April 15, 2011
Famed Singapore Chef Cooks Up West-Eats-East
fusion at Double Crown
Chef Willin Low was invited by Chefs Farmerie and Rendell to jump into the kitchen last week to cross connect the Double Crown menu with his own Anglo-Asian creations. Willin is known internationally for his take on “Mod-Sin”, aka Modern Singapore cuisine, and for being an established lawyer in a former life chapter. Here’s a bit of the fun the chefs cooked up collaboratively…pay close attention to the Laksa Linguine with Tiger Prawns at bottom, which got rave reviews from diners that night. We may have to reprise that one.
April 5, 2011
The Examiner Food Critic:
On Anglo-Asian NONYA
The Examiner’s Food Critic Howard Portnoy popped in for a long and lovely Sunday Supper and reviewed Double Crown’s new dishes:
Double Crown’s Nonya Nights
“…Brad Farmerie and Chris Rendell’s Sunday Supper at Double Crown dazzles. Oh, I know, it’s not intended to, at least not in theory. They call it Nonya dining. Nonya—that’s a Malay honorific translating roughly to “housewife” and connoting home cooking. And this is presumably the kind of simple meal a Nonya might cobble together for her family in Malaysia or Singapore. And where exactly does your typical Nonya go to acquire buttery Wagyu beef for a Thai-style beef salad that also includes oyster mushrooms, garlic shoots, and fried basil leaves? Or juicy prawns the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fist, “crumbed” in oatmeal and fried, along with a fistful of garlic?
Double Crown’s culinary point of departure is the joint cuisines of the former British colonies in southeast Asia. These are cooking styles that draw on explosive flavors, here a blast of chili, there an earthy jolt from cilantro or a sour citrus note. On the four-course Nonya menu, which changes from week to week, you might thus find red curry, coconut milk, and kaffir lime joining forces as a poaching medium for a quartet of pristine oysters. Actually, the hot mixture is spooned on top of the oysters, which are still on the half shell, barely heating them through, somehow magnifying their briny sweetness—a dish that will wow even the most diehard raw oyster aficionado. Sometimes the kitchen strays beyond the borders of the old empire, serving for example a refreshing Japanese-inspired salad of braised hijiki and daikon radish as a counterpart to fanned slices of seared yellowtail. The salad and barely cooked fish are livened by a salty splash of citrus-soy dressing .
March 20, 2011
Modern Asia, Classic Britain by way of Kalamansi Custard…
Kalamansi Custard: New East-West sweet treat by Pastry Chef Ryan Butler
Pastry Chef Ryan Butler has been charged with the task of developing a whole new menu of east-meets-west sweets for our Summer restaurant adventure; and he’s done a pretty bang-up job, if we do say so ourselves. “The challenge with culture blending desserts” explains Ryan, “is to maintain a delicate flavor balance while varying textures, temperatures, and shapes…and its also challenging to keep anything on the menu for more than a few weeks. These are exciting ingredients to play with and I like to shake it up as much as possible.”
Ryan has been doing exactly that, experimenting with elements like miso and soy, heightened combinations of salty and sweet, and softer flavored ingredients like passion fruit, mango, and Thai basil. In his Kalamansi Custard, he combines a burst of fresh citrus with tangerine scraped ice and a tart lime pudding. As Ryan says, “It’s a little bit modern Asia, a little bit classic Britain.” Mostly, it just tastes good though.
March 18, 2011
20 CULTURES, ONE ISLAND
Mail to the Andaman Islands had to make its way through 12 “way-stations” before arriving at its tiny, sunny destination.
Tamer, our Manager and Aussie world traveler extraordinaire, has been trotting about remote islands in Southeast Asia, picking up interesting ideas for the home front. He just returned from the Andaman Islands, specifically Havelock, where he notes “it feels like the globe converges in one small town”. The Islands were originally inhabited by native people with some intermittent interference and culture blending from the mainland. By the time the 1700s rolled around the British were establishing penal colonies there until the Japanese did a little WWII takeover…only to have the Indians snatch the islands from them a few years later.
While its history is rich, the food seemed to have a lesser impact, “I was hoping to find a great street food scene, but unless you are looking for a super dodgy, week-old samosa, this is not really the culinary destination one might think.” Tamer notes, however, there was one significant dining success during his stay: “It revolved around ordering a variety of items that are spooned onto a large banana leaf. The typical meal was dry mutton fry, chicken biryiani, chicken tikka, tandoori paratha, mixed raita, and mango pickle. This is done with the right hand, of course. One mixes them together and then shovels the whole lot into one’s mouth with a slick move of the thumb—super spicy, but delicious.”
