A Personal Journey from Concert Halls to Culinary Families

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My love of classical music did not begin in childhood. I was not one of those students who grew up rehearsing in orchestra rooms or singing in choir lofts. My entry into that world came later, almost by serendipity, when I was an undergraduate at Princeton University. In those years, I began taking the train into New York, slipping into evening performances at Lincoln Center – nights of symphonies, ballet, and opera that felt like stepping into a different dimension of human intention.

While at Princeton, I also became close friends with musicians and music lovers – including two concertmasters of the Princeton University Orchestra – and through them I learned to listen not only with the ear, but with the mind. They taught me how structure becomes emotion, how discipline becomes beauty, and how a piece of music is held together by choices invisible to the audience. Those friendships opened a door into a world I had never imagined for myself, one I continued to explore through classical performances after returning to Hong Kong.

As I began my first job at Morgan Stanley Hong Kong, another fascination began to take shape: cuisine, gastronomy, and the cultural power they hold. I started to understand how food dissolves distance – how a shared meal can soften hierarchies, bridge cultures, and create trust and friendship. 

In 2016, I entered a Japanese language speech contest and won an award for a speech on culinary diplomacy. Even then, I sensed that food was not merely nourishment or pleasure; it was a form of communication that could move gracefully across borders.

In 2025, my interest in the soft power of food returned with new urgency. Netflix’s Korean cooking competition Culinary Class Wars, the gastronomy forums I encountered as a Board Member of KEY Korea Europe & You, and my teaching in family wealth management at the University of Hong Kong all brought the same question into focus: how do culinary families transmit identity, legacy, and legitimacy across generations?

Gradually, I began to see that classical music, gastronomy, family enterprise, and soft power were ideas that could be woven into a single conceptual thread. The culmination of that intellectual journey is the collection you now hold: Edible Heritage as Musical Form: Listening to the Legacy of Global Culinary Families. 

When the idea for this compendium crystallized, I selected eight families whose stories carried both emotional depth and structural clarity and paired each one with a musical form, namely symphony, folk song, opera, chamber music, pastoral suite, and ballet suite. I then worked with my students and mentees to develop the comparative essays, each of which listens to two families through a distinct musical lens. 

Conventional business language often describes family enterprises through governance, succession, ownership, and strategy. These categories matter, but they can miss the emotional and sensory dimensions through which heritage survives. Music offers another language: one capable of hearing rhythm, variation, tension, harmony, crescendo, return, silence, repetition, and improvisation. 

• A symphony, as heard through Kikkoman and Barilla, reveals how global culinary families sustain coherence across generations while varying their expression across markets: Kikkoman through quiet cultural translation, Barilla through the public assertion of Italianità.
• A folk song, embodied by Vitasoy, tells the story of how a simple soy drink, once a “poor man’s milk,” becomes a vessel of cultural intimacy through accessibility and shared memory, even as it navigates a recent upward movement toward premium sustainability.
• An opera, reflected in Urbani Tartufi, shows how the drama of truffle hunting, table‑side shaving, and centuries‑old ritual shapes a form of ceremony, performance, and exclusivity that continues to exist as it moves outward to reach broader audiences.
• Chamber music, exemplified by the Loiseau sisters and the Roca brothers, teaches us the art of mutual listening and distributed authority where heritage is performed by an ensemble negotiating tempo, interpretation, and trust. While the former seek renewal through a second generation, the latter appear to view their trio as a complete, finite performance to be honoured in its own time.
• A pastoral suite, expressed through Boksoondoga, captures patience, seasonality, and attunement to place – the slow rhythms of fermentation, the humility of listening to rice, water, and microbial life, and the way terroir becomes a living, breathing collaborator.
• A ballet suite, as seen in the Donum Estate, shows how choreography, design, and sensory experience become cultural power – how a vineyard becomes a stage, how sculpture and landscape move in synchrony, and how hospitality becomes an orchestrated performance of identity.

This collection does not claim that family food enterprises are literally musical compositions, and the essays are not intended as academic case studies or definitive histories. Rather, music reveals that heritage is not a static artifact but a living composition – one that must be played, interpreted, and sometimes reinvented. We invite the reader to listen differently: to hear the music of culinary families, and the cultural scores that they continue to play.