The Malaysian Insider :: Food
The Malaysian Insider :: Food |
| Chef Homaro Cantu takes viewers into his iNG kitchen in new show Posted: 18 Nov 2012 05:45 PM PST  'CookiNG under PRESSURE' with Trevor Rose-Hamblin and Homaro Cantu. — AFP-Relaxnews pic CookiNG Under Pressure takes viewers behind the scenes into the kitchen of Cantu's iNG Restaurant in Chicago, where the menu changes every six weeks. Sound familiar? That may be because another celebrity chef in the Windy City also has a pop-up style restaurant which changes menus every three months: Grant Achatz's restaurant Next. And while Achatz may be the bigger household name around the world, one of Cantu's claims to fame - aside from his avant-garde "mad scientist" cookery - is his strange and victorious 2006 performance on Iron Chef America, in which he defeated Masaharu Morimoto in a battle with a laser printer that caramelised edible packaging material, and liquid nitrogen beet balloons. In the first episode of CookiNG Under Pressure, meanwhile, Cantu takes the crowd-sourced menu suggestions from the restaurant's Facebook page to settle on the next dinner theme: "The Nightmare Before Christmas." The show also features use of the flavour-changing 'miracle' berry, the centrepiece for iNG in which the West African fruit is used to transform sour and bitter foods and challenges taste buds. It's not the first show Cantu has done. His 2009 show Future Food on US eco-channel Planet Green also followed the chef as he and pastry chef Ben Roche came up with inventive, futuristic edible creations that defied conventional cookery. Watch the full 40-minute online show CookiNG Under Pressure on YouTube at http://bit.ly/U43zTj. The next episode airs on January 1, 2013. — AFP-Relaxnews |
| Posted: 18 Nov 2012 05:06 PM PST  The interior of The Brew Culture. — Pictures by CK Lim You've only just entered the café and already you've been offered a little gift. On a tray there are rows of old milk cartons, now filled with sun-dried used coffee grounds, ready to be carried away. Once home, you can employ the grounds as a deodoriser in the bathroom or the kitchen, or add it to your plant's fertiliser. Here at The Brew Culture, the coffee bean has gone green. Wooden crates are transformed into low coffee tables. The bookshelves and benches are made from used wooden pallets collected from nearby industrial sites. The interior is unabashedly minimal, from the concrete floors to the simple light bulbs that are scattered all over the café.  The details matter: used cartons as lightshades and plaid-padding for chair legs. This feels like a quiet little Wonderland, only Alice is happily reading a book without being harassed by the Mad Hatter. Indeed, it's not a frenzied tea party that's been organised but rather slow mornings and lazy afternoons spent in conversation or solitude over copious cups of coffee. It's a far cry from the Mondays through Fridays spent rushing to the office to clock in before the boss arrives. A quick pit-stop at one of the many coffee chains that dot the city, an order of a triple-shot caffè latte shouted over the din of other caffeine-deprived corporate drones, scalding hot coffee spilling over your new tie because the barista didn't seal the lid over the cup properly and you're wondering to yourself, as you try your best to clean up in the gent's, why you do this every morning?  Free used coffee grounds for customers to take home. No matter. Monday will come again, the week shall repeat. For now you are content to have a place to sit down, have the company of other seekers of an excellent brew, and to simply take your time. I first came upon The Brew Culture a few months ago, when they first opened. There's an adage amongst foodies never to judge an F&B outlet by its maiden month in business; too many things can and do go wrong, even with veterans in charge. Yet there's never a sense of chaos in this café; during subsequent visits the ambience simply got more assured and comfortable. Perhaps this may be attributed to the café owners Hiew Kuei Yin and Jeffrey Ng. As former schoolmates and engineers, they both have a finely attuned sense of what they want their café to be. There's no rush even as Jeffrey shares stories about how they'd go around looking to reclaim old pieces of wood or crates to be reused as furnishing.  Different types of coffee. When I point this out, he merely winks and says he felt it was time for a change. Certainly things are different from his engineer days. I've noticed my friends are not immune to the café's charms either. One would drop in the evenings after work to decompress over a freshly-brewed black coffee and a thick book to lose herself in. Another drops by during the weekends to escape the crowds in the shopping malls and research his upcoming holiday in Hong Kong. Everyone finds their own space here to take things slow, breathe again and figure out what's next. In this fast-paced and highly stressful modern life we lead, who's to say this slow culture that's brewing isn't exactly the antidote we so desperately need? Slow down, drink some coffee, breathe.  A café regular reading a book. B-1-6, Plaza Damas 3, 50480 Kuala Lumpur. Open daily (except Tue) 9:00am – 9:00pm. Website: http://www.facebook.com/The.Brew.Culture/ * Kenny's convinced there's no hurry. Slow down and drink more coffee. For more of his highly-caffeinated musings, visit http://lifeforbeginners.com |
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