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Chef Kirk Westaway at Roganic, in Causeway Bay, in Hong Kong. Photo: Tory Ho

Chef Kirk Westaway on bringing modern British cuisine to Singapore

  • The name behind one-Michelin-star restaurant Jaan by Kirk Westaway on learning the value of hard work from mentor Raymond Patterson
  • ‘I’m not French and I would never cook French food’, he says as he explains why he is preparing modern British fare
Singapore

What was it like growing up mostly vegetarian? “My mother is vegetarian and since she cooked, we ate whatever was on the table. I grew up in Devon [southwest England], where my family still lives. We grew carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and potatoes, and there are pear and apple trees. One of my fondest memories is of picking these ingredients in the summertime, making a small salad and eating it. Many years later, this evolved into the English Garden dish that is popular in Jaan.”

How did you get into cooking? “When I was about 14 years old, on the weekends and in the summer, I worked in a busy pub called The Clinton Arms, washing dishes for extra money. One day, the guy on the salad section was sick, so the chef chucked me there. That guy never came back, so for the whole summer I stayed in the hot, sweaty kitchen. It was an eye-opener to see the chefs work crazy hours, but they used nice local ingredients.

“I went to a catering college in Exeter. As part of the programme, I moved to France at 18 and worked for four months in a Michelin-starred restaurant called Manoir de Lan Kerellec, in Trébeurden, Brittany. In the morning, we walked 10 minutes to the seaside carrying two buckets. We’d fill one with seawater and the other with seaweed. Back in the kitchen, we would put the seawater into a pan, bring it to a boil and cook the langoustines and lobster in there, and blanch the seaweed in seawater for the seafood salad dish.

“After college I worked in Exeter, then a year in Melbourne and the Great Barrier Reef. Then I worked for four years in London, in Mayfair, where I met chef Julien Royer at The Greenhouse. We worked together for six months.”
King crab, spring pea and uni, by Westaway. Photo: Jaan by Kirk Westaway

What did you learn from Raymond Patterson? “I worked at his [now closed] Patterson’s restaurant for a couple of years from 2008, which taught me what the body can take. It was long, tough hours in a basement kitchen; I didn’t see daylight for two years because I would start at 7am and leave at 1am. Raymond was in his early 50s when I was there. The hours he was doing showed incredible deter­mination and hard work.

“I did an event with him and I was there preparing for 46 hours in that basement kitchen. I didn’t sleep or take a break. He stopped just to rest, but then he carried on. These moments teach you what you can achieve if you are determined. Whenever I felt tired or missed sleep, I’d look at him and shake it off – I would be ashamed or embarrassed to say I was tired. He worked many more hours than me and I was trying to keep up.”

What was it like working in South America? “In 2011, I went to Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. I spent a few months with Alex Atala in D.O.M., in Sao Paulo. Brazil has ingredients you can’t find anywhere else. One ingredient I loved was heart of palm where they would use mandolins to slice them up into strips the same width as tagliatelle and make a carbonara with it. It was delicious.”

In 2011, you went to Singapore to be Royer’s sous chef at Jaan. What was he like? “He’s passionate, driven. Eight years ago, the food we served was not what it is today. He’d make a dish and I’d look at it and think, ‘You sure you want to serve this?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah!’ Then in a day he’d have the same dish, but it would look totally different, and within a couple of days he’d have a new dish and another one. I didn’t know where he got the time while working in a busy kitchen. He learns from his mis­takes, evolves and learns new techniques. The dishes and flavours get more precise, more clean, more elegant.”

What was it like taking over Jaan from Royer? “Julien left in 2015 [to open Odette, also in Singapore]. At the time, I was in an S Pellegrino Young Chef competi­tion, which 2,000 people had entered and I was in the final round of 20 chefs, in Milan. I had to change everything in Jaan and prepare for the competi­tion at the same time. The media and regular guests had low expectations because Julien was amazing and they didn’t expect a boy from Devon to do some­thing special. It pushed me harder.

“I used to do a day of cooking in the restaurant and then at midnight I would begin practising for the competition. It would be too late to go home so I would go to the dining room, sleep under one of the tables for a couple of hours, wake up, wash my face and come back into the kitchen. I didn’t win, but it changed my life, putting me a step forward in the limelight.

The interior of one Michelin-star restaurant Jaan by Kirk Westaway, in Singapore. Photo: Jaan by Kirk Westaway

“After the competition, I came back to Singapore to rework the menu, again sleep­ing under the table and working every day and night. Four years on, the restaurant is called Jaan by Kirk Westaway, we’ve had a Michelin star since 2016, and we are No 32 on Asia’s 50 Best. I’m very happy with what I have achieved.”

Why did you decide to veer away from modern French cuisine at Jaan? “A year and a half ago I invented this concept called Reinventing British. I’m not French and I would never cook French food. Modern British fine dining is unheard of outside the UK. I had to convince manage­ment about cooking British food using top UK ingredients, like Devonshire butter, scallops from Scotland, Irish oysters.

We removed French words from the menu – petits fours is now ‘final sweets’, canapés are ‘snacks’, degustation menu is ‘tasting menu’ and jardin gour­mand is ‘vegetarian menu’. A lot of English guests eat the fish and chips with salt and vinegar and tell me they were transported to the pier in Brighton and that they can hear the seagulls and feel the rain. This is the kind of thing I want to achieve.”

Where do you eat in Singapore? “Odette is incredible while Esquina serves tapas with the guys chucking things in the fire, with amazing flavours. One of my favourite places is Luke’s Oyster Bar, located in a shopping mall and you have to go through the ladies’ lingerie section to get there. Sometimes I take my chefs to Tian Tian Seafood on Orchard Road for char kway teow, cereal prawns, black bean noodles and bak kut teh. For a good curry, there’s Zam Zam – mutton biryani with an incredible gravy, for just a couple of dollars.”

Kirk Westaway was recently a guest chef at Roganic, in Causeway Bay.

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