Some celebrity chefs focus on perfecting their signature dishes, while others chase television shows and Michelin stars. For Jereme Leung, the mission is simple: to create a fine-dining Chinese restaurant brand to compete with the best in the world.

The ambitious Hong Kong-born chef admittedly has several culinary miles to travel before achieving that goal, but his progress in Asia is impressive. In 2003, Leung founded the Whampoa Club in Shanghai, and opened a sibling restaurant in an old Beijing courtyard house last October. His portfolio also includes China House at The Oriental hotel in Bangkok, with a fourth restaurant opening in Singapore later this year. He has already published one successful cookery book, New Shanghainese Cuisine: Bridging the old and the new, and is working on two more, and is the first Chinese chef to develop a private wine label - a Cabernet Sauvignon created in partnership with Tasmania's Domaine A/Stoney vineyard.

These are impressive achievements for a young chef whose first kitchen experience came as a 13-year-old apprentice at his parents' Hong Kong restaurant, and who had never owned his own restaurant until 2003. "When I came to Shanghai in 2002, I was not a businessman. I had been the executive chef at some of Asia's top hotel restaurants for almost 10 years, and was comfortable in that environment," Leung says. "I could easily have stayed on that career path."

Thankfully for Shanghai gourmands, Leung - who had already gained significant international recognition, including being only the fourth Asian chef to be conferred with the Five Star Diamond Award by the American Academy of Hospitality Science, and named as one of the World's Best Chefs in 2000 - decided to follow the entrepreneurial path.

Opening his first restaurant in Shanghai, however, meant confronting not just an unfamiliar city, but also its notoriously strident local diners. 'It was a very challenging proposition for me to come to mainland China as a Hong Kong-born chef,' Leung says. 'In my career, I had cooked Chinese cuisine in overseas Chinese communities across South East Asia, but now I would be testing myself. I had to see if I could win over mainland Chinese diners, and have my cuisine accepted in its homeland - to prove it was authentic.'

The invitation to Shanghai in 2002 came from the owners of Three on the Bund, who were seeking to create a previously unknown concept in China: a sophisticated, multi-venue dining, entertainment and culture emporium located in a renovated 1916 banking mansion overlooking the Huangpu River. Two of the four restaurants at Three on the Bund - eponymous eateries by French superchef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Greek-Australian David Laris – would bring global eclecticism to China's rapidly changing commercial capital, but a genre-defining concept was needed for the emporium's only Chinese restaurant.

During the 1990s, while working at hotels such as the Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur and Four Seasons in Singapore, Leung had developed a cooking style he refers to as New Chinese. "It's about making Chinese food look modern and taste good, but retaining the authenticity," Leung says. "Around the world, there are many fine-dining cuisines, but Chinese cooking is often viewed as cheap and unsophisticated. I wanted to change that image by incorporating non-traditional ingredients from all over the globe, but preparing them with traditional Chinese cooking techniques." Shanghai seemed the perfect place to start.

Once the decision was made to join the Three on the Bund project, the hard research began. "This posed whole new challenges," Leung says. 'I had to ask myself: 'What do I know about Shanghainese food?' To upgrade his knowledge, Leung scoured the archives for local cookery recipes, ate in scores of the city's traditional restaurants and consulted renowned Chinese culinary institutes. He then hired five retired Shanghainese chefs - the oldest of whom was aged 82 - who provided Leung and his chef team with three sessions per week to teach their different preparation methods for traditional Shanghainese meals.

The process helped Leung choose the signaturelocal dishes to be reinterpreted and served at Whampoa Club (Whampoa was the 1920s English-language name for the Huangpu River). 'I had to digest the essence of Shanghai's past cooking in order to create the future,' Leung says. 'It wasn't easy, we all put on a lot of weight during this process.'

The research revealed one critical failing of Shanghainese food. 'I discovered that it wasn't very healthy - because it was very sweet and everything was swimming in oil,' Leung says. This discovery represented the opportunity Leung had been searching for. 'I knew then that I wanted to take the essence of traditional cooking and steer it along a new path. But you can't call your cuisine modern by just changing the presentation, so I looked at how to create a new Shangainese cuisine that would get the Chinese to buy into a healthier way of enjoying local food.'

Leung returned to his kitchen and began experimenting. 'The soul of a restaurant lies with its food,' he says. 'I like old things myself, but always like to do them in a new way. So I always had one question in my mind: 'What do I think Chinese cooking can become?'

The answer to that question soon became evident. Shanghai'itself is a relatively young city, which only began to fully develop after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 - and its cuisine is a fusion of dishes and ingredients imported in the late 19th century from the neighboring provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang.- To those old dishes, Leung added innovative new preparations, incorporating ingredients he had used in his South East Asian hotel career.

The result was an alluring menu - featuring such as Shanghai tea smoked eggs with Sevruga caviar; Mung bean noodles with hairy crab roe and green crab claw; and Chilled drunken chicken topped with Shaoxing wine shaved ice - that fused tradition with modernity, and symbolized Shanghai's ongoing transition into a truly international city. 'Some of my dishes may be unusual,' Leung says. 'But they are very Chinese in their provenance, and the recipe and techniques are always resolutely Chinese.'

To enhance the dining experience, Leung worked closely with Three on the Bund to devise a design theme for Whampoa Club that matched the unique cuisine. Although most of the building was revamped by renowned interior specialist Michael Graves, Leung brought in Hong Kong-based Alan Chan to create a modern art deco styling that echoed Shanghai's mythical 1920s decadence, and also represented the stylistic whims of this pulsing 21st century city. The result is stunning, with giant red circular moon-gate murals, time-warp glass chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, jade chopstick holders and private team rooms.

Looking back on his first four years in China, Leung is reflective, amiable and painfully honest. 'We were lucky to begin in Shanghai,' he says. 'This is a unique city, where people are open and willing to try new things. It enabled us to test out the New Shanghainese cuisine concept, which we have now refined and adapted for the Beijing restaurant.'

China's capital is now embracing Jereme Leung's 'New Beijing' creations, where he has revitalized traditional dishes, such as Peking Duck, which has been doubly re-imagined as Crispy duck with five spiced goose liver mousse and fresh mango, and Soya braised boneless duck wings with crunchy salad.

With China's two biggest cities conquered, it's time to think globally. 'I'm lucky,' Leung says. 'I have a platform to create and broaden my perspective, and I am confident that the New Chinese cuisine concept will be ready to move beyond Asia.' The world eagerly awaits his next move.