Dan Hong grew up helping his family run the Thanh Binh Vietnamese restaurants across Sydney and fine-tuned his craft at Longrain, Pello and Marque before moving on to Tetsuya’s.

In 2006 he was appointed sous chef at Bentley Restaurant and Bar, where he was working in 2008 when he won The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide’s Josephine Pignolet Award for Best Young Chef. He used his prize money to do a stage at New York hotspot, WD-50, returning to Sydney to take up the role of head chef at Potts Point’s Lotus.

In late 2010, Dan returned to his South East Asian heritage, opening Ms.G’s with a great array of mod-Asian dishes, many rooted in his family’s Vietnamese cooking. In 2011 he added his hand to the kitchen of El Loco Mexican Cantina y Barra, which knocks out Mexican street food with his typical focus on fresh, light ingredients. Mr Wong followed in 2012, spread over two levels of the Establishment Hotel and offering classic Cantonese fare with Merivale flair.

In 2018 Dan was appointed executive chef for all of Merivale’s Establishment restaurants and in 2019, returned to the original Lotus site for a one year pop-up, reviving some old favourites and creating some new ones.

Visit Lotus for more information.