Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category
Singapore’s Stature Rising as the Mecca of Fusion
October 29, 2009
It’s not surprising that six of the world’s most renowned chefs would eventually find their way to Singapore. Mario Batali, Daniel Boulud, Wolfgang Puck, Santi Santamaria, Guy Savoy, and Tetsuya Wakuda will all be bringing their own restaurants to the lavish Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore. With them, they bring their famed cooking brands and could further illuminate the Singaporean culinary renaissance that has been brewing under the radar.
Singaporean dining is shaped by duality. On the one hand, the country has a knack for attracting internationally known chefs from other countries. On the other, the deeply rooted hawker dining scene is one that’s built on local tradition. One might think the arrival of celebrity chefs could overshadow the less glamorous, yet more widespread, traditional, local cuisine (plastic furniture and fluorescent lighting often provide the extent of the décor at hawker dining spots), but Singapore is a nation that seems at ease with the intermingling of cultures. For every headline that mentions a celebrity chef in Singapore, another puts the spotlight on a locally-run restaurant.
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Follow the Tweeter: Kogi Introduces a New Mobile Restaurant
August 25, 2009
One of the fastest-expanding gourmet food truck empires on L.A.’s blossoming mobile restaurant scene is Kogi (pronounced with a hard “g”). This Twittering L.A. Korean-BBQ-on-wheels was created by media-savvy owner Mark Manguera and chef Roy Choi (formerly of NYC’s Le Bernardin). It’s a concept that’s Web 2.0 to the core: Tweet location changes for your food truck every couple of hours, wait for the lines to form, then serve up creative combinations of spicy Korean BBQ-style chicken, tofu, pork, or ribs on corn tortillas, topped with sesame-chili salsa roja, Korean chili-soy vinaigrette slaw, cilantro-green onion-lime relish, and crushed sesame seeds.
Manguera and Choi have deftly pinpointed a crossroad between modern fusion food culture and the latest in mobile technology, but it’s not just the relative novelty of a Twitter-centric food service that tickles us; it’s the community that the creators are building around their mobile establishment. The lines at Kogi are gaining a reputation as indie meeting grounds where Twitterers engage in a less modern practice known as face-to-face conversation. Check out Kogi’s endearingly enthusiastic blog for a glimpse of the Kogi dining experience.
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