Philippine Butterfly

Archive for the ‘Food’ Category

In Australia, local cuisine is far more sophisticated than toast and Vegemite , a dark brown paste made of yeast extract, especially if you’ve made a reservation at 529 Kent Street in Sydney. Here, you’ll find the home of Tetsuya’s Restaurant , where an internationally renowned chef, Tetsuya Wakuda has made a home for foods steeped in the tradition of Japan with natural, seasonal flavors, heightened by French technique, and based on local foods.

Degustation is a word that belies its meaning. Certainly, the sound of the word doesn’t seem as if it should refer to an excellent meal out, but it simply means a careful and appreciative tasting of foods, usually a small portion samples of a chef’s signature dishes, accompanied by wine. At Tesuya’s Restaurant, there’s an eleven-course degustation menu available for about $200 per person. This menu changes often, but it might start with something as simple as chilled cold corn soup with saffron and vanilla ice cream, moving to smoked ocean trout and avruga, then three New Zealand scampi. The signature dish might be Petuna ocean trout with knobu and fennel, then Queensland spanner crab with an avocado soup. Desserts might include chocolate ganache with green tea and red beans or a beetroot and blood orange sorbet.

Tetsuya’s has been awarded the highest rating available in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, as well as Restaurant of the Year and Best Fine Dining at the Restaurant & Catering Association Awards. The restaurant itself offers private dining rooms for group bookings and two main dining rooms which overlook a Japanese garden. The restaurant is open for diner Tuesday to Saturday from six in the evening and open to lunch only on Saturdays from twelve noon.

The chef began his journey to Australia in 1982, at the age of 22, when he picked up a job as a kitchenhand. Less than ten years later, he opened his own restaurant in 1989, and this restaurant filled up quickly, with daily waiting lists. He moved to the latest location in 2000, where he continued to grow his reputation. Wherever you might be in New South Wales, no matter what hotels , if you have an adventurous taste for fine degustation, then find your way to 529 Kent Street.

This restaurant is where I will try to consider the things that have happened in the past 24 hours.  On the way here, I saw a boy who wanted to ask me for something, something very important.  He was hungry, that much I gathered, but the rest of it was lost in languages.  His small hat reminded me of one that I had bought for my son before his mother and I decided that we could no longer go on.  It is a source of grief that comes back only at the end of some of the longer days, and the rest of the time, it is only a given circumstance.  This restaurant, Italian and smartly designed, will reimburse my own sense of purpose in the world.

Before the boy, I was walking and thinking about traveling.  I don’t normally get lost in thought, but sometimes in Singapore, I remember that I am not from here.  This makes me want to draw the line back to where I was before.  In the streets in Italy, there were too many people who were hungry, not enough to remember that there was a war, and just enough to fill the empty spaces with a bottomless want.  These are the stories I will tell my son, when I see him again.  For now, it is this city-state, this restaurant, and the evening ahead of me.  I put my fork in front of me by the napkin, and wonder about how things sometimes fall into place, and how they sometimes need help.  It is probably for the best that one cannot smoke in here.

It was my obsession at one time to be considering the way the birds play in the park.  They sing to each other, they preen themselves and inspect each other, and they fight over food.  Here, I am thinking about the wife I once had, and the son that I miss, and when I have wine and salad before me, it is almost too much.  My dinner guest will be here soon.  In the meantime, there is enough, and in time, we all eat from the same bowl.

This is definitely the place to be for a truly global alternative culture.   The difficulties of being alternative in Singapore already add some complex layers to the performance of self here, and it’s even more interesting when you add the greater complications of fame to the mix.  It’s a very impressive place to come, however, and easy to get swept up in how much there is to do on any given day in this very cosmopolitan city-state.  There are always plenty of sights to enjoy, and while away the afternoon, excellent Restaurants that specialize in Chinese food, that will remind you of why people speak so highly about the importance of the place as a major world port, and then the evening’s entertainment is entirely up to you.

You can see lots of pop music, whether it’s a big concert with a superstar from here or other parts of Asia, or Europe, or Africa.  It all exists somewhere here, because the performers and their agents understand that Singapore is a place to go for exposure.  There are also plenty of other kinds of music, and it’s likely that Goth Punk might not be what you’d expect to hear, but you surely can.  La ‘Dies is the band that’s fairly surely cornered the market on this music in Singapore, and the result is a very dark force that’s extraordinarily compelling.

They’ve been playing here as well as making headway into overseas markets, particularly the usual suspects for Singapore bands, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.  They have a difficult sound, and as Chinese artists performing in a genre that’s not overwhelmingly Chinese, there are more difficulties for market categorization, but this also opens up more doors for fascinating complexity.  The sound is very honed, and simultaneously disturbing and romantic, making every goths dream realizable.  Worth checking out for sure.

It’s hard not to love Singapore.  Even the most world-weary travelers perk up when they realize that they’ve just set foot in one of the most unique and lively places in the world.  The island city-state is a conglomeration of cultures, ideas, and attitudes, and they come together in interesting ways.  It also has a fascinating and rather complex history, that speaks of a major trading port that has seen a lot of the events and peoples of the world.  Today, it’s still a very active port town, and you can get most anything here.

This is very true for seafood, of course, and lots of other fresh ingredients, and that makes it a great place for a good Japanese restaurant.  There are lots of opportunities to try fantastic food, and the Japanese influence on local food here is very strong, and it’s a wonderful way to get into the rhythm of the city.  If you’re coming in the spring, you may want to time your trip with the Richard Poon concert.

This singer from the Phillipines is a Chinese crooner who has wowed audiences all over the world.  His father is a restaurant owner, and his mother is a big singer in Taiwan.  He’s been impressing people with his ability to make very sweet sounds in the tradition of the classic singers like Sinatra and Martin

My mission this week is to eat as many different kinds of curry as possible, and to not think about her.  So far, it’s working out very nicely, and she has not once crossed my mind.  I’ve been in Singapore for only a few hours, but have found an Indian restaurant that has already made me feel a little swoony.  It’s one of the benefits of having taste buds that are extremely sensitive, because smell is something that affects how we look at the world.

Nostalgia begins with the nose, literally, and that’s where I like to go whenever I’m here, because Singapore has memories that have nothing to do with her at all.  And we never got the chance to eat at an Indian restaurant, which is no loss, and even better because now I’m here and I can do this and not even think of her.  Onions remind me of being here before, long before I met her, when I discovered that Indian food is not mostly about heat or spice, but about subtleties.  Someone mentioned to me once that the Indian food in town is sometimes considered to be even better than what you can find in India.

I believe that.  I also believe that it’s possible to drown your senses in new sensations, and that can affect how memory behaves, and how it creates past events.  Maybe we are all made up of pieces of what happened before, but it’s true that in the moment we can rewrite how we think about the past.  She used to like to do that with me, where we’d be talking about childhoods with a conscious effort to retell it in a way that we liked.  It was one of the best ways to spend an afternoon and I just broke my promise to myself, and suddenly she’s everywhere.  It will be all right.