Business Times - 11 Apr 2009
Improved chemistry
Making an entrance in gold wheelchairs may not have been the best introduction to molecular gastronomy, but with the injection of new avant-garde chefs and events, the movement is now in the pink of health in Singapore. By Audrey Phoon
IT WAS in December of 2006, nearly 15 years after cuisine involving industrial and scientific methods was born at elBulli, that a restaurant operating along vaguely similar lines opened in Singapore.
Aurum was marketed as the first restaurant to dabble in molecular gastronomy, serving food in forms that were completely alien to most Singaporeans - pasta noodles squirted from syringes and chocolate reverse-fried in nitrogen, for instance. Combined with the restaurant's gimmicky gold wheelchairs-as-chairs concept, this turned out to be too much for the public to swallow, and Aurum rolled off the scene last year.
Still, that clumsy introduction was better than none. And Aurum must be given credit for 'opening the door to molecular gastronomy in Singapore', says a chef who is in the business of progressive cooking himself, Andre Chiang of Jaan. 'Without Aurum, the movement of molecular gastronomy here would have been many years behind.'
Indeed, since Aurum's closure, Singapore has taken some steps down the 'veritable goat track' (as Ferran Adria once called the country road leading to elBulli). Besides Chiang, avant-garde chefs like FiftyThree's Michael Han, BLU's Kevin Cherkas and Tippling Club's Ryan Clift have begun to dazzle diners with their innovative cuisine. The latter two arrived here in the middle of last year, while Han - who worked briefly at Fat Duck and Mugaritz, started his Armenian Street establishment four months ago.
Then there are other chefs - Chiang and Saint Pierre's Emmanuel Stroobant and Paul Froggatt among them - who, while not heading full-on in the molecular direction, are harnessing certain techniques from that genre to whip up flavour-filled foams, jellies and the like to punctuate their styles of cooking. Stroobant recently pumped up the experimental offerings at his restaurant with a new molecular bar too.
Remarks Tippling Club's Clift: 'I think the momentum of the avant-garde style is starting to pick up speed in Singapore. There are a few more places doing it in the last year and doing it well.'
There's even a gelatine sphere or two to be found in unexpected places, like Aussie steakhouse Uluru. 'When we first opened, we stuck to traditional cooking methods such as roasting,' says Uluru's executive chef Edwin Lau. Noticing that the molecular movement was picking up steam in Asia as well as in Singapore 'with a lot of overseas chefs coming to do this sort of cooking', the Geneva-trained chef began introducing things like spherified desserts and flavoured-smoke amuse bouches to his tasting menus about half a year ago.
'It gives our diners new experiences and lends creativity to the food,' he explains, adding that some of the high-tech equipment used to cook these dishes affords him more time and convenience as well - the use of a circulating water bath which controls temperature and cooking time, for instance, frees up Lau and his team to do other tasks as they don't have to 'constantly keep an eye on what we're cooking'.
'And the end product tastes better as well,' says the chef.
But are diners biting now? Chefs such as BLU's Cherkas report 'seeing more local first-time diners', and a visit to BLU, FiftyThree, Tippling Club or any of the other proponents of modern cooking rarely reveals an empty house, even in a difficult economic climate. Sales of tickets to this year's World Gourmet Summit events, too, would indicate that interest in molecular cooking is growing, with some of the fastest-selling tickets being the ones for events by the more avant-garde chefs.
According to the organisers of the festival which kicks off on April 19, tickets to the culinary workshops of Wylie Dufresne, Dan Hunter and Sergi Arola were sold out as of April 7, while those to workshops conducted by more traditional masterchefs are 'selling okay'.
Whether this budding interest can be sustained, of course, is dependant on more than new chefs and such events. For one thing, people need to know more about the movement before they can appreciate it, says restaurateur Ignatius Chan of Iggy's, which began using a smattering of molecular cooking techniques even before Aurum's time, although it does not bill itself as a molecular gastronomy restaurant.
'Ferran Adria is the pioneer of pushing food in a different direction - but if you haven't followed his cooking over the years, you would think that what he does is no big deal,' says Chan. 'But that's because you haven't seen the evolution of his cuisine, from its infant stages till maturity.'
Adds Tippling Club's Ryan Clift: 'The thing that people need to understand is that this movement is about pushing boundaries, not going backwards. At the end of the day, it's about how accepting people are of this style.'
On the chefs' part, it's up to them to send out the right messages via their creations, feels Cherkas. 'I think it is more about how well the chefs in this field can execute their creativity, rather than whether or not progressive cooking will catch on,' he says.
'Foodies in Singapore are an adventurous bunch and have very discerning palates. They take a strong interest in understanding various cuisines. As a result, chefs must possess a deeper appreciation of the ingredients' inherent qualities in order to create an amazing dish.'
Clift puts it more frankly: 'Honestly, the people who don't know how to cook this style of food and fall short are the ones who are ruining it for the rest of us and giving the movement a bad name.'
As challenging as it may be to turn out molecular creations, the principles of cooking this style of food are just the same as that of any other kind of food, say the chefs. That is, it should be all about the taste and not about the concept. 'In my opinion, progressive cooking should be practised as a cooking technique and not as a gimmick, trend or marketing strategy,' says Jaan's Chiang. 'Obsession with technique will dilute and distract the beauty of the cuisine.'
Cherkas reaffirms this: 'My top priorities lie in making a dish delicious; creativity and presentation rank lower on my list. It gets too much when food looks better than it tastes - food is not an art made just to be admired!'
With talents like these chefs in place and a growing base of followers such as Michel Lu who welcome 'the kinkier the better - nothing is really too much as this sort of cuisine is something that I would only have occasionally', it would seem as if Singapore has finally begun to open herself up a little to experimental cuisine.
Perhaps even more than a little, if Clift is to be believed. 'I don't think Singapore is that far off from experiencing the sort of cuisine that we are accustomed to in Europe,' he says. 'It is already here in Singapore - the general public just needs to realise that it's here, right under their noses.'
Masters of the molecular
Whether you regard them as scientists, eccentrics or madmen, these three chefs will soon have you rethinking the way you eat and enjoy your food
Wylie Dufresne
wd~50 50
Clinton Street
New York, NY 10002
Tel +1 212 477 2900
www.wd-50.com
ANY food writer who's had to describe the menu at New York's wd~50 has probably had to rethink his vocabulary. After all, at the simply-decorated 70-seater restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side, oysters are not 'plump' but 'flattened' on purpose, foie gras arrives in a knot instead of a slab and mayonnaise isn't the least bit drizzly - it's cubed, breaded and fried.
The, um, chef (or scientist or madman, depending on how you look at it) behind these wacky creations is Wylie Dufresne, son of a restaurateur-designer couple and a protege of Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He's also a cookbook collector who says his collection is a 'major influence' on his food. With the help of his mentor, Dufresne opened wd~50 six years ago, 'serving modern American cuisine, although I'm never fully happy with the term', he says.
Indeed, 'modern American' is an expression that seems largely inadequate to describe what Dufresne does. This, after all, is a guy who is well-known for not having many culinary boundaries. He doesn't just list xantham gum as a cool substance to work with: he plays around with it, understands it and combines it with other unusual ingredients such as konjac flour to produce the aforementioned foie gras, flexible enough now to twist into slinky pretzel-like shapes.
And it's not just the gum - he loves carrageenan and methylcellulose and a whole bunch of other strange-sounding substances too that are as difficult to make sense of as his last name (it's doo-FRAYN, by the way).
Chefs who work with scientific substances and methods run the risk of estranging themselves from the audience, of course, and Dufresne hasn't escaped that - even as he feels his food has maintained 'the three goals of taste, balance and visuals' since he started out.
Wd~50 received not-so-hot reviews from critics including a two-star (out of a possible four) rating from The New York Times when it opened, and Dufresne admits that getting his restaurant up and running 'was an immense challenge'.
But he stuck to his smoking guns and persevered, determined to make diners 'reassess taste, texture, and how we experience flavour'. And, gradually, things picked up (the restaurant has recently won multiple Best Restaurant and Best Chef awards. It was also rated by Restaurant magazine as among the top 50 in the world, and NYT revised its rating to three stars after another visit last year).
Of his success, the chef, whose L-shaped sideburns, long hair and granny glasses render him as eccentric-looking as his food, says: 'It takes so long for everything to really gel in a new restaurant. In some ways I don't think the food has changed that much (since wd~50's opening), but perhaps it has matured.
'We do know more about the kind of cuisine we are pursuing here than when we first started, but I think the same can be said of the diners. They've become more educated and open-minded about innovative food. So maybe you could view it as both ends moving a little closer to the middle: the food really working and the public being more receptive to it.'
Dufresne's visit to Singapore in two weeks' time will be a test of just how far local diners are willing to throw convention out the window, too: the chef plans to serve up some of his signature strangeness in the form of a wagyu steak with long beans, tamarind and peanut butter 'pasta'; and an 'everything bagel' dish with smoked salmon threads and crispy cream cheese, for instance. His famous (and not just because he once told New York magazine that 'hollandaise, I would like to pour over my head and just rub all over myself') reworked eggs Benedict is also on the menu.
But is he really all that weird? Dufresne says that 'in some respects I can enjoy some pretty pedestrian food items: slices of American cheese, a good cheeseburger, scrambled eggs'. Later though, it comes to light that he enjoys eggs so much, he has them six days a week, every week, for lunch. And that, like his food, is definitely not pedestrian.
Dan Hunter
Royal Mail Hotel
Glenelg Highway
Parker Street, Dunkeld
Victoria 3294
Tel +61 3 5577 2241
IT'S rare for young people these days (as the old folk would say) to want to carve out a career in the country. But when you're an 'old soul' who grew up in the boonies and who's spent a hefty chunk of your work life thriving at one of the world's best country restaurants, then perhaps a tiny town in the middle of nowhere is the ideal environment.
That's how it's turning out for Dan Hunter, the young chef who's heading the Royal Mail restaurant in an ancient bluestone building in Dunkeld, a nearly five-hour-drive from Melbourne city. The thirty-something Victorian spent his childhood in the rural town of Bairnsdale, then moved to Spain for four years when he was in his 20s. There, he spent most of his time at the two Michelin-starred Mugaritz run by Ferran Adria disciple Andoni Luis Aduriz, rising to the position of head chef in his last year.
In 2007, he moved back to Australia and, after a brief stint at Melbourne's Fenix restaurant, took up the job at the Royal Mail, where he's been raking in the accolades. (Since his arrival, the restaurant has won several awards for being the best regional/country restaurant of the year, as well as a two-hat rating from The Age Good Food Guide. It's also fully booked until next February.)
Being in the country, says Hunter, allows him to separate himself from the Australian restaurant scene, which he feels is 'more about competition than alliance and nurturing'. And in such natural environs, he can 'hopefully begin something that is not compared constantly to what is next door' and 'be free of the constraints of the city, such as the lack of truly fresh produce'. He admits Mugaritz has been a big influence: 'There are so many restaurants doing the same thing, cooking fairly similar food and relying on the same suppliers. Mugaritz is a model for those interested in sub-cultures and the non-mainstream; from there I have taken away the realisation that restaurants and chefs don't have to conform to be successful.'
At the Royal Mail - as at Mugaritz - Hunter has a large plot of garden that supplies vegetables, herbs and flowers to the restaurant daily (the chef and his team can often be seen using tweezers to painstakingly pick the best of what's available, then bringing their bounty into the kitchen). Eggs are gathered fresh from the on-site chicken coops, and 'poultry production is on the agenda, as is lamb and beef', he says.
Those are some pretty old-fashioned ways of doing things, but a quick look in the kitchen will reveal that Hunter isn't living in an earlier age. Cryovac packaging, liquid nitrogen and texture-changing thickeners are all techniques used in the world's top restaurants, and they're what Hunter expertly works with to turn out dishes such as a plate of pork in two forms: one rendered clear and almost jellied by xanthan gum; and another poached to yielding tenderness in a vacuum-packed bag and then flash-fried for crispness, with both versions crowned by newly-picked rocket flowers.
Many chefs would find it tough striking a balance between what all that fancy equipment can do and letting good produce go untouched. But Hunter manages to do it, perhaps because he knows how important it is 'to appreciate natural forms and the natural state of the ingredients'.
'I do try to present nature,' he says, adding that he enjoys 'working with anything that is of a genuine high quality'.
The ingredients that he is used to will not all be available when he cooks in Singapore in a couple of weeks' time, but the chef aims to make the best of it. 'Because of the produce we use at the Royal Mail, we can never fully represent what we do there. We just try to use the best possible produce available to where we are,' he says. 'For the dinners at Iggy's I have chosen dishes that best represent our cuisine that don't rely so heavily on the more delicate ingredients we grow.'
Jeff Ramsey
Tapas Molecular Bar
2-1-1 Nihonbashi Muromachi,
Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Tel +81 3 3270 8188
JUST when you thought it was safe to eat out again, along comes a guy like Jeff Ramsey to dispel the notion that molecular gastronomy is losing flavour - I mean favour - among the culinary cognoscenti. Sure, world-class restaurants that focus on the science of cooking - like elBulli and The Fat Duck - are still booked out year in and year out, but for some time, there has been a sense that when chefs seeking a spot on the celebrity bandwagon are more gimmick-driven than produce-driven, it's time to start eating elsewhere.
Ramsey, 33, the 'chief culinary engineer' at the eight-seat Tapas Molecular Bar in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Tokyo, and recent recipient of a Michelin Star, is savvy enough - and good enough - to recognise that while the molecular movement, with all its smoke and mirrors (not to mention syringes and blow torches), can only transport experienced (or jaded) diners so far, you can still provide a memorable meal by ensuring that the technique doesn't overwhelm the produce. It's a pretty fine line when the tools of the trade include liquid nitrogen, olive 'clouds' and truffle-scented tissue, but the true test comes when the diner puts whatever is on the plate into his mouth.
There's no shortage of showmanship in a meal by Ramsey - who is performing nightly at Dolce Vita for only eight diners per seating - but there is also evidence that the wow factor has been tempered by a desire to include a dose of substance along with all that chemistry-influenced style.
Molecular cuisine is defined to a large extent by the imagination of the chef, and there was ample evidence of Ramsey's creative talents at a tasting session earlier this week. Despite the fact that he had only arrived in town the night before, the 12-course menu he concocted (abbreviated from the 23-course tasting menu that is being served nightly) was fun, inventive and entertaining without being over the top. There were a couple of hiccups along the way (a miso soup 'yolk' that had trouble staying intact, for example) but in general, it was great culinary theatre - fascinating and tasty as well.
Expert practitioners of the molecular genre rely on one basic philosophy above all else to dazzle diners with: what you see is not necessarily what you get. So it is that a single spaghetti strand is actually made from liquid parmesan, gelatin and agar, while what looks to be a conventional lamb chop turns out to be Ramsey's version of xiao long pau, where a frozen cube of lamb jus is implanted and sealed inside the chop so that the juices ooze out when the meat is cut into.
Other dishes include a tomato gazpacho with powdered (freeze dried) olive oil, a poached lobster with airy potato vanilla mousse and grilled sirloin that is not grilled, but cooked sous vide at 53 degrees for 12 hours and then infused and spread with Japanese charcoal oil to fool the palate into thinking that the meat has been grilled. For additional impact, a paper serviette, scented with truffle water, accompanies the dish.
Several other signature dishes are featured from Ramsey's extensive repertoire - much of it inspired by the likes of Ferran Adria - but even if you know what to expect, the experience is not diminished. 'Once you have the concept, you have to match the technique and be able to tell a story,' says Ramsey. 'Technique is great, but it's just a tool - it's all about giving the customer a feeling.'
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