RESTAURANTS THAT COMBINE MULTIPLE DISCIPLINES BEYOND FOOD HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR SOME TIME. WHAT SETS APPETITE APART?

“What I think sets us apart is the team and our ethos: our central pillar of crossroads. Nouri has been at that for the past three years with crossroads as an idea; a question. It’s also the place from which we explore the different ideas that become our exhibition themes at Appetite. Crossroads is also extremely relevant to Singapore. If you think about it, ‘crossroads’ is basically a formal word to encapsulate the ‘chapalang-ness’ of human history. Civilisations have always interacted. Crossroads as a guiding theme is applicable on so many disparate fronts, but because it is also one that is broad enough that you can work on a lot of specific sub-topics, we are able to put together a series of efforts, programmes, workshops, research at Appetite that is cohesive and tight.” “I think generally what happens is one of the individual elements in such multi-concept spaces is really strong and the other is kind of just an afterthought. For many members of our team, our formative years were spent in cities around the world: Ivan in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as London, for example, while some important cities in my life were Tokyo and New York. There was an energy – a specific kind of creativity that was present in those cities that we felt was lacking in Singapore. Yet we also love living here. So we wanted to take a risk and bring that energy here and see how people respond. We knew that if we were to do it though, we had to do it right, which meant investing a lot of money, time and capital talent into the space, all while knowing that there aren’t really other places like this in Singapore and we didn’t know how people were going to or will respond.”