HONOLULU (KHON2) – Imagine going to a fancy dinner at a nice restaurant.
As you enter the restaurant, you are greeted by two beautiful ice sculptured swans leading you to your dinner table.
Well, that may be something you can do eventually here at LCC with the Culinary Arts program.
We are here with Assistant Professor, Chef Lee Alan Dung.
When we talk about ice sculptures in a restaurant, I would think its a specific artist and that’s their specialty and not necessarily the same chefs who are cooking the food.
So, tell us a little about this particular art form in the cooking world.
“Well, this class is called Garde manger which is the art and craft of the cold kitchen, said Dung.
“So, we do salads and soups and all those kinds of things. But we really specialize in the art forms of, like, ice carving and vegetable carvings.”
Is this a dying art?
“It is becoming a very dying art,” said Dung.
“Not too many people carve by hand anymore. A lot of time if you order an ice carving, it gets made by a machine now. So, to be able to teach this next generation of ice carvers, its something fun.”