Twist on tradition

Is there room for yet another Italian eatery in Singapore? BT Weekend sniffs out four new Italian eateries that up the game by offering more than meets the eyeSopra Cucina and Bar#01-02 Pan Pacific Orchard, 10 Claymore RoadTel 6737-0811Hours: 11:30am-midnight (Mon-Wed), 11.新蒲崗迷你倉30am-2am (Thu-Sat)It’s hard to pull new tricks out of the overflowing bag that is the Italian dining scene in Singapore, so the people behind handsome new restaurant, Sopra, decided that the best way to compete is to simply bring something new to the table.Hence the spotlight is on the cuisine of Sardinia, a Mediterranean island just off the West coast of Italy known for its hearty, pastoral fare.”Most of the Italian food in Singapore is from Tuscany or Sicily, but people forget that there are 18 other regions in Italy, and each one with a completely different cuisine,” observes Sopra’s Italian restaurant manager, Mauro Serrajotto.Compatriot head chef Simone Depalmas is a native of Sassari in Sardinia, where he has worked as a chef for most of his life before moving to Singapore a few months ago – and being fresh off the boat, so to speak, has its advantages.”This is my first time working out of Italy, so I’m cooking as I do in Italy,” he explains, after waxing lyrical about the access to free-range meats and fish bought straight off a fisherman’s daily haul that he gets back home. Of the myriad Italian dishes he has sampled here, “some of them don’t even exist back home in Italy,” observes Depalmas. “My idea is to create the pure Italian taste, not something adapted for local tastebuds.”Bucking the stereotype of Italian food as creamy carbonara sauces and carb-laden pastas, Deplamas’ creations are largely free of heavy butter or cream-based sauces.Expect rarely seen but traditional pasta like the little knobby-shaped chewy Malloredus in meaty sauces or chewy pearls of fregola bathed in light seafood stew. All of Sopra’s pastas, breads and pizzas are made onsite in the restaurant’s sprawling 800 sq m premises.Specifically Sardinia-imported pecorino cheese also features liberally on the menu whether enveloped in crisp wafer thin Carasau bread and drizzled with honey, or stuffed in deep-fried fritters. The best way to sample all the regional specialities is to zoom in on the Sardo degustation menu ($98++ for a minimum of two, $158++ with wine pairing).Signature cocktails tastefully work in Italian amaro, or herbal liquer, for those not use to pounding them back as a digestif, while a range of Italian craft beers and Sardinian wines are also available by the glass ($9.50 to $26) and by the bottle (from $58).Unadventurous and still unconvinced? Classic pan-Italian dishes such as lasagne, burrata salad and fettucine bolognese are fail-proof Plan Bs, or go for the pizzas,which come in more than 20 flavours and three sizes (9″, 14″ and 20”), including a gourmet range folding in premium ingredients such as tuna bottarga, salmon caviar, wagyu beef and lobster salad ($52 to $59).By Debbie Yongdebyong@sph.com.sgTastes of Italy and Peru in one biteSupply & Demand8 Raffles Avenue #01-13Esplanade MallHours: 11.30am-11.30pm (Sun-Thu), 11.30am-2am (Fri-Sat) .facebook.com/supplydemandsinOpens mid-SeptemberWHAT do Italian food and Peruvian cooking have in common? To most people, the similarities may not be immediately obvious, but that hasn’t put off the team behind upcoming Italian-Peruvian restaurant, Supply & Demand, from trying to meld the two cuisines together.Set to open in a fortnight, the mammoth 200-seater takes over the former premises of Italian trattoria, Al Dente, at the Esplanade Mall and is a labour of love among five friends – Foong Yeap, Samdy Kan, Jacelyn and Joanne Ngo and Jeremy Tan – who had each dabbled in the F&B industry at some point in their lives.But their first restaurant venture together won’t be heading down the trite fusion food route. Instead, Supply & Demand will have classic Peruvian and Italian creations separately listed on its menu, with just a few dishes combining influences from both cultures. “Fusion is rarely done correctly and well, we want to stay true to the fundamental flavours of each cuisine,” explains Kan, an alumnus of Italian restaurants such as Senso and Barpazza and one of the restaurant’s two head chefs. Still, he’s confident that the two cuisines share many similarities – plenty of Italian food is consumed in Peru, and the Italian and Spanish languages are close cousins – hence there won’t be too large a cultural rift.Heading up the Peruvian half of the kitchen is Foong Yeap, a classmate of Kan’s from culinary academy, At-Sunrice, and who later cooked aboard a cruise ship in the United States. The latter is also where she met her Peruvian partner, with whom she spent six months eating her way through Peru earlier this year.Now back in Singapore, Foong hopes to recreate the flavours she’s tasted in her time abroad, including classics such as the aquadito de pollo or chicken soup, mashed potato-based causas, anticuchos (skewered meat) and of course, the ubiquitous ceviche and tiradito, or Peruvian raw fish salads.On the Italian side of things, expect crowd favourites such as starters of parma ham with melon, risotto rice balls, a range of pastas in three base sauces (tomato, cream or olive oil), seafoods such as fish and lobster done in various styles, and over 20 flavours of pizza.The group estimates spending about $800,000 doing up the gritty, industrial-chic space, thanks to co-founder Tan, who also runs an interior design business. Expansion is already on the cards, with a second 1,900 sq ft outlet set to open in Orchard Gateway next January.There’s even talk of eventually setting up a direct import company to bring in less commonly available South American ingredients such as maize, aji (chillis) in fresh and paste forms, and classic Peruvian hauncaina and rocotto sauces.Peruvian dishes will take up about 80 per cent of the menu at their second outlet, says Kan, while the third outlet will eventually be a full-fledged Peruvian restaurant.”Peruvian food is still so new in Singapore, we want to start with something safe and familiar first.”?By Debbie Yongdebyong@sph.com.sgChinese accent on Italian fareNo Menu Bar7 Boon Tat Street Tel 62240091Hours: 8-12am (Mon-Fri), 5.3mini storagepm-12am (Sat and Public Holidays), Closed on SundaysOpens Sept 9OSVALDO Forlino is one name you might trust to put homemade pasta on your dinner plate. But would you trust that same name if it were to serve you coffeeshop cai fan?It does seem a little unconventional for the Italian chef and owner behind No Menu restaurant to be including Chinese cuisine at his new venture, No Menu Bar, when it opens the following Monday. But Forlino has a simple and practical explanation – he just wants to satisfy the demand.”Before I took over, that corner shop used to sell Chinese food. And it was so busy. So I knew that is what people would want. If we sell Italian tapas, we probably won’t have business,” he explains. After all, No Menu restaurant already serves the clientele that prefers a sit-down Italian lunch, so his new eatery should provide a little variety, he adds.”I am just an Italian selling Chinese food, so I won’t design the menu. I know nothing. But I have Chinese chefs. So I’ll let them do it,” he promises. And according to executive chef Nelson Wong, 44, he intends to do a simple Chinese mixed rice selection, where the average plate of rice with one vegetable and two meat dishes will cost about $5 to $6.But it’s just one section that will be set aside during weekday lunch hour. The rest of No Menu Bar is made up of stripped-down takeaway counters that will sell pizza slices, sandwiches, pastas, etc that customers can quickly consume at the al fresco dining area. And much like a deli, there will be Italian products such as olive oil, parma ham, pasta and salami for sale.At night, Forlino intends to do away with the casual cafeteria style and have a full-service dinner with an a la carte menu of Italian food, and a cocktail and tapas bar. The selection of tapas includes a caprese salad of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, a roasted pork belly accompanied with a sweet apple sauce, or green asparagus wrapped in parma ham and topped with a poached egg, all to be priced at $7 each.”For lunch, people need fast, cheap, good quality food. So if we do fine-dining with waiters and a manager, nobody will come. It’s like if you go to the North Pole, you don’t sell ice. But in Singapore, you can. I have to sell what people need,” says Forlino.By Rachel Loirachloi@sph.com.sgItalian food that pushes the boundariesFratini La Trattoria10 Greenwood AvenueOpens mid-SeptWHEN Fratini La Trattoria opens along residential dining stretch Greenwood Avenue later next month, it won’t – like most Italian restaurants here – serve any pizza, burrata or even spaghetti vongole.Instead, you may be presented a plate of rigatoni, the pasta elegantly wrapped around a clump of meat sauce and oven-baked rather than smothered with sauce and saut?med in a pan.And in place of the traditional lasagne, the restaurant will dish out fagotto di lasagne, a double-layered pasta pouch plated in individual servings rather than sloppily carved out from a large platter.Not a new-fangled creation by any means, the latter is in fact a 25-year-old signature creation of Italian chef, Gabriel Fratini. After a decade-long hiatus from Singapore, the 55-year-old is back to leave his imprint in Singapore with Fratini La Trattoria.If that name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s done it all before. The native of Pescara, in Northern Italy, first came to Singapore in the late 1980s as the former head chef of Domvs at the Sheraton Towers, and later went on to open rustic Fratini La Trattoria in Neil Road and the slightly more upmarket Fratini II Ristorante in Ngee Ann City, before giving it all up to raise his children in Europe.Now the two kids – a 21-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son – are all grown-up and leaning towards building careers in Asia, Fratini and his Singaporean wife are back home to roost, too. “It’s the best time for me to prepare the path for their return,” he says.As for version 2.0 of Fratini La Trattoria, Fratini says: “What I want to do is traditional Italian food with a chef’s twist. I’m reconstructing the dishes to give them a modern look.”In his absence from Singapore, he’s been jetsetting around Europe as a private chef to a wide clasp of billionaires, European royalty and presidents – experiences that have collectively helped to refine and modernise his cooking, he says. “You just can’t go to them and do ‘Mama’s cooking.'”But can Italian food really be taken into the 21st century and beyond? Can food taste as good when not dished out by an aproned and rotund Italian woman?”The idea of Italian food being only ‘mama’s cooking’ is so decades ago. Today, we have three Michelin star restaurants in Italy and ‘mama’s cooking’ is hard to find even in small restaurants,” retorts Fratini. “Ten years ago, you were dressed differently, so why aren’t you wearing the same dress today? We have to move with the times.”Pass?m for Fratini, too, are heavy-set Italian menus offering everything from soup to dolce, and every course in between. Instead, he wants to keep things simple – and seasonal.The a la carte menu is kept small – three starters, three pastas and three mains at any one time – so that focus can be thrown onto the restaurant’s daily specials that will written on a chalkboard that flanks the entire 40-seater, 1,300 sq ft space.A wine cellar at the back of the restaurant doubles as a private room for 10 to 20 guests, and all wines on Fratini’s list will be available by the glass, including the highly prized Tignanello ($40 to $42 per glass), while bottle prices will start at $50. If you just want to kick back with a drink and some small bites, assagini – think of it as Italian tapas – will also be served, or go the whole hog with degustation menus spotlighting Fratini’s bespoke appetisers, a trio of pastas or main courses and dessert ($70 to $85).When operations stabilise, Fratini also hopes to launch lunch time cooking classes with a personal touch. Each session will be capped at four participants and the lessons will be devised according to what participants request to learn.As for the glut of Italian restaurants here, Fratini is not too bothered: “I’m doing something that no one else does, and I believe that as long as you are doing something good, there will always be room.”By Debbie Yongdebyong@sph.com.sgself storage