The gods of small things
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 26, 2011
If dining out is an adventure full of excitement, anticipation, even mystery, chef Andre Chiang delivers it in spades. His menu reveals little, with courses listed as Pure, Salt, Artisan, South, Texture, Unique, Memory and Terroir.That was the order on the evening we were there but it changes depending on that day's ingredients.Pure presents as a roll of raw scallop spread with seaweed paste and wrapped around aromatic Japanese chives. It sits in a puddle of lavender-shaded jus. Salt, which is sodium-free, is a Royal oyster dressed with a stem of tiny sea grapes and granny smith apple foam, while Memory is a foie gras custard in a black-truffle consomme.As with all chefs pushing the culinary envelope, the 29-year-old plays with your senses. He mixes sweet and savoury when you least expect it and food that presents as one thing is actually another. So, in Texture, is the risotto made of squid and are the calamari rolls created from rice? I've given it away now but there are plenty more surprises at the smart, converted traditional shophouse in Singapore's Chinatown district.The elegant dining room at Andre accommodates just 25 in one sitting each night. And that puts Chiang in line with other high-end chef-restaurateurs who are changing the face of fine dining, eschewing large places in favour of small. In the same city, Tetsuya Wakuda also has 25 seats at his new restaurant, Waku Ghin, with two sittings each night.In Sydney, Justin North's move to take his two-hat Becasse restaurant from Clarence Street to the Westfield centre means a change from 89 dining seats to 24."The biggest problem fine-dining restaurants have is to do really intense, amazing food consistently with 60 for lunch and 70 for dinner every day," North says. "It is virtually impossible to keep it at a high level. We wanted to increase the creativity, quality and consistency of what we do in a dream restaurant with a small number of covers."The ratio of staff to diners at the new Becasse will be almost one to one. To do that under normal circumstances, North reckons, he would have to charge about $500 a head but Becasse is just one of his new ventures in Westfield and it will share back-of-house facilities, such as a full-time butcher, but not kitchens. There will be one sitting nightly and he expects to charge about $200 a person plus wines.Waku Ghin costs about $310 plus drinks and Andre is about $225, with $160 for matching wines.Creativity never came cheap.The writer travelled to Singapore as a guest of Singapore Tourism but is negotiating a bank loan for dining at Andre.
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald