Airing New Possibilities
Acclaimed chefs Matthew Orlando and Will Goldfarb hope to inspire and spark deeper conversations and action around food and circular cooking at their idyllic concept Air in lush Dempsey Hill.
Chef Matthew Orlando has one big point to make about sustainable dining, and he does it in the best way possible — by serving up mean plates of food you can’t get enough of.
Take, for instance, the crispy oyster mushrooms slathered with Sarawak pepper emulsion and topped with pickled chillies at the sprawling 40,000 sq ft dining concept Air, which opened in late January.
Inspired by fried chicken, they are moreish, highly umami bursts of flavour that are practically impossible to stop popping into one’s mouth. The secret to their surprising depth of flavour is a lacto-fermented spice mix made from the kitchen’s veggie ends — proof that a lot more can be done regarding the conscious and creative use of ingredients. “Whatever you are making has to be as good as or better than what you are trying to replace, or you are not going to convince people,” says Orlando.
A textbook example of this is the Re-Incarnated “Chocolate” that mixes the by-products of three common processes — cocoa husks, cascara (the fruit that is discarded in the process of coffee making), and coconut flesh with cocoa butter and sugar to yield a luscious chocolate bar with a deeply roasted flavour that one would be hard pressed to tell apart from actual chocolate.
“Basically, this is the traditional way of making chocolate, just without cocoa beans, of which there is a worldwide shortage,” he explains.
Orlando was most recently the chef-owner of Copenhagen restaurant Amass. During its years of operation from 2013 to 2022, the restaurant sparked a movement to examine how the hospitality and food industries must play a role in mitigating its negative environmental impact.
This conscious philosophy is imbued through almost every element at Air, one of Singapore’s most ambitious restaurant openings this year. Its campus comprises a farm-totable restaurant, research lab, cooking space, and garden. Besides Orlando, the other two brains behind the concept are Will Goldfarb, who runs dessert restaurant Room4Dessert in Bali and Ronald Akili, the Indonesian co-founder of hospitality brand Potato Head.
The menu of contemporary cuisine with strong Southeast Asian and European inflexions is spearheaded by Orlando, featuring farm-to-bar herbs and botanicals. The chef duo hopes the irresistible food will organically spark deeper conversations and positive action.
“We never want to preach; instead, how do we do something that is accessible and have people engage on their own terms,” says Orlando, who is relocating full-time to Singapore.
“I could sit here and talk all day long about using stems and skins and seeds to make flavour, or I could put a spoon of delicious food in your mouth and get your attention. Food is very much a vehicle to communicate about broader topics such as food systems and the bigger ecosystem.”
This is a key reason why he characterises Air as an “open source”