Celebrity chefs open Air, a new Dempsey restaurant with an edible garden, cooking club, research space Restaurant Air, a massive “campus” with lots of greenery in the heart of the city, is an ambitious project in sustainability and deliciousness by Room4Dessert’s Will Goldfarb, Matthew Orlando of Amass and Potato Head’s Ronald Akili. When I met Will Goldfarb last year at his restaurant Room4Dessert in Bali, he was clearly dying to spill the news. But, he made a good show of being all coy about it. All he would say was that he maybe, possibly, was working on a soon-to-open project in Singapore. This, of course, was of interest to me, seeing as (a) he’s a world-famous chef with many accolades including World’s Best Pastry Chef 2021 and his own Chef’s Table: Pastry episode; and (b) Room4Dessert was full of Singaporean diners that evening and doubtless every other evening, too, so evidently it made perfect sense for him to open a restaurant in Singapore. Well, as it turned out, he wasn’t just opening a restaurant; he was opening a “Circular Campus and Cooking Club” together with two other global industry heavyweights: Chef Matthew Orlando of now-closed Amass in Copenhagen, renowned for its gastronomic forays into sustainability; and entrepreneur Ronald Akili of Potato Head fame. This month, Goldfarb finally welcomed me to their “crazy, enormous, super fun, ambitious project”. Air, located at Dempsey Hill, occupies a 40,000 sq ft space that includes a barracks complex that was once a clubhouse for civil servants; a beckoning lawn and a “garden farm” where edible plants are cultivated for use in the restaurant. But where in Dempsey, you ask, is this hidden glade of wonders? Well, it’s behind the large carpark off Holland Road, an area you’ll have missed because you’re too busy making your way to Samy’s Curry or Long Beach. Back in March last year, “Will sent me a message: ‘Can you be in Singapore in 48 hours?’” Orlando recounted. Akili had managed to secure the site. “I flew in, stood on that lawn, when there was tall grass everywhere… I was 100 per cent with my initial gut feeling.” Now, with Air gearing up to open on Jan 31, “I pinch myself”. AIR ON A TEH-C STRING That’s because it’s not just a place where guests can come to dine. Air, an acronym for Awareness, Impact and Responsibility, spans two storeys, the second of which has a pastry kitchen; a research facility where Orlando has already begun fermentation experiments; and a dedicated space for cooking classes that anyone can sign up for, including planned free classes for industry professionals. In the garden, run by urban farming social enterprise City Sprouts, fruits like chiku; vegetables like spinach; and herbs including vetiver, lemon balm and cat’s whiskers already grow. “We are so lucky to be able to go and pick our own herbs,” said Orlando, adding, with excitement, “I was having coffee on the lawn a month ago and saw a family of monitor lizards.” Orlando sets the direction for the food, while Goldfarb is involved in the “operational side”, the garden and educational initiatives. “It would have been hard for us to pull off what we talked about doing without a space like this,” said Orlando, a former Noma chef de cuisine who also worked at The Fat Duck and Per Se. He recalled how fermentation experiments would spill over onto kitchen workspaces back at Amass. Here, “We have space to do things correctly.” (Not to mention, a very sizeable budget, doubtless.) “It’s almost hard to believe you’re in the centre of Singapore. It’s like a magical place,” Goldfarb mused. “I think it’s one of those things that if you don’t make obvious, you could take it for granted. Maybe, coming with fresh eyes, we’re like, ‘Wow, this is so magical’, right? It’s like a playground. And, you have such an amazing clientele here when it comes to food, and people who are really passionate about different types of cuisines, and really understand the value of making things.” At the same time, he’s keen to stress that it isn’t about two didactic American chefs parachuting in and taking over. “What we wanted to focus on here was Singapore. You know, this is a Singapore restaurant. We’re proud to be in Singapore, flying the flag for Singapore. We’re not looking to transplant or bring anything from anywhere except our experience. Singapore is such an amazing, unique and diverse place. We really want to celebrate what’s here, and the people, in everything that we do, in all of our offerings.” One dish that Orlando whipped up for me to sample was a plate of crispy oyster mushrooms with a Sarawak pepper emulsion; it also has pickled chillies, which amused me when I learnt that his favourite local dish is hor fun – fried rice noodles in gravy that are, of course, also served with pickled chillies. “The best hor fun I’ve ever had is at Alexandra Village – on the back side, not even the main side,” he divulged. He also likes fried fish bee hoon soup. He’s been taken under the wing of many a passing uncle. “I was not expecting that I would be walking around – this has happened about four or five times – and somebody would come up to me, they’re mostly in their 60s, and say, ‘Hey, where are you from? Do you want to go get a beer?’ If I have the time, I always say yes. Here, everyone has their favourite thing to eat in a specific spot and very strong opinions, and they want to take you there.” As for Goldfarb, he’s “obsessed” with salted egg fried chicken from New Station, bak kut teh at Zion Road, and lotus paste and grass jelly desserts. “I’m also a sucker for old school soft eggs for breakfast. I could literally just walk around and eat that all day. With teh C siu dai. Having here.” Here’s a first look at Restaurant Air at Dempsey in Singapore, which is set to open in January 2024. EATING AIR The menu at Air isn’t categorisable into a genre, apart from the fact that Orlando wants to keep it approachable, with “snacks”, “bites”, “mains”, “sides” and “sweets”; but all of the ingredients used are from within Southeast Asia. “Thailand was as far as we would go, for dairy; and everything else is from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore,” Orlando said. “We use a lot of produce from local Singaporean farmers as well, which has been really interesting to learn about.” So far, he’s met about 30 local farmers of everything from shrimp to mushrooms. Many “have also reached out, saying, ‘We have strawberries that we can’t sell because they’re the wrong shape – can you help us process them?’ or, ‘We can’t sell these vegetables – can you turn them into a jarred pesto so we don’t have to throw them away?’ I wasn’t expecting that to happen so fast.” Local social enterprise Mushroom Buddies, for instance, which employs people with special needs, contributes trimmed mushroom bits towards Air’s umami-laden mushroom “XO” butter that’s served with fluffy, chewy fermented cassava flatbread; as well as to the oyster mushroom dish. The charm of Orlando’s food is that it looks beautifully simple while demonstrating a keen mastery of complex processes. The crispy oyster mushroom dish, for instance, utilises a spice mix made from “the stems of all the herbs from the garden”, which “we lacto-ferment and grind into powder,” he explained. Another of the interesting ways he uses plants from the garden is in a dish of roselle-glazed duck breast with cashew cream and smoked chili oil. “We do a sticky glaze on the duck with the roselle, but we also take the roselle and put it through the same process as umeboshi,” said Orlando, who had never tasted roselle until he came to this part of the world and remains excited by it. But it’s not about being clever – everything on the menu is first of all “flavour-forward”, he said. “When I was younger, it was all about, like, provoking people. But I think as I’ve gotten older and also eaten more, it’s about creating flavours that are unique, but still have a reference point for people.” A dessert called “The Whole Papaya”, for instance, is an exploration of how fermentation processes can draw flavour even out of the parts of the papaya that aren’t usually eaten. Papaya seeds are lacto-fermented – “they’re very peppery” – and infused into a cream, while the papaya skin is blended with sugar syrup, frozen and scraped into a granita. Meanwhile, papaya flesh is made into jam with some ginger, and raw papaya is folded into it. Lactic-fermented, dried papaya seeds are sprinkled on top of the dish, along with marigold oil. “For me, the interesting part is how we’re processing the products and the flavours,” Orlando said. “If I just told you this was a dish of papaya, you wouldn’t know it contained the skin and seeds.” Another dish that encapsulates his cooking philosophy is the one that reads, “Whole Coral Grouper For Two” on the menu. “In people’s brains, they’re thinking they’re going to get a whole fish on the table. But when it comes, it’s four different plates.” There’s confited fillet with vinaigrette; a rillette made from the fish head and collar, served with emping crisps; and noodles fashioned using pressure-cooked and pureed fish bones mixed with flour, rice flour and tapioca starch, “a technique we developed in 2016 at Amass totally by accident”. “It’s the whole fish, but literally the whole fish”, bones and all. One thing he’s looking forward to messing around with in the research space is “the pulp of the cocoa bean – not the actual bean you make chocolate out of, but the fruit. I tasted it at Will’s place. For me, it tastes like the best lychee you’ve ever had, but on another level, another universe. It’s very hard to get because it’s so volatile.” INSPIRATION IS IN THE AIR It’s every chef’s dream to have carte blanche to delve into mad-scientist explorations in cooking – but at the same time, “there’s something very fundamental in terms of what we do,” Goldfarb asserted. “Our job is to feed people, and I think sometimes in restaurants, we forget that. “To me, the value of being inspirational and doing exciting things really comes down to simple things like being generous, wanting to feed people, wanting to take care of the environment.” One of the things he wanted to bring to Air, after 15 years in Bali, was “the idea of a big village where we take care of everyone… I think something we do really well is give access and opportunity to people who might not otherwise have it, to show off their skills and to be leaders; to kind of show there’s no such thing as a talent gap, but there’s frequently an access gap.” And leaders, at the same time, serve – during the course of our afternoon at Air, Goldfarb was in and out of the kitchen, quietly cleaning surfaces and supporting the team. (Orlando did spill to us that “Will likes to eat food off plates in the dish area”, so that might have been a motivational factor, too.) One of the lessons Goldfarb has absorbed from life in Bali is “to stay humble and be ready for the unpredictable”, he shared. “So, not to take anything for granted; to come to Singapore with open eyes and be here to learn first, and then to communicate, as opposed to coming in and trying to teach people. We’ve been made to feel at home by the Singaporean community and we would like to share that feeling with everybody. “Every walk through the garden, every conversation, every bite of food – that’s the beautiful thing about working with all this. It’s impossible not to be inspired.” Air is at 25B Dempsey Road. Bookings online are open for Jan 31 onwards at https://www.instagram.com/air_cccc . For more information, visit https://www.aircccc.com/.
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