and fish. I think we will eat very differently five years from now. I believe so. I think we've changed already tremendously. But I hope there's always going to be that classic restaurant. Because I believe there should be always that classic Italian or French restaurants that serve original food. Then you have some other people who are going to bring it to a different level. If you think of New York 10 years ago, it was a totally different place to eat. The Green Market on 14th Street celebrated it's 20 year anniversary. But when I arrived in New York in '86, 10 years ago, there were a few potatoes, apples. I mean now you see things that you never did before. I think we're going back to wilderness. There's a lot of wild things that you see now. Like the wild leeks. People are going back to wild herbs.

Congratulations! On your four stars for Jean Georges! What are you doing differently there to make it four star experience?

JGV: I want to bring back four star service a little bit. Not the flambe, not all the flamboyant things that don't make sense. But something ... like finishing touches. I think stewed vegetables in a cast iron pot that you bring out and open the lid . If I open the lid in the kitchen and scoop it out on a plate, you miss 50% of the joy.

When they took all the table side service away, that all went ...

JGV: I want to bring it back a little bit. Not the flambe, not all the flamboyant things that don't make sense. But something ... like finishing touches. I think stewed vegetables in a cast iron pot that you bring out and open the lid . If I open the lid in the kitchen and scoop it out on a plate, you miss 50% of the joy.

And when the fish comes out and you see the whole piece of it, you see where it's from.

JGV: Exactly. Then you make it a filet and leave a little olive oil on the table. Something really simple. So it would be like more service oriented. Try to leave the food the most natural possible.

I think hygiene is a very big thing too. When I go to a restaurant I see duck breast sliced in 20 slices, I say to myself, how many hands touched my food? As a cook I think, maybe I'm getting old, but I say how many hands touched that plate? I prefer to see my duck coming out and somebody slicing it in front of me. I miss that because I grew up with it 25 years ago. A roast chicken, when you have a roast chicken coming out. The smell is incredible. Now we have a breast of chicken and we don't know which pan it went into. We will have a different method of cooking as well. You can have a rotisserie. The chicken roasts without touching the parts, which is roasting naturally. It's going to be very different, it's going to be very natural. We don't want to miss any smell.

There is much more but...

Thank you. I've learned so much. You look at it from an artist's point of view.

JGV: You know why, because normally chefs don't eat their own food. That's a problem. I eat my own food and I cook the way I like to eat. We sit down every day every night and we eat our food. Everything we put on the menu we eat ourselves. Many chefs, they just serve something and they never sit down to eat it. Can you finish your plate? Is it really good that you can finish it and you can say that, if you don't eat your food so you can say OK this is missing, this is missing, this is missing, how can you know about it? I think that's the mistake of a lot of chefs. They're creative, they put things together, but they don't eat their own food. They try to make it beautiful and they forget the flavors. What's left in the mouth, that's what counts.