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Singapore is the destination for Air, a new restaurant collaboration from two of the leading lights of the industry, Will Goldfarb and Matt Orlando.
An acronym for Awareness, Impact and Responsibility, Air is a restaurant that harnesses the considerable culinary experience and skills of Goldfarb and Orlando, with a dining room, and as you would expect from these two luminaries for sustainable and innovative fine dining, a cooking school, research space and garden farm.
At Air, located on Dempsey Road, the chefs are creating a restaurant that presents their combined learnings about food, sustainability, waste and deliciousness in a menu with touchpoints like banana caramel made with banana skins, fermented cassava flatbread, noodles made with fish bones, and granite made with papaya skins.
Orlando, former Chef de Cuisine at Noma, has established himself as a global authority on sustainability in fine dining, including at his now-closed Copenhagen eco-institution Amass, and has spent the past couple of years as a nomadic chef and food innovator. Air, in Singapore, represents a welcome return to the kitchen for a chef who challenges the way we think about food. He has made the move to Singapore to live as the restaurant concept is built. “There is so much here. I keep finding stuff. I’m like a kid in a candy shop. Rosella, coral grouper, the flavour of basil here is different, it is way more medicinal,” he says.
Fellow American chef Goldfarb has been dividing his time between Bali and Singapore in anticipation of the Air opening. “I’d like to paraphrase one of my favourite restaurateurs, Drew Nieporent,” he says, “who when talking about opening with Robert De Niro, said, ‘You can open a restaurant with anyone, or you can open a restaurant with Matt Orlando. I prefer to open with Matt Orlando.’ Nobody does it better.”
Diners can expect dishes that are as ethically and environmentally sound as they are high-level fine dining and delicious, including whole coral grouper for two, a main course where the fish’s head is made into rillettes and served with emping crackers, and the fillet confit is topped with green onion and black garlic vinaigrette made with stock from fish trimmings and is served together with the noodles, which are tossed with mushroom butter.
Another example of the cooking skills on show can be found in a dish of whole papaya, with pieces of fresh papaya in peppery papaya seed cream made by lactic-fermenting the seeds and grinding them to a fine powder, then infusing in cream. Papaya skins are also lactic-fermented, blended into syrup, frozen and blitzed into a 'granite'.
Orlando and Goldfarb have been working for months to develop an innovative and refreshing menu that challenges diners to think differently about food about also to deliver a restaurant experience of the very highest quality. Singapore’s diners will not be disappointed.
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