Recipes Re-mixed

As blended as Swiss concrete with the natural.

Shintori reflects what the French Concession is to its city, Shanghai. You walk through a narrow minimalist corridor of lush prolific bamboo and enter a sparsely lit industrial warehouse replete with equally minimalist place settings. But if you were to naturally anticipate that the resident chef has a modern cooking technique along the lines of Heston Blumenthol’s signature philosophy, you’ll be further pleasantly surprised that this restaurant actually serves not just authentic Japanese cuisine, but Far Eastern fare that steps one up on the likes of Tatsu Sushi in Chimjes here. The element of un-expected harmony achieved by deco blending with the cuisine takes you to a whole new plane in fine dining.  

The idea of similarly blending two recipes together took shape quite by accident. After all, everyone knows that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Well, necessity came knocking in the form of all supermarkets having no fresh mussels in stock, when I had already paid for all the other ingredients needed to whip up a time-tested Latin American paellal-like dish. But what’s available were some succulently local prawns looking like they had been freshly hauled up in trawling nets.

The necessity of ensuring that the other ingredients in this wonderfully fragrant dish didn’t overpower the pretty-in-pink prawns meant that they too had to be well marinated before adding them to the cooking rice. The necessity of ensuring the added flavours blends harmoniously with the ingredients, well-loved by the people living far south off San Diego, gave me inspiration to borrow the spices added to a contemporary Australian recipe for barbecued prawns. To my greatest delight, the new fusion surpassed the authentic mussel-ladened dish in charismatically tantalizing our senses - greatly enhancing the pleasure of romantically dining by candle light.  

Enhancing the joy of sharing a meal is itself catalytic in necessitating a blend of the well-loved traditional Australian recipe for curry chicken pie with the South-East Asian way of stewing all forms of curry. Borrowing this technique from ASEAN ensures that the aromatic, chilli-hot spices successfully marinates into the dainty plae-pink cubes of cut-up chicken breasts. That way a generous bite of the piping hot pie oozes with the intoxication of fragrant curry: greatly complemented by hubby’s desire to share the whole pie with work mates.