HAPPILY EVER AFTER

CHRISTINA KO muses over the making of molecular gastronomy, discovering a happy medium with the Krug Room’s fairy-tale menu

FEW FOOD MOVEMENTS are as divisive as that of molecular gastronomy, and few chefs are willing to fight for this scientific style of cuisine. Many I’ve come across simply deny it like an accusation. “Molecular? That’s not what we do.” They shake their heads and purse their lips and assert that theirs is a cuisine born of emotion, not a test tube. Is there anything more exacting and pretentious than a 10-plus-course molecular tasting menu? This is a cerebral approach to cooking, and its definition is confusing. From a technical standpoint, it’s the study of various processes that allow food to metamorphose. But beyond that, it’s the science of enjoying food, an investigation into the factors and constants – both physical and metaphysical – that make up a food experience, which may include mood, environment, knowledge and ingredients.

The public adores fresh and feel-good food. They love to hear that the sashimi arrived fresh from Tsukiji two hours ago, or that their lambs were slaughtered before reaching two years of age, or that their tomatoes were harvested sans preservatives and scary fertilisers. They’ve seen Like Water for Chocolate and they believe in hot-blooded, impassioned cooking. So why would any chefs pony up the admission that they use anything but fingers and fervour as their tools?

Chef Uwe Opocensky is finding a way to meld the empirical with the expressive. The Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong’s executive chef helms two restaurants, the Michelin-starred and more straightforward Mandarin Grill, and the hidden, more playful Krug Room, a 12 seat diner that seeks to delight adventurous palates with its radical menus.

“Do I consider what I do to be molecular?” he muses. “Depends on what we understand it as. Is it foams, bubbles or jellies? Or is it the understanding of how food reacts when you cook or prepare it? I believe what we do is to try to understand food.”

His solution to the cold shoulder associated with molecular cuisine is to fuzzy it up with overt connections to very common childhood nostalgia. Running from late last year until this April, Opocensky’s fairy-tale menu is a fantastical take on old-favourite tales and the familiar characters that inhabit them.

“I was reading a bed-time story to my daughter, and I had the thought of living through fairy tales at work, and how I could turn this into food,” he explains.

Because of the way in which the menu is presented – in print as a staccato listing of disparate ingredients; on the blackboard as a crossword puzzle of intersecting elements – it’s difficult to predict exactly what will appear on the plate. The titles of the dishes act as philosophical guidelines, however, so you can expect seafood to be part of “Moby Dick” or “Tea Party” – though Melville and Carroll might scratch their heads over the actual combinations. The former steers clear of mammalian sea creatures to focus on lobster and risotto, while the latter marries onion, gold and herbs.

As is characteristic of most molecular dishes, the presentation is dauntingly beautiful, which begs the question: how does it taste? Does Opocensky go too far in bringing his concepts to life? Is a Cinderella dish involving pumpkin and a Prince dish involving frog’s legs much too obvious for his own good?

Taste and presentation often work inversely against each other, so the prettier a course is, the less delectable too, sometimes, but Opocensky has come a long way in his years at the hotel, so the missteps are fewer and farther between. The key to harnessing the mood and fancy of a diner isn’t, as Opocensky once offered, by serving up a pot filled with carrots and flowers sprouting from a bed of green mush (verisimilitude to soil is rarely a major criteria in judging food). It’s in evoking relics of the past: a “Forest” reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Woods; “Magic Mushrooms” that could be the secret abodes of a tribe of Smurfs; a “Snowman” that, if you close your eyes and dream hard enough, might just take off into the midnight sky, taking you along with it. Now that’s a gastronomic journey worth taking.