Vicky Cheng was born in Hong Kong and raised largely in Toronto, Canada, growing up with a family heritage that includes a Shanghainese grandmother and a Chiu Chow (Teochew) father, a mixed background he has said shaped his palate long before he ever cooked professionally, according to Tatler Asia’s profile of Cheng and his restaurant Wing. He is the chef-owner of VEA Restaurant & Lounge and Wing, both housed in the same building on Wellington Street in Central, Hong Kong, not mainland China, despite his cooking sometimes being filed under a broader “Chinese fine dining” label. He trained formally at George Brown College in Toronto, per Wikipedia’s biography of Cheng, after being drawn to cooking around age 12 by watching television chefs Jamie Oliver and Emeril Lagasse, a spark he described in an interview with The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

Cheng began working professional kitchens in Toronto as a teenager, training under chef Jason Bangerter at Auberge du Pommier and chef Anthony Walsh at Canoe, according to Wikipedia. He then moved to New York to work at Restaurant Daniel under Daniel Boulud, an apprenticeship that grounded him in classical French technique, per the same source. In 2011 Cheng relocated to Hong Kong, where he took the executive chef role at Liberty Private Works, a members-style dining concept; in an interview conducted while he ran that kitchen he described wanting “to do something really different for me alone… I wanted to create my own dishes,” per Jeannie Cho Lee’s Asian Palate interview with Cheng. In Hong Kong he also trained under Chinese cuisine specialists Chef Tam Kwok Fung and Chef Adam Wong, according to Tatler Asia, building the technical grounding in Chinese cooking that would later underpin his own restaurants.

Cheng’s defining breakthrough came in 2015, when he opened VEA Restaurant & Lounge on Wellington Street in Central, his first restaurant as sole owner-chef, per Wikipedia. The following year, VEA earned a Michelin star, formal recognition for what Cheng calls his “Chinese x French” philosophy, pairing French technique with Chinese ingredients, a description he has used repeatedly, including in the Tatler Asia profile covering Wing’s opening. VEA has held its Michelin star continuously since 2016 and has appeared on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list in multiple years, according to Wikipedia’s account of his career.

In April 2021, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cheng converted VEA’s former lounge space one floor below the restaurant into Wing, a second restaurant dedicated purely to reinterpreting the eight major regional Chinese cuisines, according to the Tatler Asia account of Wing’s launch. Wing’s rise has been fast: the restaurant debuted at number 20 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2024 before climbing to number 11 in 2025, and it reached as high as number 3 on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2025, according to The Star’s coverage of Wing’s ascent and the official World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing for Wing. In 2025 Wing also won the Gin Mare Art of Hospitality Award and the Inedit Damm Chefs’ Choice Award at the Asia’s 50 Best ceremony, according to the World’s 50 Best interview with Cheng.

Cheng has become one of the most consistently profiled chefs in Hong Kong dining media, with feature coverage from the South China Morning Post, the Michelin Guide’s own editorial team and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization, per the South China Morning Post’s profile of his cooking and the Michelin Guide’s “Movers and Shakers” feature on Wing’s opening. Cheng has said peer recognition matters more to him than press coverage, noting “it’s not often you get compliments from chefs,” a remark he made in the World’s 50 Best interview after Wing’s Chefs’ Choice Award win.

Cheng is a featured chef collaborator for French tableware house Legle Porcelain, which showcases a “Ruyi Collection” of dinnerware selected by Cheng alongside a dedicated “Plating Inspiration” section built around his dishes, according to Legle Porcelain’s chef page for Cheng. He has also lent his name to guest curation projects, including T Australia’s “The T Australia List,” curated by Vicky Cheng. These are brand and media collaborations built around his culinary reputation rather than personal-appearance endorsement deals of the kind common in entertainment.

Cheng’s core business remains the two-restaurant operation at Wellington Street in Central, comprising VEA and Wing, run as distinct concepts sharing a building, according to Tatler Asia. He has since expanded outside Hong Kong for the first time with K by Vicky Cheng, a restaurant in Bangkok carrying his name and culinary approach into a second market, per the Michelin Guide’s listing for K by Vicky Cheng. Both VEA and Wing remain privately held; no public filing discloses their revenue or Cheng’s ownership stake in either restaurant or in the Bangkok venture.

No public record reviewed for this profile discloses personal real estate, a vehicle collection or other major personal assets belonging to Vicky Cheng, and that absence is treated here as fact rather than filled in with a guess. What is documented is the commercial footprint of his restaurant business: VEA and Wing occupy leased premises on Wellington Street in Central, one of Hong Kong’s most expensive commercial districts for dining, with Wing built out as a 38-seat room plus two private dining spaces with terraces, according to the Tatler Asia account of Wing’s build-out. That is a business asset tied to the restaurant company rather than a disclosed personal property holding, so this section is best read as an honest absence of public record rather than a quantified estimate.