Special Video Feature: Underground Chef Reveals All!

Ronsar Lo is a superb chef with an unusual resume. Training: YouTube. Restaurant: His basement kitchen. Day job: structural designer.

Lo is part of an international trend, underground restaurants meant to be more expressions of communal joy than profit motive or iron chef competitiveness. Lo runs his private dining spot out of his home in Burnaby, B.C. He calls it Sarlo's Awesome Eatery. Meals are by invite only -- Lo's friends, and Lo's friends' friends -- but an anonymous fan of the restaurant made a profile for it on restaurant review site Zomato.

[Editor's note: Watch the video above made by Christopher Cheung and Elmira Kuznetsova, and you'll have a first-hand look at how Lo creates and serves his sumptuous fare to a handful of lucky guests.]

The YouTube culinary institute

Two YouTube channels Lo credits for his training are Food Wishes by John Mitzewich and Cooking with Dog, which features a Japanese chef who isn't named and a canine host. As a result, Lo's cooking influences are a mixture of French, Italian, and Japanese.

"There's so much to pick up and learn from," said Lo, "from basic techniques like knife skills to how to brown and sear."

He likes to cook pub food, Cantonese cuisine from his upbringing, and anything out of the ordinary, like rabbits or octopuses.

Lo calls himself a hobbyist, but his creations and habits say something else. He roasts entire ducks and sides of pork belly. He boils ramen stock for days, 40 litres at a time. He swears by his trusty Takamura Hana -- a knife from a company established during postwar Japan, whose founder hails from Echizen, a city with a 700-year history of hammer-forged knives.

His kitchen is a Frankenstein's monster of appliances accumulated from other kitchens. He has a ceiling-high Starbucks fridge that he purchased at a restaurant auction (still boasting a Starbucks Coffee label). He has a gas stove that he found on Craigslist for $300. The stove was located on the second-floor of the seller's home, and required Lo and his friends to catch it as it was dropped off a balcony.

Lo even keeps his own bees for fresh honey. He grows his own herbs and produce, like kale and tomatoes. His latest ventures are growing healthy wasabi and enough mint around his house to choke out every last weed.

"It's to save some money," said Lo, "because I'm cheap."

Share plates

Private restaurants like Lo's are also called "supper clubs," "pop-up restaurants," and "underground restaurants." They are emblematic of a sharing economy on the rise. After all, if people are renting their homes via Airbnb and their cars on Turo, why not share food as well?

A husband and wife team in the U.K. have been credited as one of the first to adopt this model in the early 2000s. Their "restaurant" is four tables at the back of their Norfolk home and known by some as the U.K.'s best fish restaurant.

In Vancouver, one west coast restaurant called Birds Nest is located in a historic apartment unit around South Granville. In Toronto, two friends in sales and marketing run Chez Lisgar out of their tiny condo at night.

Slow food Lo

Like many aspects of the sharing economy, these restaurants raise questions about taxes, wages, overhead costs, inspections, licenses, and official certifications.

Then there's the issue of what separates a professional from a keen hobbyist, or if there even is a distinction. The Internet has brought the rise of writers on blogs, personalities on YouTube, and entrepreneurs on Etsy -- many with huge web followings.

Lo is just happy if he breaks even, cooks, and learns. Food was how his family showed each other care, and he's doing the same for others.

Friends of Lo who are food critics are in consensus that he puts care into his creations and that the dishes are theatrical (Lo has given events titles like "Good Lambs to the Slaughter" and "Cute Things with Butter"), but also not gimmicky. However, they say, Lo cooks slow.

There's a lot of experimentation that goes on in Lo's kitchen. Replicating dishes he eats at restaurants never works the first time, he says, but adds: "It's always something I can chip at and improve."

It gives him comfort to know that there's a vast culinary world to explore at home on his computer.

"All the knowledge is out there," he said.

[Editor's note: The writer Christopher Cheung knows the chef through mutual friends. This video was made by Cheung and Elmira Kuznetsova at the UBC School of Journalism.]