Restaurant proud to have retained Michelin star

Yeoh is not convinced that Chinese restaurants in the UK are disadvantaged in any way when it comes to the Michelin guide reviewing process.

"If you are serving a cuisine which is not the cuisine natively known by someone, then the job of the restaurant is to communicate and if you do that, then you are exactly on an equal footing with everybody else," he said.

Restaurants usually do not know the Michelin reviewing criteria and the inspectors who visit the premises are always anonymous. Yeoh said "it's almost a matter of coincidence what we are doing aligns with what Michelin wants.

"It's always been in our thinking that if you want to convince people of what we are about, then we have to try and create food which people love but might hate, rather than designing a menu entirely on what people might like."

Yeoh set up Kai Mayfair in 1993, but it was not until 2008 that his restaurant gained a Michelin star for the first time. He attributed the breakthrough to his bold move of narrowing down the menu and highlighting the focus.

"The hardest thing we found was actually to decide what not to put on the menu," he said, because there was a time when his restaurant menu was crowded, with both old favorites and new dishes created by a new chef.

"So, one day, we decided to cut the menu in half, and we had lots of complaints from customers. It was difficult," Yeoh said. "But we did what we believed in, and we believe that we have to have focus and let customers know what we are about. And the following years, we got the star. It's risky, but you have to commit."