What would you pay for?

Waku Ghin @ Marina Bay Sands
10 Bayfront Avenue
Singapore 018956
Tel: +65 6888 8507

So despite all my rhetorical remonstrations about the rising price of fine dining in Singapore, in the end I’m still a sucker for it. I still want to be wowed, I still want to be shown a good time. Maybe those good times don’t come along as often as I’d like, but they represent a luxury that I am unwilling to forego completely. Shanaz was in town the other week, and we took the opportunity to try one of the celebrity chef restaurants at the Marina Bay Sands casino – Waku Ghin, by Tetsuya Wakuda.

What is it that you pay for, anyway, at these places that see fit to charge such astronomical prices? The way I see it, I’d gladly pay such high prices for several things. First – the cost of quality, fresh ingredients. It is not cheap air-freighting, say, fresh-caught seafood from miles and miles away on a daily basis, and ensuring that the seafood reaches your table in a time better measured in hours rather than days, all the while making sure it stays fresh. Secondly, I’d pay for talent. If the guy’s a good cook, you’ve got to hand it to him. But seriously, I know these restaurants have to pay a little more to attract skilled front and back of the house professionals, and the staff-to-customer ratios at these places are often really low – to ensure an unforgettable, pampering experience for the diner. Then there are the costs of training and retaining these folks – not an easy thing to do in the rough-and-tumble culinary world where turnover is unlike any other industry. So, I really can’t begrudge a few dollars on menu prices if the people are good at what they do. Thirdly, I’d pay to see effort. The effort chefs put into developing, honing, fine-tuning their recipes; changing them seasonally. The effort that the waitstaff puts into creating a magical evening for me; or the effort that the dishwasher makes in ensuring spotless dishes or cutlery. If people are busting balls, I would willingly pay what it took to get them to do so.

It seems a little callous to reduce the cost of a good meal to such basic elements – there are other things you might pay for as part of the fine dining experience: a good location or view for instance. Or you might think the extra work, research and development needed for molecular gastronomy may be worth paying a few extra dollars for. Or perhaps the costs needed to maintain a comprehensive winelist may be something you’re willing to foot (although I’m pretty sure that the markups on wine more than cover those). In any case, after our meal at Waku Ghin it was abundantly clear which of these elements your money was really going towards.

Waku Ghin is Chef Tetsuya Wakuda’s first establishment outside of Australia – his flagship restaurant being Tetsuya’s in Sydney. The concept here though, is different from the Sydney restaurant. At Waku Ghin, food is prepared and served teppanyaki style, at one of a few counters with immaculate iron griddles and granite countertops. Each of the counters is enclaved away from the others, and there is a drawing room in the corner of the restaurant – overlooking Marina Bay – where you retire to have your dessert and petit fours after your meal, which is in itself part meal, part demonstration.

The interesting thing about Waku Ghin is that they welcome and are even happy for you to take as many photos and videos as you want. I didn’t bring my camera, so I had to be content with taking the odd iPhone shot while Shanaz went a little obsessive compulsive with her photo-taking. She’s promised to send me the pictures, but she’s also promised me lots of other stuff before, so we’ll see if she makes good this time.

At the start of the meal our chef brought out the fresh seafood in a carton for us to ogle and I must admit I was slightly aroused at this sight. (I did not, of course, disclose this to my dining companions.) The ingredients, with their deep, rich, natural colours, looked as if they had only been caught hours before. Not even at farmers’ markets or wet markets had I ever seen ingredients this fresh, this succulent, this appetising. It was all I could do to stop myself from reaching out to caress them.

We started with a terrine of duck and foie gras which was technically excellent but unfortunately not memorable. To be fair, it’s not the best lead-in going from oohing and aahing at raw lobster tails, a two foot long trout, and other assorted tasty ingredients – to eating two tiny cubes of terrine and foie gras. They were delicious, don’t get me wrong, but our thoughts were unfortunately elsewhere. I will also say, though, that this dish was, like everything else, meticulously and scrupulously executed. There was just the right amount of vinaigrette on the frisee, just the right balance of greens to protein – no more, no less. I couldn’t help but think that everything had been painstakingly measured, portioned and prepared and it was a tone that carried through the rest of the meal.

The next appetiser was raw Botan shrimps marinated with sea urchin and topped with caviar. Now, you and I both know that appetisers are supposed to be flavour bursts, to open your palate in preparation for the main course(s), but there was little that could have prepared us for the explosion of umami that was this dish. The waitress touted it as one of Waku Ghin’s signature dishes, and I certainly enjoyed it very much. It came with a little spoon you were supposed to use, and I took a little-boy pleasure in cleaning off the dish.


Marinated Botan Ebi with Sea Urchin and Oscietre Caviar

We then moved on to a dish of trout, slow cooked to a deep orange, tenderly placed atop a Belgian endive and paired with a Japanese seaweed sauce. There was a healthy cracking of black pepper atop the trout, which I loved, and which made the kick from the seaweed sauce more pronounced. This was no ordinary peppercorn, it was woody, tart and spicy beyond the pepper you and I use at home. By itself this might have already been my favourite dish of the night, but what sealed the deal was the salad of endive leaves and pear that accompanied it. The vinaigrette for this dish was spectacular – a perfect balance of sweetness and sharpness. I asked the waitress to find out what was in it and she came back with the perfunctory answer of ‘red wine vinegar, honey and olive oil – that’s it’. Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if that is really it. There has to be crack cocaine in it, because it wasn’t even funny how fast I inhaled that salad.


Slow Cooked Tasmanian Petuna Ocean Trout with Witlof and Yuzu

At this point, the first of the chef’s theatrics began on the griddle in front of us, with the cooking of Alaskan king crabs atop a bed of sea salt and covered with bamboo leaves. They were finally served drizzled with lemon scented olive oil, but to tell the truth they were – while very good – a little bit of a letdown after the elaborate show of preparation.

The next course was lobster braised in stock, and involved yet another intricate kabuki. First, the lobster pincers and tails were sauted with garlic and shallots, before lobster stock and fresh tarragon added. Our chef made a big show of ladling the stock over the lobster pieces with a spoon but the entire time he was doing it Shanaz was cringing on the edge of her seat. From where she was sitting she could see the ends of the lobster meat curling up, and her worst fears were realised when – after le montage au beurre and the addition of lemon zest – the lobster was served to us a tad overcooked. This set Shanaz off wailing about the injustice of this callous treatment of such quality ingredients, and for good measure she threw in a jibe about tarragon being a ‘common’ herb. (What can you do; women, they’re always throwing in something completely unrelated when making their point, and making the argument about something else instead.) I knew better than to come back with a snide remark, though, and so kept my mouth shut, and when I looked over at her plate after a while she had finished the dish anyway.


Braised Lobster with Tarragon

Snide remarks aside, I do have to agree with her that our lobster was overcooked, and that it was a terrible way to treat ingredients of this quality. The final product was still pretty tasty – it was pretty hard for it not to be given the ingredients – but the knowledge that it could have been better coloured our enjoyment of it slightly. I remarked to Shanaz that never in my life had I had the opportunity to work with such premium ingredients – and indeed, few home cooks ever will.

The next two courses were of beef – first a piece of Japanese Wagyu striploin rolled into a tiny pillow of awesomeness, served with maitake mushrooms. The beef was incredibly fatty, with salt and pepper the only adornment it needed. After that came cubes of Australian Blackmore steak with fresh grated wasabi and citrus-soy. The star of the show here, I thought, was undoubtedly the fresh wasabi. It was not as pungent or spicy as the processed wasabi we were used to eating, but had an almost soothing burn when paired with the beef. My steak was a little overcooked for my liking, but I wolfed it down nonetheless. (Shanaz’s, I thought was perfectly rare so there were no complaints from her this time.)


Grating wasabi

We then had a course of chicken consommé with rice and small fillets of snapper, which was impressive for the pure and strong taste of the consommé. Clearly this was not a consommé made from your average industrially raised farmbird. I don’t know what exactly it was made from, though, and by this point I was too full to care. Before dessert we had a shot of Gyokuro tea, an expensive kind of green tea that differs from the normal green tea in that the leaves are grown under shade or at least shielded from the sun for at least two weeks before harvesting. This gives it a distinctive sweet aroma, while producing a leaf with less catechins (the source of bitterness in teas) than normal green tea. It was made with lukewarm water, and in all made for an interesting experience to drink.

Dessert was steady if not spectacular – a chilled strawberry shortcake served in a martini glass, followed by the house cheesecake, which was almost too fluffy in texture. We then had several cubes of Japanese melon with cracked black pepper on top – which was interesting because the melon was not only incredibly sweet, but had also had something done to it such that it completely disintegrated in your mouth upon contact. The experience was a mixture of eating a solid piece of melon and drinking melon juice, and one that was very interesting indeed.

For the most part, Waku Ghin is spectacular food that will please you if only for one reason – the quality of its ingredients. I take nothing away from the ability of our chefs and waitstaff for the night, but with ingredients this spectacular, you don’t have to do much to them, and Waku Ghin wisely refrains from doing so. But you pay a pretty penny for the luxury of these ingredients - $400++ a person. I personally don’t know they manage it, but to be able to get crab legs from Norway, lobster from Canada, trout from Tasmania, Wagyu from Japan and Blackmore steak from Australia – delivered fresh daily is an incredible accomplishment. (Sure, the environmentalists will have their say, and with good reason too.) The trick that Waku Ghin pulls is therefore not one of cooking, or presentation, although they have those tricks in abundance too. The trick it pulls in rather one of procurement. Chef Tetsuya has undoubtedly built up an impressive network of suppliers who can get him these premium ingredients with the timing and regularity he requires. That, in the end, is what you pay for, at Waku Ghin.