“WHERE’S HENRY? ANYONE SEEN HENRY?”

It’s six o’clock on an unusually mild New York evening in late November, and Susur Lee is staring at a taro-crusted dumpling, his arms folded across his chest and his eyebrows scrunched in consternation. “What is that?” he mutters to no one in particular. Five seconds go by, then 10. Finally, Lee picks up the dumpling, regards it for a moment, and wordlessly puts it down, shaking his head.

“Where’s Henry?” he bellows again.

Henry, a sheepish man who wears a U.S. Virgin Islands baseball cap (and who has a knack for vanishing), is one of several cooks Lee has recently hired to work the kitchen at Shang, a Chinese-themed restaurant in the Thompson LES hotel that will mark his first foray into New York’s gastronomic scene. The restaurant is due to open in a week, and tonight is the first time that Lee and his team of a dozen cooks will prepare all of the items on the menu. The front-of-house staff—about 20 servers, maître d’s and busboys—has gathered expectantly to sample his dishes and learn the art of presenting them to customers.

This is slicing it a bit fine for a dry run, even by Lee’s extemporizing tendencies. Cooks scramble up and down the stairs, carting their mise en place from the hotel’s subterranean room-service kitchen to the undefiled Shang kitchen on the second floor. The scene is one of general chaos—a fragile plinth for the reputation Lee has carefully constructed over the past two decades.

Lee is both punctilious and impulsive: he obsesses about getting the details right, about finding the perfect harmony of acidity and saltiness, the proper foil of sweet to sour. Yet he is congenitally predisposed to whim, sometimes changing his mind about a dish hours before the service begins—and driving his staff crazy in the bargain. He’d devised the menu only a month earlier and had already changed it five times. When Lee finds inspiration—when he decides, for instance, that the gently fried oyster in kung pao sauce needs a soft cucumber accent—he will jot ideas on scraps of paper, stuffing his pockets with crumpled musings.

“Henry, communicate!” he scolds once Henry has reappeared from the bowels of the hotel.

With Lee, the learning curve can be steep, and the standards exacting. Food for him goes beyond the visual and oral to the aural: when he concocts a recipe, he imagines not only how something will taste, but how it will sound when it is being chewed. “My taste is very sharp,” he says. “I was born in the year of the dog, so I have an incredible sense of smell. And I love colours—I love combinations of colours. Texture as well. You hear it in your ears. The crunch is coming from here”—he points to his ears—“not from here”—pointing to his mouth.

The staff, in the kitchen and the dining room, are expected to become fluent in the arcane language of Lee’s pantry, stocked with a confounding array of powders, roots and alchemical-looking juices. There is burdock root and yeast extract (the latter a substitute for MSG, which he doesn’t use); there is licorice root, desert moss, pennywort and Japanese chrysanthemums; there are wolfberries, thai peppers sourced from Holland, tea sauce, water-shield (an aquatic plant), lemon balm, osmanthus (another flower) and lily bulbs. All will be pressed into service for a menu that is designed to reflect the Chinese diaspora, and which, in some ways, is a culinary travelogue, tracing Lee’s journey from east to west.

Related:
• The Verdict: New York food critics weigh in on Susur Lee’s NYC venture
• Goodbye, Susur: After years of acclaim, Susur Lee is closing one of his eponymous restaurants on King St. W.
• Susur’s Dynasty: Four Susur-ites keep the home fires burning