What’s cooking, good looking?

by Yeoh Siew Hoon

There we were sitting at breakfast at the Banyan Tree Lijiang, three friends from different corners of the world gathered for this somewhat on-a-whim kind of journey.

I had gone to the buffet and brought back a plate full of food – I love the Yunnan cross-the-bridge rice noodles. My male friend squealed. I thought a yak or something had wandered into the resort. But what he said was, “Wow, you can eat.” You know, the kind of words that can really melt a girl’s heart.

My girlfriend replied, “I love to travel with people who can eat. Aren’t you suspicious of people who don’t eat?”

Of late, I have been eating rather a lot. I mean, I have always believed in living to eat, but now it’s more like eating for a living.

I’ve had sumptuous dinners at the World Gourmet Summit in Singapore, been invited to fancy restaurants to taste the creations of Michelin star-rated chefs from Dubai to Shanghai to Beijing and tried the new organic menu at the Mezza9 at the Grand Hyatt Singapore.

But since the kitchen is more alien territory to me than the mountains of Lijiang, I have never really appreciated the passion that can go into cooking – until I met a chef who I swear could fry an egg with the fire in his eyes.

I met him in Beijing at the Blu Lobster, the new Western restaurant at the Shangri-La Hotel, Beijing. With the opening of its new Valley Wing, the hotel is determined to set itself apart from the competition, which it has to because it is located on what is generally regarded as the other side of the city.

Brian McKenna is an Irish lad – “there’s only one Ireland,” he says – born in a tough neighbourhood and at a time when the only way out for boys was either the army or the prison.

He chose the kitchen “because it’s one of the jobs you can do without education or qualifications”. Before he took up cooking though, he was boxing for a living, winning 20 fights in a trot one time.

You can still see the boxer in him every now and then, whenever he wants to make a point about something.

Like how he feels about foreign chefs who think they know it all and are here to teach locals a thing or two about cooking. Or about hotel food & beverage processes and systems that he believes would suck out the creative juices of any young person wanting to be a chef. Or about foreign chefs who will only cook with imported produce and not seek out local ingredients.

His first day on the job – he came to Beijing via Amsterdam where he ran Rain, a star-rated restaurant – he surprised his Chinese team by taking them to the local market.

“95% of what you eat at Blu Lobster is from China, whether it’s foie gras or the fresh vegetables,” he said. He’s built up relationships with local farmers to produce specially for Blu Lobster.

“We now get our own veal – I told a farmer how he had to keep his calves in the dark for 30 days. It’s a matter of getting out there and doing it yourself, and not staying in the kitchen and telling people what to do.”

But it was his cooking which did most of the talking for him, as far as I was concerned.

For three hours, he wooed (sorry, wowed) us with his creations – from a salad containing 42 ingredients, with slowly cooked egg, chardonnay jelly and hazelnut mayonnaise; Asian spiced crab risotto with avocado ice cream, tempura of crab claw, lemongrass bubbles; and beef cooked at 60 degrees, so tender you could eat it with a spoon.

The dessert, chocolate tart with “popping, oil, paint” melted and crackled in my mouth at the same time and made me long for childhood. That’s what good food should do, I believe – make you feel like a kid again.

Having no idea how to cook beef, I asked him rather innocently what’s the big deal about cooking it at 60 degrees? Well, let me tell you … very, very, very slowly.

Today, many “celebrity chefs” have emerged, offering new types of restaurants and bars. In Singapore, there’s one offering molecular gastronomy, which to me is like food created in a laboratory. It reminds me of an experiment I tried in chemistry class, only to have it blow up in my face.

It’s next to a bar called The Clinic where you sit on wheelchairs and hospital beds with drips. There’s an operating lamp (taken from a surgery) just in case you can’t see what you are drinking.

Everytime my older Chinese friends walk by, they hiss at it. “Choi. Bad luck.”

A friend once asked me – we were talking about food, of course – when do you cross the line between being creative and being gimmicky?

I think that as long as it tastes good in the end, it doesn’t matter how it’s done.

Which I know will be sacrilege to the ears of chefs – forgive me, Brian. See, it’s like a book. As long as it’s a good read, most people don’t really care how it was written, just that it was written, enjoyed and talked about.

Catch up with Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at The Transit Café – www.thetransitcafe.com