Princess d’Annam Cooks Up a New Menu Every Day
Sunday, 23 Aug, 2009
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New restaurant combines guests’ ideas and desires, experiences with local food
Unlike most hotels and resorts that roll out new menus seasonally, the new restaurant at the Princess d’Annam Resort & Spa debuts a new card every single day.
Whether guests voice a hankering for pan-fried snapper, grilled cobia on a lemongrass skewer, bouillabaisse or any of dozens of other dishes in Chef La Thuan An’s repertoire, the experience of dining each evening is as fresh as that day’s catch from the South China Sea.
“There is no default menu,” said Jean-Philippe Beghin, general manager of the resort on Ke Ga Bay near Phan Thiet on Vietnam’s south-central coast. “In the same way that performance artists feed off their audience, we’ve charged our chef and F&B manager with acquiring new information about that day’s group of guests and using that information to develop that evening’s menu.”
This new, ‘consultative approach’ to dining is one of the hallmarks of the Princess d’Annam. The 57-unit, all-villa resort opened earlier this year with a mission to establish itself as one of Vietnam’s most individual properties. The food and beverage consultation is part of that effort. As the chef and F&B manager greet guests daily, they remain alert to the interests of guests who are inclined to talk about gastronomy.
“It happens all the time,” said Thierry Mounon, F&B manager. “People love to talk food. And really, when they’re on holiday, they want their gastronomic experience to be much more than selecting items from a one-size-fits-all list. So many people want an interactive dining experience.”
Two to three times a week, Chef An and Mounon shop in the local fishing village. As often as not, they’re accompanied by guests who want to review the catch and query the local fishermen.
“If they have had this experience with the fishermen, then later, when they get into that crab or snapper or grouper, they’re bringing so much more to the experience than consumption!” said An.
The chef is a native of Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam and seat of the country’s grandest culinary tradition. His father is Chinese, and his mother is Vietnamese. He absorbed both culinary traditions as a boy, and then built on that foundation with a long stint on New Caledonia, where he was schooled in French cuisine.
At the Princess d’Annam, An presides over an 80-seat restaurant where the preferred seats occupy an expansive terrace that takes in views of the bay and its iconic lighthouse. An air-conditioned interior, the pool deck and tables on the beach complement the anchoring terrace as dining venues.
The resort was designed by the renowned Singaporean architect Tan Hock Beng. The interiors were designed by Vincent Koh and the grounds were landscaped by Alan Carle, who also designed the ginger gardens at the Singapore Botanical Gardens.
Valere Tjolle
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