Airing New Possibilities

Acclaimed chefs Matthew Orlando and Will Goldfarb hope to inspire and spark deeper conversations and action around food and circular cooking at their idyllic concept Air in lush Dempsey Hill.

- KAREN TEE

Chef Matthew Orlando has one big point to make about sustainable dining, and he does it in the best way possible by serving up mean plates of food you can't get enough of.

Take, for instance, the crispy oyster mushrooms slathered with Sarawak pepper emulsion and topped with pickled chillies at the sprawling 40,000 sq ft dining concept Air, which opened in late January.

Inspired by fried chicken, they are moreish, highly umami bursts of flavour that are practically impossible to stop popping into one's mouth. The secret to their surprising depth of flavour is a lacto-fermented spice mix made from the kitchen's veggie ends -proof that a lot more can be done regarding the conscious and creative use of ingredients. "Whatever you are making has to be as good as or better than what you are trying to replace, or you are not going to convince people," says Orlando.

A textbook example of this is the Re-Incarnated "Chocolate" that mixes the by-products of three common processes cocoa husks, cascara (the fruit that is discarded in the process of coffee making), and coconut flesh with cocoa butter and sugar to yield a luscious chocolate bar with a deeply roasted flavour that one would be hard pressed to tell apart from actual chocolate.

"Basically, this is the traditional way of making chocolate, just without cocoa beans, of which there is a worldwide shortage," he explains.

Orlando was most recently the chef-owner of Copenhagen restaurant Amass. During its years of operation from 2013 to 2022, the restaurant sparked a movement to examine how the hospitality and food industries must play a role in mitigating its negative environmental impact.