Richard Ekkebus

Richard Ekkebus’s formation in professional kitchens was shaped by repetition, hierarchy, and pressure. His training included Hans Snijders and Robert Kranenborg, Pierre Gagnaire, Alain Passard, and Guy Savoy, a sequence of kitchens associated with discipline, restraint, and exacting standards. Earlier work in his grandparents’ restaurant and hotel in Netherlands gave him a practical foundation in service timing, pass coordination, and the daily mechanics of restaurant and hotel kitchen life. That ground-up experience informed his understanding of standards, because maintenance, readiness, cooking, organization, and consistency were all part of the same operating system. At Neercanne in Maastricht, Netherlands, Ekkebus worked first as kitchen porter and then as chef. That progression reflected exposure to the full load of kitchen labor before moving into responsibility for cooking and consistency through repeated services. He later took Executive Chef posts at Royal Palm Hotel in Mauritius and The Sandy Lane in Barbados, where the demands of luxury hotel cooking required polish, precision, and consistency across international guests and changing context. He also served as mentor to South East Asia region finalist Jake Kellie at S.Pellegrino Young Chef 2018, extending technique beyond his own kitchen. He is now Culinary Director of Mandarin Oriental, The Landmark Hong Kong / Amber. At Amber, contemporary fine dining is framed around clarity, with vegetable-focused dishes given significant space and the restaurant’s work tied to sustainability and dairy-free cooking. In Ekkebus’s kitchen, these choices act as constraints as much as values. They reduce reliance on richness and place more pressure on structure, texture, seasoning, and clean definition. The aim is depth without excess. A signature dish at Amber is the uni dish, which has become a defining point for guests. Ekkebus has described the tension around it clearly: “people always want to come and have the uni dish because that's such a defining dish. But I'm always much more excited about the dish we created today and that we want to put on the menu tomorrow.” That balance between recognition and development captures the way the kitchen continues to move while holding onto a strong reference point. His dessert work follows the same preference for concentration and counterpoint. The 85% chocolate soufflé with cacao sorbet uses a familiar form, but its contrast between warm soufflé and cold sorbet, aerated structure and concentrated cacao, gives it definition rather than weight. It reflects the wider logic of his cooking, where familiar architecture is sharpened through restraint, intensity, and clarity. Ekkebus’s career has moved from early kitchen labor to international hotel leadership and a contemporary fine dining context, with the same discipline carried through each stage.