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bookWORM; Bjorn Shen Rock out with your fork out
âI like a lot of niche cuisines â anything with gutsy, bold flavors that is unpretentious,â chef Bjorn Shen says during Sunday brunch rush at his modern Middle Eastern restaurant Artichoke in Singapore
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'I like a lot of niche cuisines ' anything with gutsy, bold flavors that is unpretentious,' chef Bjorn Shen says during Sunday brunch rush at his modern Middle Eastern restaurant Artichoke in Singapore. 'I like that ramen chefs in Japan spend so much energy, effort and cognitive effort into every aspect of a bowl of noodles that ends up looking like a sloppy bowl of noodles.'
At a recent talk at the Singapore Writer's Festival on the future of food in Singapore, Shen showed off his business savvy, speaking of 'average spends' and 'good branding' ' a testament to degrees in hospitality, tourism and marketing earned in Australia.
However, the 31-year-old ' who has been a guest chef at Loewy in Kuningan, South Jakarta ' doesn't care much for concept restaurants. 'Décor, drinks ' for us, those things don't matter. Our battle is food,' he says.
That ethos is reflected in Artichoke's menu: Each dish uses at least one herb or vegetable from the organic garden Shen keeps on the grounds of the restaurant.
Unsurprisingly, Shen, who penned a 272-page memoir/confession/cookbook titled Artichoke that he was signing at the festival, loves cookbooks. Here are three of his favorites.
'Au Pied de Cochon: The Album',
Martin Picard (Douglas & McIntyre)
My favorite cookbook of all time is Au Pied de Cochon, by Martin Picard. It means 'The Foot of the Pig'. He's my favorite chef. He's the kind of chef that gives you a heart attack: entire pig trotters stuffed with foie gras ' and that's a serving for one. His cuisine is heart-attack cuisine.
'Recipes for a Good Time',
Elvis Abrahanowicz and Ben Milgate (Murdoch Books)
I like this book a lot. It has recipes from two of my favorite restaurants in Sydney: Bodega and the Argentine adaso [fire-pit restaurant] Porteño. All my favorite recipes were here: sashimi slices of kingfish on top of burned toast and shaved cuttlefish, spit-roasted lamb. Crazy amazing. So much effort is put into something so low-brow as Argentine barbecue ' for something so pedestrian, so street level as barbecue.
'Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen',
Edward Lee (Artisan)
The author is an American-born chef but Korean by heritage ' brought up in Manhattan but moved to the American South. A Korean kid growing up in Kentucky, he managed to fuse Korean cuisine with southern cuisine to make his own brand of comfort food. He does a ramen-crusted buttermilk fried chicken ' the ramen is ground into a powder. Whereas in Korea, you'd use sugar; he uses molasses ' everything is bourbon, honey, sorghum, molasses. It's beautiful food.
-JP/Christian Razukas
