Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks.
Today I have a very special guest, my friend Ivan Brehm.
Hi Ivan.
Hi Eric, good to see you my man.
I would say like the first thing I would ask you is a little bit about your background
because as far as I know you're Brazilian, born but also German and is there anything
else to the mix?
There is a bunch to the mix, like most Brazilians I know, we all come from multiple parts of
the world and just get together in Brazil.
Everything ends in Samba.
On my dad's side of the family we're Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian and German and on my mom's
side of the family we are Syrian, Lebanese, Spanish and Italian and all like first and
second generation Brazilians.
Okay that's kind of similar to me, like my father is German and my mother is Spanish
and I was born and raised in Venezuela.
There you go, it's the Latin American modus operandi.
And I think that's also like the perfect melting pot to get like a food or culinary education
at home.
It was.
How did that start?
How did you start cooking?
I thought I was going to be a lawyer forever, my family is lawyers and you know as you get
familiar with this stuff and one day I watched an ad in a magazine for a French school in
France like learn how to cook and speak French at the same time and there was a chef picture,
it was a lady with a whisk and I looked at it and it was the first time I actually ever
considered cooking as a profession you know, before eating was the thing and then that
was the first time, I might have been 16 years old.
How did you end up at Perseid?
That's one of the best restaurants in the 21st century I would say.
It was almost accidental, I went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York after having
gone through a couple of cooking schools in Brazil.
I had a teacher in Brazil who was American and the CIA had a partnership with this cooking
school in Brazil and he's like you need to go and just go cook somewhere, you know, go
get this formal education properly and I went.
I had to do an internship to graduate and the only person I wanted to work for was Thomas
Keller.
I had stumbled upon the book which wasn't accessible in Brazil when I was there and
then a friend of mine showed me the French Laundry Cookbook and I was really curious
and then I remember reading about the fire.
I was just essentially very excited and lo and behold, after a few months of trying,
it really accidentally, my brother called me to say, hey, I heard, I remember you wanted
to work with Thomas Keller and I'm like, yeah, but it's impossible, they don't reply to
my messages.
So I'm having a beer right now with one of his captains, floor captains and I'm like,
dude, please give him my resume and like it was an accident, he just shared a beer with
a stranger and that stranger turned out to be somebody that really connected me to the
restaurant and I went and it was just incredible.
It was a very mind-opening experience to this day.
It's like one of the most formative things that I've ever done.
It was almost a year of just intense learning.
I have some questions about that because I've heard that there's like this mentor thing
that he has in his restaurants that once you enter that you have like an assigned mentor
who will be with you in the first month.
How does that work?
I think, well, I worked at Perse at a time where the structure within the Thomas Keller
group was not entirely established and so it was literally six months after the fire.
I spent virtually a year there and I think a lot of these ideas were starting to grow
but there wasn't a structure yet.
But I do remember informal requests from head chefs.
At the time, Jonathan Beno was the chef there and I remember a conversation where I was
very much partnered with a guy called Rory the mad dog and he was a delicious, amazing
human being and a real true mentor in all sorts.
I really have nothing but deep love for the guy.
He fell in love with clove cigarettes which I used to smoke at the time.
So every now and again, I just give him a little pack here and there as an exchange.
And my parting gift when I left Perse was a Jacques Pepin book with one of the most
lovely memos written inside.
Like he signed the book.
It was beautiful.
The experience was amazing also because I had lived and breathed that thing.
Like it was just, that was on crack, man.
That thing was just everything I wanted.
I would walk 16 blocks a day there and back to just imagine how I could improve from like
the a thousand mistakes that I was doing.
It was my first real kitchen job.
Wow.
That's like a crazy start to start there, you know?
It really set the tone and within the weeks and essentially failing after failing, after
failing within the first three weeks and then the first month and then noticing improvement.
And after that leaving, like having grown so, so much and it was an impossible thing
to redo, you know, like I love that.
It was a very good, good experience.
Do you have like any specific anecdote or like a funny story or moment that you could
remember from Perse?
I think the one that's stood in my mind for the longest, for obvious reasons was one day
out of, and everything changed after this day.
It was like, it was literally night and day, but I was doing, it was probably my first,
the end of my first month there.
And I was very much struggling with the pace, you know, and you look at these guys and they
were freaking amazing.
The chefs, you know, you see yourself like years ahead and these guys were just crazy.
And I remember, I don't remember what I did as a mistake.
And somebody just literally belittled the living crap out of me.
Made fun of, made fun of my standard issue knife, you know, like I was using the school's
knife and these guys all had Japanese knives.
It's like, look, if you're serious about this, go buy a knife and stop fucking around.
You need to do this properly, blah, blah, blah.
And I was just overwhelmed and all.
And I went to the bathroom and I was really like bawling.
It's like, oh, don't cut out for this.
You know, this is crazy.
And it took me like a good five minutes of just sobbing in the bathroom to get back to
work and like just pick myself up.
And as I opened the door, like red eyes, just teary, Laura Cunningham, I believe is her
name, is Thomas Keller's wife.
Yeah, she was waiting to use the bathroom and her face was like literally this close
to my face in front of you.
And she looked at me and she's like, are you okay, chef?
And I'm like, yeah.
And I closed the door, just bawling.
And I thought it was everything.
Like it couldn't get any lower, you know, then it became like this cool for me.
I always refer back to this because like I think this like these moments are poignant
and when you hit the ground is when you jump the highest, right?
Like you can you really need contact with with the ground first.
That was my ground, man.
Like it was really the next day I was a freaking beast.
I had similar moments in Mugaritz, which is the next place I wanted to talk with you
about, which is where we met.
And I remember a couple of times in Mugaritz.
The first one was when they sent me to the dishwashing station.
I think that was my first day and it was you to the dishwashing station.
And in Spanish you say pica.
And I didn't know that word.
And I asked someone, what is pica?
What is this?
What is he asking me to do?
I remember those talks in the dishwashing station.
Yeah, those were intense.
So like and how did you end up in Mugaritz, which is where we met?
So I it was just I started after the French law and after per se, I started just looking,
you know, I was hooked.
It was everything I wanted to be, everything I wanted to do.
And that was after like an understanding, you know what I mean?
I wanted the expression and I wanted the job was everything I've ever wanted, really, and
just to be better at it.
And I remember maybe a year before, a year and a half before the El Bulli cover with
Fernandre, which was iconic.
I don't know what he was.
Remember the Times magazine?
Yeah, with the foam.
How do you call that in English?
Like a fulmer?
Yeah, I think the carrot foam dish, right?
Yeah.
I don't remember.
And so I left and I'm like, these guys are just freaking wicked.
And I started researching and it just seemed like Spain was it.
Like there wasn't bound by tradition in a sense of weight, right?
Yeah, especially at that moment, like end of the 90s, beginning of the 2000s.
That was a moment of Spain for sure.
Yeah.
And that's, I just went for it.
I remember reading an article, there's an interview with Andoni about like essentially
how food and emotions interact, right?
And how you can evoke emotions through food, just a simple act of placing something, can
connote something, can, I don't know, say something.
And that was like, this is the guy, you know, I really wanted to work for him.
Yeah.
Andoni is really a guy that, I don't know, that cultivates you in the way he talks.
Like that he's like a punchline producer.
Every third line he's saying something really that resonates in you, you know, that you
remember for the rest of your life.
It grabs you.
Yeah.
And there's so many, that's so true, Eric.
I have too many of those conversations in my mind, you know, and even to this day, I
think to listen to him is a blessing, you know.
I've often referred when in doubt or had questions about the business or what I wanted to do,
every now and again we speak about it and he says a lot with very little.
And I think you can see that in his food as well, you know, like sometimes with two or
three components.
I remember like, see these dishes, let's not talk about verduritas, right?
But let's talk about verduritas.
I think I've talked about it in another episode, but just to go through it, verduritas literally
means vegies.
Yeah.
So this was like the veggie dish, but it was like the gargoyle version of Mugaritz.
It was the gargoyle.
Yeah.
It was like 120 ingredients, like individual leaves of different plants and flowers and
vegetables cooked on different ways.
And it was crazy.
It was nuts.
And you would play this like an Ikebana with medic tweezers and you know, it was crazy.
It was really crazy.
It would take time.
I remember if you were behind, you're done, right?
If the guests didn't arrive at the precise time or you were caught behind.
Oh my God.
You have to do it again.
It was horrendous.
But that thing of like saying so much with so little.
So Mugaritz made sense.
And it was, I still to this day, like, and to no detriment of all the experiences I had
that were formative and all the rations I worked, but it's still the place that I house
the most memories of what happened there.
And at that time as well, you know, I remember that crew and that feeling in the kitchen.
Yeah.
And that year was crazy with so many guys that would become superstars working in the
same kitchen at the same time.
That was really magic.
It was.
And to have him there involved and passionate and like literally show you the difference
between the leaf here and the leaf here, just a little bit like this, you know what I mean?
Well, actually, like I had a similar moment from that deal you told about going to cry
to a bathroom and it was with that dish with the verduritas.
And I remember I was fucking it up.
I couldn't do it.
And Andoni was there and he could also be like really harsh.
And it was like, yeah, you have to put super poetic and then like a monster.
You should put the leaf to create volume.
That's not fucking volume.
And I was like, oh, oh, and I started shaking.
Now he's shaking.
Someone take him away.
You know, and I was there to take him away to clean something in the basement.
You know, and I was like, I was just about to cry there.
Like, you know, and then Danny Lasser came.
By another incredible human being.
Jesus, the whole macro.
He's like an incredible chef.
And well, Danny Lasser, I would say, is like my main mentor on attitude inside the kitchen,
you know, on how to keep it cool and how to keep the tone and how to be respectful and
how to be at the same time pedagogic without being an asshole.
And all of these things that he embodies.
So he just takes me back and shows me how to do it properly.
And then with a proper methodology, you know, like you put one leaf, then you turn the dish
and blah, blah, blah.
So you create this effect.
You start with the larger than the smaller.
And yeah, and at the end, it was like a dope dish.
When you saw it like properly executed, it was something really.
Yeah, and those feelings of doing that afterwards, right?
To be able to feel first that it's impossible and you never be able to achieve it.
And then just persisting and feeling it.
That was very nice.
Danny, I have no words.
Both Andoni and Danny, it was a wonderful time.
So working there for sure.
I remember that was a moment that will never leave my head because I think it's very much
connected to the way that we see food today.
But I remember asking Andoni if we could talk more about conceptually what was happening
in the food, you know, because we were consistently just doing the dishes, right?
But we had no idea what the creative impulse was.
And there was two things that happened.
One was he took us for a walk in nature for like four hours or something like this.
So the whole team was grabbed.
And it was at the time where he had the violet ice cream with the chocolate roll dusted
with green tea powder or something like this.
And it looked like a tree trunk with moss on it.
And he took us on this walk.
And I remember we were walking around, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he stopped in front of like a viewpoint, like he could see it was a valley.
I don't remember what, where.
I really have no idea where we were.
There's lots of rocks and a big tree trunk and there were flowers and the tree trunk
had moss on it.
And it looked like the freaking deserts.
And just when we were there, you know, and he didn't have to say anything.
But this, this mimetic aspect that was just so everywhere and this realization that like
inspiration exists everywhere you look, you just have to be looking right.
And especially back then you could really like, if you take the chlorophyllia book,
it really feels like a walk in the forest.
You know, like that's like a thing that you can easily see in the way the dishes are played.
Yeah.
No doubt about it.
Well, that natural element of the food is such an alluring thing to look at, right?
Because you know it's edible, but at the same time, it's almost like magical.
You're looking at something that you'd be walking over or walking with.
And the other one was him talking about the equivalence of carrots and caviar, you know,
that you had to stop looking at ingredients from their perceived value because the job
of a chef was to create value with those ingredients, not to just pass over value, right?
Translate the already existing value.
And that stayed in my mind forever to like look at a product and not think of its, not
only think of its monetary value and its perceived kind of status, but also like what's going
to happen?
What are you going to do with it?
You know?
Yeah.
I also remember in that line of thought at that time, he would talk a lot about the redefinition
of luxury.
Yeah.
That luxury shouldn't be like gold or silver or having like super fancy dishware.
Like it could be just having water from the river of the forest next to the restaurant
if it's like a super nice water and a super nice river, you know, like that's actually
luxury not flying water from Italy.
Yeah.
I think if only everyone had had that talk.
Then you ended up at Fat Dog, which is another huge name in culinary history, Hassan Blumenthal.
What about that?
How did you end up there?
Well, I spent after Mugaritz, I spent some time traveling Spain and kind of couldn't
find anywhere.
I remember calling Dunny from Madrid going like, I don't know what to do.
Like I've had trials at all these places.
I don't want to work in any of them.
After this restaurant, I don't know where to go.
And he's like, I can assume it's very difficult because there's no restaurant on the planet
that is like us, but you have to start somewhere and just let life take you, which was great
advice and awesome of him to give me the time.
He probably doesn't remember this chat, but I'll never forget.
Was it Dunny or Andoni?
It was Dunny.
It was Dunny Lassa.
Dunny.
Yeah, Dunny is like such an amazing guy.
And after that, I left and went to Italy to take a break really, like to do like Osteria
cooking, you know, I spent some time in Alba.
There's a small Osteria there called Isognatori and then some time at a wine cantina.
And then I started working at a castle for a little bit as a chef there.
And it all felt like I was just really repairing.
I needed to be repaired a bit.
And then the duck came.
I got an opportunity as an intern.
I took it.
I literally just gave everything I had.
It was at the time the duck was just, it was right on the year that Sattar got its best
Russian in the world.
The book was being written.
There was an energy there with folks that were just really gunning for it.
And I had never worked at a place where people were so absolutely interested about what was
happening with the food they were cooking.
People during service would be talking about like stabilizing agents and specific temperatures
about beef and should we do 56?
And I don't mean like the chef, the head chef.
I meant like CDPs and sous chefs and almost like a weird democratic kind of bit where
people had voice.
Is it?
It's like a tight space, you know?
And so like a very top down hierarchical system would have felt unbearable almost.
So people during service consistently feedbacks like, hey, a couple degrees hotter, a couple
degrees colder for everything.
Like that was something that in retrospect, like a lot of the Spanish Russians, I remember
working at a restaurant I won't name that has multiple stars too, but they would make
the sauce in the beginning in Spain.
They would make the sauce in the beginning of the evening and still serve it by the end
of the night, this thick kind of glazy whatever that they just slopped on the plate.
At the duck, if the stuff wasn't the same viscosity with the same acidity at the same
temperature, like you get sent back, no questions asked, you know, the standards were just incredible
and the interaction between chefs regardless of their ranking.
I mean, it has been one of the best restaurants in the world for many years and it has also
been like a game changing restaurants, one that brought science and cooking a lot closer.
I remember as a kid, the first time I heard the concept of a culinary lab or gastronomic
lab, I'm not sure I think it was culinary lab, it was the name of a show, Discovery
Channel where Hassan Blumenthal was the host.
It was so good.
What a wonderful show.
Yeah, and I remember watching that and I was already starting cooking back then and it
was like, okay, these guys are really doing like dope platings and conceptually deep dishes.
This is not just anything, you know?
And I googled and I see like this guy has three Michelin stars and he was already on
the 50 best list that was just starting.
This must have been like around 2005.
So I was like, man, this is incredible.
I have never gotten deep into his work, like having read his books or getting deep into
his recipes or having go to his restaurants, but I for sure understand the impact he's
had.
And to be honest, it's worth way more credit than it gets, you know, to be frank.
He is a genius in the way that he conceives food, but also in the way that he just approaches
the restaurant outside of just the food context, you know?
Like I remember having later during my tenure there, having conversations about like, should
we start warming the handle of the door of the restaurant during wintertime and cooling
it down during wintertime so that people's first impression of the restaurant as they're
holding something is soothing, you know?
Oh, it's so cold outside and the door handle is warm.
Should we change the font?
Is the sound okay?
What is the smell?
Is the light all right?
What is...
If everything was curated, not to try to like mislead people, but just to really try to
give people the best possible experience, you know?
There weren't conversations about giving people an inferior product and just try to
make the rest of it up.
It was like the best of everything on all sorts of angles, you know, like ingredients,
wine, glassware, everything was curated to just give you the best possible opportunity
to experience it.
My friend, John Reggevold, he has to be one of the persons I know that has eaten in most
restaurants, you know, he's been like everywhere.
And he says that that's on his top for sure, like his top three restaurants he's eaten
in his life.
And he told me like the experience was first, it's hard to get a table, you have to wait
a lot.
But then the conversation where they were taking the booking, they made him some like
random questions.
And he mentioned like two things, like a place where he traveled and something else.
And they incorporated that into the menu and into the conversations he had while being
there.
And this is a reference to your recent trip to blah, blah, blah.
And you know, like these kinds of things, which it's absolutely crazy.
Yeah.
And way before, I mean, I know 11 Medicine Park used to do something similar to this,
but there were that level of proximity.
It's funny, the greats, I remember that story of Anthony Bourdain getting a tobacco custard
or something like this at the French Laundry when he came to eat.
Yeah, I think these guys are very much in tune with what that represents for somebody.
Right.
And that's true hospitality in that sense.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Having someone at home and being a great host.
Yeah.
Those things are amazing.
But in all areas.
And it was a place also because it's in the UK, right?
I think the treatment is very different from a Latin country, the way that we engage and
interact with each other.
There is a different tone to things.
And it was nice to be in an environment like this because this was the hardest experience
I've ever had without fail.
I mean, growing up as my first experience that per se was very difficult, but just to
have the consistency and the consistent requirement for grit to just be there day in and day out,
you know, turning artichokes, for example, and nailing every single one of them.
It was impossible.
Like, and the desire to get it perfect.
Everybody knew there was no such a thing, but people were going for it.
I remember my well-being trained, I think I was on my third week and they took training
super seriously.
I was on my second or third week and I broke.
I was like, I can't do this.
This is intense.
You know, please call Alan Herrick, who's the gentleman training me, wonderful man as
well.
If Alan hears this, hello Alan.
And I said, I can't do this.
And the moment I said this, Ashley, who was the head chef there, took me outside like
almost instantaneously and said, don't you ever say that ever.
You know?
Like, it's okay to not be able to do something right now, but don't say you can't do it.
You can do it.
Just freaking put your mind to it and push on, man.
Get in there and tear it up.
And it was the first Russian I realized that expected of you so, so much, but also on the
other end, edify you to deliver it.
You know, there was conversations that were HR related before.
Any Russian really had any HR preoccupation.
There are conversations about your feelings, your mood, chats about biohacking in the corner.
You know what I mean?
Like, it was a place that was really trying to expect it a lot, but also was willing to
provide you that level of commitment there.
And I hadn't had experienced that before.
It was a wonderful experience.
Yeah, that sounds crazy.
You also reminded me of this story I was telling earlier about being sent to the dishwasher
station that was actually Paco Morales.
He was head chef at Bogares.
And I was like, you!
To the Pica!
And I asked him, what is Pica?
And they told me there, and I was really down, you know, like I really felt like shit.
And I look around me, everything full of dirty pots.
And I start cleaning, you know, like completely defeated, you know, like almost about to cry.
And then Chema Martinez was a chef at a wonderful restaurant in Barcelona called Amposta, Bodega
Amposta, which I really, really recommend.
He was already like a bougie veteran.
He already knew the whole thing, how it worked.
And he came in and, come on here, I'll show you how to do it.
And he was like, pam pam pam, doing everything like a fast pace, like having a methodology,
like also assuming it with a different attitude.
That was really life changing for me on how to take these things, you know?
Yeah.
And I think not these days, not to deviate too much, but I think we're touching on this
without talking about it.
But a lot, and rightfully so these days, gets discussed about the treatment of chefs in
the kitchen and restaurants and abuse and mental health.
Yeah, we talk a lot about that here at Potluck.
And all of those bits are rightfully discussed.
But I'd say that a significant amount of some of these most challenging moments that I
had were equally met by people that were in the system, the chefs, the head chefs, the
sous chefs, the kitchen porters that provided a level of humanity and interaction with you
that was actually quite healing and edifying.
And while I know that there is a limit for these things, and this is in no way an apology
for folk to mistreat, abuse and mishandle their authority, but that there is something
to be said about the challenges and meeting them head first and having the support of
folk around you to edge you forward.
And there were an interesting time, I think, in the industry where that could very easily
be misconstrued for toxicity or abuse, you know?
And while I've had abusive bosses in the past, and I won't name them here just because I
also credit them for a substantial amount of my growth overall, I do remember these folks
that were serious with me with a lot of gratitude.
They really gave me the opportunity to be better.
They expected more from me, and I in turn expected more from myself too.
Yeah, like I also had those moments of, as you said, making things I thought I would
never be able to do, you know, and doing them easily, you know, after training.
That's what training is.
Yeah.
And especially in a vocational gig like this, right?
Like I think that there is so much of the language of what we do is really learned on
the job.
It's not learned in a book.
And you can go to the best culinary school in the world that if you haven't repeated
that process a thousand times, you won't master it, right?
And if cooking is a language, really, you can know the basic words and express a basic
sentence.
But if you want to poetically say something, if you want to categorically say something,
it takes understanding that vocabulary with a lot of clarity.
And that's years making mistakes, spelling things incorrectly, being reminded of how
incoherent you are.
And not enough is said about that process, but maybe that's a conversation for another
year.
Yeah, no, I actually wanted to jump on that.
Like after all this background, you ended up in Singapore opening Nory, which is where
you're in.
Is that pronounced right?
Which is where you're working now.
How did this start?
What was the goal when you opened this place?
I was in Singapore already working at a restaurant group and I decided to leave Singapore and
go back to Brazil and in the interim, after having quit my job here and preparing for
a move, got called onto a meeting with who is now my business partner, a lovely man called
Lilik Peng.
And it was a very fruitful chat and we talked about a bunch of stuff and the restaurant
opportunity was one of them.
And he said, look, I don't have anything right now, but in the future, if there's an opportunity,
I'll let you know.
And there was literally a couple of weeks later, there was the building that he'd found.
And I remember it was the week that I was flying to Brazil.
I remember drawing the restaurant based on the floor plan on the flight and having conversations
about the kitchen while in Brazil.
And literally the restaurant was designed and built within a month and a half of me
being away.
It was so fast that by the time I arrived, I had no idea what we were going to cook.
Like I didn't have a menu yet.
I had the urge to have a restaurant and to drive an idea forward.
Was there exactly what was the initial spark?
You had like just like saying what, bringing out what you had inside or how would you define
that?
Yeah.
Okay.
It was that like there was, there's the hippie side of things.
That was very much after that.
I wanted to understand how to just express, express what you felt.
And a lot of that was like my background and so, and the travels.
And I was always drawing from inspiration from other places, trying to include ingredients
that were either alien or underused in the cultures that I was representing.
Very curious about ethnic everything and music and food.
And so one day I had a bad interaction with a guest, with a human at a Lyft.
I said good morning and the person like turned their back to me and refused to say good morning
back.
And I said good morning again, three times.
And I used to live on the 17th floor.
So I had enough time on that Lyft.
And when I got to the ground, I went onto like a full spiral.
It was like, how can we be so shit with each other?
And then that day I carried that like for a while.
And then it kind of, I started to think about it.
And I sat in the kitchen floor, had a conversation with my wife about my day and then said, like,
I don't understand, like just because we're different, why would this person not recognize
me?
You know, like, absolutely.
And then it clicked.
It's like, why not they have a restaurant that's about showing you people how we're
more alike than we are different.
You know, that despite the different shirts we wear, if we look underneath, we'll find
that there's way more stuff that we share than not.
And to be able to not be confused for a hippie and dismissed, I was like, the only way to
do this is to throw research at the problem.
So let's study the living crap out of food traditions and recognize how is it that they're
so expressively different, because I'm pretty sure that at the heart of it, we'll find
out they all stem from specific bits that are shared, specific codes.
And that was really the beginning of Crossroads.
I came to call that as Crossroads cooking and eventually Crossroads thinking.
So Crossroads cooking and Crossroads thinking, and I think it's crazy, or better said, like
completely appropriate for Singapore and also for your context, since you told me you have
so many different heritage from different cultures.
And at the same time, I would say it would be okay to say that the foundational narrative
of Singapore is that it is a country built by migrants, right?
Yeah, that we know it's a, it's a, that's a difficult story there.
And I think Singapore is still trying to figure that one out because it's as a country, it's
quite young.
But I do agree with what you're saying.
It just felt very natural for me to jump into this specifically because of the place that
I was in.
It is very much a melting pot also of cultures that I was very also illiterate on.
And so every day is a school day for me.
And it's still 11 years on, almost 12 years on here.
And there's not one day that you don't just notice something that is new, you know, that's
one of the reasons why I'd love to be here so much as a chef.
But the, also the narrative of the country is still forming.
It's a relatively young nation that had very much custodians, people who were here before
the arrival of the Chinese, before the arrival of the British, way before the arrival of
the British, which are the Malays, right?
The Peninsular Malays.
And so that ethno narrative there is still being formed, which is great.
It's great to be in a country that's still kind of having these conversations because
you notice the bones are not entirely calcified yet, you know?
Like you can have that chat.
I think it would be really interesting if you could share like through an example of
a dish, like a complete process of how did it start and how did it end that exemplifies
what crossroads thinking is.
Yeah.
I'll use one as an analogy and then explain how that exploded into crossroads thinking
afterwards, which is kind of like systems thought, but applied to the arts and culture.
So if we use the example of sushi, for example, I guess, and it's important for us to always
start with dishes that are iconic and representational of a particular culture, right?
And so we would take ceviche, sushi, pizza, things that are easily recognizable in part
of everybody's vocabulary there when they're referring to a culture.
And so taking the example of sushi, edamai sushi specifically, right?
The notion of a nigiri of rice that is slightly sour and slightly sweet with a fish slice
on top of it, fresh, right?
Sometimes pickled or maybe cooked, but most often fresh.
And we use that to define a lot of what edamai cuisine is.
And it's an ambassador of Japanese food culture all over the world.
Exactly, and it's like a culinary word and a symbol, an icon, something people understand,
recognize and have their own ideas about it.
Exactly.
It serves a social function, also a social capital function.
People use it as a flex.
I've eaten at this restaurant, paid $2,000 for the best sushi of the live whatever.
So that's a great icon to start with.
Sushi really is, as it stands, is a very recent innovation of another type of sushi that came
in maybe 150 years ago called batera sushi, which is a pressed version of this dish.
The rectangular one, right?
Like with a press, I think.
Exactly.
That happened maybe 150 years, 100 years before, all around like the 18, between the 16 to
1800s, right?
And that was the other period of great cultural stability and progress in Japan.
There were very few wars.
That was when the shogunates united.
They were also closed to foreigners, right?
At that period.
Yeah.
Like the whole country was closed.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Bear with us as we're close for refurbishments.
And it was really what was going on, to be honest.
I mean, before that, the Japanese were literally consistently in fighting.
And after that, there was some form of not super lasting all the time, but there was
a piece there that allowed for roads and road movements for folk to develop ice houses for
the transport of items and for a middle class to be born.
And with the middle class being born, the requirement for a snacky, easy to make food
that could be served in counters or could be served in carts.
And so those 1600 to 1800 period represents really the birth of this dish of press sushi
that evolves into the hand shape of sushi that does not require a lot of space to make.
Right?
Both of these sushi's are the evolution of a specific dish that is about a thousand years
old in the Japanese lexicon, called nara sushi, which loosely translates to old or mature
sour rice.
And it was a preservation technique more than anything.
It's essentially pickling rice in a carbohydrate lead fermentation where you would bury the
fish in rice and salt and allow the process of fermentation to render the product shelf
stable.
These folks would just walk around, serve you steamed rice, take the nara sushi out and
just essentially flop it onto the dish.
You had a pungency, a form of sweetness to it because of the fermentation carbohydrate lead.
And it was served alongside other pungent items, things like ginger, for example.
So if I'm guessing right, what's going to happen next?
You applied your sophisticated fat dog culinary thinking into figuring out how to reproduce
this ancient sushi today?
Something like that.
It gets even, it gets freakier, my friend, because nara sushi isn't Japanese.
It was a technique that was brought into Japan together with rice.
And it's about 3,500 years old.
There's analogues all across Southeast Asia and Southeast China that predate the arrival
of rice to Japan.
Nara sushi is in some forms a dish called pho in the Cambodian tradition, very similar
to what's pra-hock now.
Kekasam in Malaysia, Carbo-Ajulette fermentation for fish that has been around for thousands
of years longer.
The history of nara sushi is the history of Buddhism into Japan, of tea, of lacquer, and
a bunch of other stuff in rice that isn't Japanese in origin.
It has very much roots right here where we're at.
Amazing.
And this is, of course, part of the story that you serve with your dishes at Nori.
Yeah, not only do we build the dish like that, but we try to recreate that link so that there
are Southeast Asian components to it as there are other Japanese-like components.
We use a nice toro iwashi when it's in season, and there are little like miyoga pickles.
There is lots of references to Japan, but there are references to the entire culinary
journey that had to happen for the edamai sushi to exist as it is today.
Amazing, so yeah, the crossroads cooking concept itself is explanatory now that you told me
the whole thing.
And it's great for creativity because ultimately you're mind mapping all of the evolutionary
processes that culture has gone through to the point where you can stop at any point
and understand the meaning of the choices you make.
And that is very cool for creative work when you understand the way that culture is webbed
and pushes itself outward, essentially.
All you need to do is just find a point of intersection further and you can make links
between Indonesia and Japan.
Or Portugal and Japan, like Tempura was introduced by Portuguese Jesuit monks into Japan, and
it comes from tempurada, which means season.
Yeah, and the peixinhos da horta, and then the connection between Arabs and Japan through
Portugal because the Arabs actually introduced the act of frying battered dishes into Portugal.
So those links, you can't break them anymore.
And the beauty about them is that they tell the story of us, right?
This is really not just the story of one place, it's the story of this web of people that
have moved.
And so once you get to the heart of it, and sorry to drag this for too long, but for me,
it fascinates me to this day, once you get that, it's a beautiful story of how we got
to this place and it really explains why we are different.
We carry this shared curiosity and code about the world, but our circumstances make that
curiosity express itself very differently.
And so it's really a code that's somewhat universal to some degrees and inherited that
gets applied to your circumstantial narratives and differences, your neighbors, your weather,
if you have wood or if you have water.
And all of those bits will manifest into cultural differences over time, but the DNA of these
bits is still very much related.
And when you take that for food, which is easy because we eat, and you start to look
at just culture in general, any human artifact is linked, is connected.
No, and it's super easy to do that if you decontextualize anything you do on your daily
basis, it can be something really crazy.
You know, like, oh, I'm smoking plants imported from tobacco factories or I'm having these
roasted seeds that are grown on the Ecuadorian side just to be more awake.
You know, like all these kind of things.
If you take them out of context, yeah, because it is the anthropological layer that gives
meaning to it.
Like how did that end up in your coffee cup?
Right?
There's a whole, yeah, a whole subtext there, set of forces that brought it there.
And you can't, once they become seen, they can't be unseen.
For me, I think one of the, I feel we spent a substantial amount of time creatively as
chefs trying to understand innovation from a technical standpoint.
And so, and there's plenty of that at the restaurant, you know, with cooking techniques
at the heart of our means of delivery.
But I think for the most part, cooking has been reduced to some degree to just the technical
element of that.
You know, it's like, do we have a new stabilizer that allows us to make a bubble that we can
pump smoke into it?
But what are we actually doing with it?
You know, and how is that forwarding our story or narratives?
How is that like, can we do more?
And I think when we talk about food in this particular manner, that split between art
and artisanal is palpable.
You know, when you can infuse, and this is why like folks like Heston, when he did like
the beetroot and orange jelly, a simple dish of beetroot and orange.
Yeah, let's explain that dish for the audience.
It's a genius dish, I think.
It screws your mind the moment you pay attention.
The waiter drops a purple jelly and an orange jelly in front of you and you're asked to
this is the beetroot and orange jelly.
Please start with the orange and you associate orange flavor with orange color, but that's
a golden beetroot, right?
And the moment you put the orange in your mouth, he realizes beats.
So when you start to play with these things, the condition of what you're doing stops
being just about like how to cook a steak.
And there's great value.
This is like literally 90% of the work.
I could call that sensory fooling or sensory hacking, something like that.
Yeah.
Well, you're playing with a human.
You're playing a joke.
Yeah.
It's like a sensory joke.
Like, haha, look, it was actually beetroot.
Exactly.
When you do that, I think you start to make people question things.
And I think not a lot of not a lot of that's going on.
And I feel, especially in the context of what we're doing, end of today, like with wars
and craziness out there, that this conversation is necessary.
You know, who are we?
Now I completely get what you mean with artisan and artist like the artisan will never.
Well, it's not his goal to make you like having like a, you know, like a revelation while
an artist, that's a goal, I think, you know, like to change.
Change something inside of you somehow.
I think so.
And there's merit in that, I think.
And from a food standpoint, I think we've evolved.
Like if you think of all the arts, I think there's a vocabulary for painting and music
and theater, right?
With scientific studies of these traditions, food in some ways, like the work that you're
doing, for example, and the work that the Basque Culinary Center is doing and other
schools, like it's very much incipient.
Like we're really scratching the surface of the work and we're still talking about our
tools, right?
Yeah.
Like trying to understand our tools.
But when we get to the core of like how to use these tools to do something about it,
to do something with it, I think the power is exponentially maximized.
And I do believe that of all the arts is the one currently most relevant for our time,
you know, I believe that.
To get back to Nori, because I also want to understand, like having an experience there,
like a menu, let's say, getting through the rabbit hole is like having stories like this
one you just told me over and over again, but is there like a line, let's say, it is
always related to Singapore or there are no boundaries or?
There's no boundaries.
We obviously use local narratives where we find applicable if the story is about a line
like this.
And we over the years have learned not to give research to folk.
We feed them.
If the work is done properly, then people find a connection just through taste, you
know.
And so we get a lot of this stuff like this reminds me a lot of my grandma.
And it's funny because sometimes we have it on the same night, like a Filipino guy and
a Swedish guy.
There are different tables.
They eat the same dish and say, this reminds me a lot of my grandmother.
That's super interesting.
Yeah, they're probably common factors in both grandmothers, you know, which is great.
And so we learned to let the research out of the way.
And we put a QR code.
If people want to access the work, then they can to get the work done in a way that is
substantial and not really prone to conformational bias.
We actually work alongside anthropologists.
So it's not just me doing that research, but we have a real good team of folk that we can
reach out to for questions and people that are consistently working with us on those
developments.
And a lot of that work gets published through social media as like little snippets that
are curious for people.
And if they want to read the full work, they can just access the link on the tabs.
And so we let the work be the work.
But the point is for the food to do the talking, to unite folk just by sheer existing.
And what about the drinks?
How do you work the pairings for such a menu?
And it has to be also like a complicated task.
It is.
For that, like we try to be very borderless again for drinks.
And while we still focus on wine and sake primarily as the base of our menu, the restaurant
had forever been a pioneer in the Western restaurant sake pairing kind of movement in
Singapore.
We were one of the first restaurants to start working with natural wine in the context of
pairing.
Our first sommelier, Matthew Chan, was a complete, is a complete wiz in that front.
And so we do essentially pick from everywhere.
And the list is a lot more about width than it is of breadth than it is of depth.
You know, like we don't try to like explore Burgundy 10 times over.
We want to bring wines from Georgia, wines from Turkey, wines from South America.
And we explored the variety of grapes and the varieties of techniques to express those
commonalities as well.
I guess also if the wine has like one of these cross-cultural crazy stories, it's also like
an added value for your context, right?
Absolutely.
And so doing A, like very ancient grapes, grape varietals, and B, ancient vinification techniques
are great for us to talk because there's tons of links there, right?
From the conversation of Enfora to the idea of a grape that was actually cross-bred to
become Sauvignon Blanc.
You know what I mean?
So the chats there are everywhere and with everything.
So not only with wines, but we also explore rituals that are shared.
And so I guess when he comes in, we actually do.
Have you ever been through a tomate, like a Georgian toast?
No.
When folks kind of...
No, but I know Georgia is like a mecca of wine, right?
It is.
The delicious beverages, but also their ritualized feasting habits, rituals, where people talk
at lengths about why they're gathering and pay tribute to their ancestors and blah, blah,
blah.
The act of toasting is a shared human act across multiple cultures, right?
And so we start the meal at a separate room where folks actually toast with a drink that
we provide and we wash their hands.
Another act that is ritualized and very common in multiple cultures, when there's no water,
it's sand, right?
And so the meal starts also with rituals, artifacts.
The Russian is just dotted with symbols to remind folk of these webbed kind of connections.
Okay.
Super interesting.
What about tea?
Do you have any special teas?
Same.
Yeah.
A large tea selection that changes all the time and same comes from everywhere with a
good focus on the best Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese tea.
Amazing.
And Sri Lankan blacks as well, which are amazing.
Well then recognition came.
You got a Michelin star.
You got featured on HH50 best.
How did that felt after screwing up in your first years at Perse?
It was a good pat on the back.
It also came because the work felt so important and so addictive that there was an element
of I wouldn't say fear, but anxiety in regards to this whole thing.
Because as you know, guides and lists can be quite overwhelming and they demand a relatively
large amount of allegiance for you to continue to rise and grow at those awards, right?
And we didn't want to do any of that.
I didn't specifically.
Yeah, I can imagine.
I can imagine you dunking a shit about Michelin stars, just getting them without wanting them,
right?
Yeah.
I think obviously it felt like a great recognition to know that a good amount of people that
eat out a lot saw some value in what we were doing.
But the value was self-explanatory in some sense.
I felt very much connected to the bits.
This has never been an easy bit because there's obviously the recognition part, the human
ego, the financial part.
Those recognitions are incredible for all of those bits, right?
You feel amazing and you should.
But it can also be like a poison gift, right?
It could be very well the trap.
And I see folks that you deeply respect sometimes get caught and it's a sad thing.
And I won't say that it hasn't happened internally, but I loved the process of getting
out of that mindset.
It was a real good awakening in that regard.
And the work just benefited from it in a way that's nuts.
It was how we managed to take this conversation into the arts and culture in general.
We started talking about art curation, being panels that were a lot more considerate of
our product as a conceptual product, not just the food that was delicious, but the thinking
behind it started to make sense for more people.
And we said, you know what, that's not the type of validation that we're after.
And that's been really cool.
But I'm excited about that.
Our team has stayed together for the longest time and that's helped a lot.
I think our core members of staff, which make up pretty much 60% of the staff fabric, have
been with us for the entire duration of the restaurant.
Some have been working with me for much longer than that, 10 years.
Wow, that's a lot.
And we're just going for it.
It's worth our while.