Robert Fong stacks the pieces of a smoker outside the back door of the Community Food Co-op's Connections Building. He brings armfuls of briquettes and wood from the trunk of his car.
Today he's using guava wood - from his friend's backyard in Hawaii - and black cherry from the county that has dried for more than a year. The two woods represent his homes, past and present, and the food he cooks with them is influenced by all of his stops along the way.
Fong, who grew up in a family of chefs and restaurateurs, has been to more than 60 countries since the 1960s. Hawaii is lovely, he says, but he wanted to see more.
During his trips, Fong sampled the cuisines of the world - from street food to fine dining, from home-cooked meals to three-star restaurants in Paris. He almost always went into the kitchen and talked to whomever he could.
"I could go on forever and ever about my travels," he says. Now, he is channeling some of those stories into a cookbook. "I'm blessed with a good taste memory," he says, "so I remember the dishes."
One of his favorite dishes, from Peru, was influenced by several cultures: Chinese-style stir-fried beef with onions, spices and chili, topped with hand-cut french fries.
"It works," he says. "It works if you're using good potatoes and doing it yourself and using fresh oil and know how to coordinate two dishes."
Fong certainly knows how to do that. Until about four years ago, he owned Pacific Café on Commercial Street in Bellingham, where he blended dishes, spices and cooking techniques from around the world with local produce and local cooking traditions.
"In the early years we had a difficult time labeling the restaurant," he says. "My wife came up with 'East West Northwest,' but it didn't catch on. This was before Pacific Rim cuisine."
Fong sold the restaurant before the economic downturn of 2008. It just seemed like the time to do other things.
"Even though it was a successful business, I always feel it's good to leave at the top," Fong says. "Many people go past their prime and start to fade, and I didn't want to see that happen."
Fong still teaches tai chi, and runs the annual tai chi camp that he started leading on Orcas Island in 1976. He also works as a private chef and caterer, and enjoys his cooking workshops at the co-op, where he teaches about 20 classes a year.
"I get to cook whatever I want to, and draw from my experiences from my world travels and family recipes, and re-invent and improve on dishes we served at the Pacific Café," he says.
Fong says it's nice to cook whatever he feels like, without the economic constraints and pressures of running a business. For now, he wants to go back to simple cooking: high-quality, organic, sustainable products cooked with the sensibilities of the old world.
Such influences will be present in Fong's cookbook. Rather than merely compile recipes, he plans to explain his philosophy about how to approach cooking.
His cooking is influenced by the martial art that brought him here in the first place. The principles of tai chi can apply to the culinary arts, Fong explains. Both require balance, attention to detail, sincerity in practice and application, and acute attention to doing everything the right way.
Cooking involves a tai chi-like flow of movement between stove, oven, counter, sink and cutting board. Most people make those moves by habit after a while, but Fong says chefs should concentrate calmly on what they do, just as tai chi encourages people to focus on another oft-ignored habit: breathing.
A few years after Fong began studying tai chi, his teacher, T.Y. Pang, moved to Orcas Island. Fong and his wife, Lesley, followed Pang to Washington, but didn't want to live on an island. Fong remembered Bellingham from his travels around the country, so they came, thinking it would be temporary.
"I used to tell my wife, 'Don't plant a garden, we'll be gone in a year,'" Fong says.
That was 1975.
"Well, the years sure flew by," says Fong, now 65. "Two children later and a number of businesses and adventures, and here we are."
