Bun Appétit 33 Food Origins: Farm to table

cravings

Burgers are the blue jeans of comfort food.

Bun

Annette Tan

Appétit

It used to be that two allbeef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onion on a sesame bun were all a burger needed to impress. Today, however, it’s hard for the hamburger to stay humble, as gourmet burger restaurants proliferate across the world, each offering a high-grade patty, to-die-for bread and all manner of upscale ingredients in between.

The blame often falls on French chef Daniel Boulud. Boulud started the trend in 2001 with the db Burger at his db Bistro in New York City. For a gourmet price tag of US$32 — almost certainly more than anyone else had charged for a burger till then — the db comprised a sirloin patty stuffed with braised short ribs and topped with a morsel of foie gras between parmesan-dusted buns. With that, America’s favourite fast food was transformed into high-end grub, and there was no turning back.

Ten years ago, veteran New York restaurateur Danny Meyer redefined the fast-food experience with his burger chain

Shake Shack at Madison Square

Park. Decked out in sleek, stainless steel, the restaurant churns out burgers that are worth lining up for (which is what diners must often do – sometimes for up to an hour). With their soft buns, gooey American cheese and custom-blended patties made from beef supplied by meat masters Pat LaFrieda, Shake Shack burgers have become a benchmark for aspiring burgers meisters around the world.

With outlets at Singapore’s Turf City and Wisma Atria, Omakase Burger is widely regarded as the city state’s answer to Shake Shack. Owned by former banker Cheng Hsin Yao, Omakase’s burgers are made from US Department of Agriculturegrade beef, which is first rolled into a ball and then smashed onto a hot grill. Delectably moist on the inside, with an appealing thick char, the patties are topped with a tasty slice of American cheese and set between soft squishy buns that absorb the meat’s delicious juices.

Three Buns is the latest burger restaurant to hit Singapore, and chef Adam Penney — who is well known for creating some of London’s best burgers at Patty & Bun — dishes out a mean (though miniscule) Baby Huey burger that sent hipsters flocking to the restaurant when it opened in June this year.

As Rebecca Bent wrote in her 2004 cookbook Burgers: “Burgers are the blue jeans of comfort food”. And as everyone knows, classics like denim never really fade.

In 2017, Rene Redzepi reconceptualised Noma as an urban farm and eatery that serves up the harvest, in a bid to reinvent and challenge diners’ concepts of food and eating. While the Copenhagen restaurant has led the charge in various avant garde food trends such as foraging for ingredients and even cooking with insects over the years, this was considered Redzepi’s most drastic move yet.

“It makes sense to have your own farm, as a restaurant of this calibre,” he told the New York Times. The plan is to serve food according to the seasons, including turning into a vegetarian restaurant during spring and summer, with dishes made from the bounty of the restaurant’s urban farm.

Closer to home in Asia, this changing approach to eating is a sign of the evolution of the foodie, says Cynthia Chua, founder and managing director of the Singapore-based Spa Esprit Group, whose latest restaurant Open Farm Community features a menu made with locally sourced ingredients and plants from its on-site urban farm. “There is something powerful about a community garden, where people can see where their food comes from and this encourages them to become more connected to the environment,” says Chua.

Over at Fisherman’s Cove restaurant in Gaya Island Resort, Kota Kinabalu, the chef sources for sustainably fished seafood and line-caught fish, which purists will say taste better than farmed fish and also contribute to the livelihoods of local fishermen.

In land-scarce Singapore a collective of restaurants have come up with a way to meet this demand for ingredients with provenance by obtaining their greens from Hatiku Farm, an organic farm in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. These restaurants include Cocotte, The

Provision Shop, Bacchanalia, Corner House, Burnt Ends and Meatsmith.

While this may sound trendy, there is actually a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make this a possibility. It took two and half years for the chefs and farmers to figure out what plants could be grown in Cameron Highlands. Today, almost 80 per cent of the greens used in Cocotte now coming from Hatiku. A spokesman for Cocotte says, “By working with the farm it helps to reduce our carbon footprint, lower our costs, and we get our hands on fresher ingredients because they’d be delivered within a day from the point of harvest to the kitchen and from a traceable source where we know exactly where and how our food was grown.”

With responsible establishments such as these becoming more and more commonplace globally, it may soon be a reality for gourmands to be able to eat well, while doing their part to save the world at the same time.

FOOD ORIGINS: Farm to table

Karen Tee