I started the week on Sunday by having a Sunday family lunch to celebrate my Dad’s 92nd birthday. We had some Tim Sum and dishes at a familiar restaurant near his home. Both my parents have taken their first shots of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks ago and took the 2nd one this week without much incident.
I have always been interested in cooking and the appreciation of good food since I was young. When I was little, I loved to hang out in the kitchen to watch my mum cook and to join her for her morning wet market shopping to see all the fresh produce that was displayed.
After I started my career and had better financial means, I was able to eat at the finer restaurants and to observe the skills of the chefs. My taste palate improved over time with the introduction of wines and travels to food capitals of the world like New York/San Francisco, London, Paris and places in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian) and Italy (Rome, Venice, Positano and Sicily). I got to experience the many Michelin stars chefs that served their unique creations in many degustation meals.
During those times, we had to travel outside S’pore to experience fine dining as the country was mainly known for good and cheap hawker food plus some traditional cuisines. In the 1980s time, we were known as a dull place of hardworking people which no one would have spared a second thought to want to come here for a visit or a vacation. Things only started to change after 2000. This was one of the reasons why:
My friend reminded me last Sunday of a fine dining movie that just began airing on Netflix. It was of interest to us because of a group dinner we had there in 2010. This was the story of Andre Chiang and his rise to fame in S’pore over the 8 years where he obtained 2 Michelin stars. The movie is called “Andre and his olive tree” and it was more than 2 years in the making.
Andre is a passionate and compulsive chef who had honed his culinary skills via the school of hard knocks, starting from right at the bottom at a well known Paris restaurant peeling potatoes and living in a barn. He became a perfectionist chef that believes in doing the same thing 10,000 times to get it right all the time.
Over time, he had condensed his work into 8 elements or themes which he uses as the beginning point of creating a degustation menu for diners. The 8 elements are:
1. Pure
2. Salt
3. Artisan
4. South
5. Texture
6. Unique
7. Memory
8. Terroir
From these 8 elements, his team will create multiple individual dishes (almost 200). This serves as an internal catalogue for the new season every year. They also carefully track each diner’s past menu eaten at the restaurant to ensure that repeat customers will never eat the same thing while getting to enjoy new dishes every time they visit. This high standard of service and dedication earned them a well deserved 2 Michelin stars when the food guide started to rate S’pore restaurants in 2016.
I had eaten at Andre twice. The first time was when they just opened in late Oct 2010. I planned and booked the dinner months in advance for a 03 Nov date. I gathered a group of good friends I had known during my Citibank days and asked for the biggest table they had. They had one table on the 1st floor which could accommodate 8 persons. The movie mentioned that this particular table was made from a single piece of wood. It was so big that they had to slip it in through the ground floor windows before assembling it. We were told that we were the first group to eat at that table for dinner as the restaurant had just opened.
That was a most pleasant evening for us. We had a fantastic dinner with a few bottles of fine wines. Andre was there to introduce himself. He was so friendly and accommodating. He allowed us to visit his kitchen and then to tour his 3rd-floor office where he showed us his prized complete collection of the red Michelin guide books. It was a really memorable evening that we still speak about till today. He gamely took a group photo with us too at the end of the private tour 🙂 After that dinner, I had to go back again and I brought my wife for a celebratory meal the next time.
Thanks to Andre, S’pore’s profile as a fine food city was elevated over the almost 8 years they had operated. People now come to the island city knowing that they can dine at top-rated restaurants that are recognized on the world stage.
There was a very moving moment in the movie where Andre dropped the big bomb on the evening of the restaurant’s anniversary on 10 Oct 2017. It was also his wedding anniversary too. He announced that he would close Andre on 15 Feb 2018. The last service will be on Valentine’s day, 14 Feb. The shock and weight of the news were overpowering to all his staff, especially his wife.
He had explained that he had achieved all that he has wanted for this restaurant and that he will return the Michelin stars. The emotional tension was so great that I teared too. Reflecting on that moment, I now understand his motivation. To close at the high was the way to go. To force a retirement to recharge himself for the next adventure in his life journey. It is like a halftime reckoning and I really admire his bravery and conviction.
His strong-mindedness and single focus will power to channel all his efforts to his food and then to walk away at the peak of his success – that is so empowering and heroic. He knew that he wanted to move on to the next stage of his life and was brave enough to face the uncertain future ahead. I wished I could have been like him in 2012 and moved on from the peak of my career before I was retrenched.
I highly recommend this movie to everyone even if food is not your passion. It is the human side of the story that is so compelling to watch, just like a similar movie I highly recommend too – Alpha Go the Movie. You go in with low expectations and at the end, the movie overwhelms you and you get so much more out of the film than you ever expected. Lifelong learning lessons about how to navigate your journey of life.
On Thursday, my appointment to receive my first Pfizer vaccine shot finally arrived. The process was quite smooth at the community centre and I had to be observed for 30 minutes after the injection. During the night, my arm started to feel sore and it got worst the next day. I felt tired too, so I took a walk instead of doing my daily run. By the second day, most of the aches had disappeared.
I am glad to have received the vaccine now for peace of mind. The next one will be in 3 weeks time and I understand that most people will feel soreness and tiredness as well. We are slowly inching our way back to normalcy after more than a year of this pandemic. There is light at the end of the tunnel now.
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