Delicious off-cuts

Dibs

51 Duxton Road

Hours: 12-3pm,6pm-12am (Mon-Fri), 6pm-12am (Sat)

Tel 62233784

THE most fail-proof way of running a restaurant these days seems to be: order in a chunk of premium wagyu, mindlessly toss it on the grill (how bad can good wagyu turn out?), slap a high mark-up on it, serve.

But then again, where's the fun in that?

That is why budding local chef Leong Khai Git, 29, and his team behind three-week-old restaurant Dibs on Duxton Road set themselves up to do just the opposite. Their aim: to present inexpensive, off-cuts of meat in unexpectedly delicious ways.

A platter of beef short ribs ($34) is cooked sous vide for 24-hours to accentuate its tender marbling; a slab of pork cheek ($28) is dusted with a panko crust and served on a bed of pea and horseradish puree.

If it all sounds a tad Fergus Henderson to you, it actually is. For Cordon Bleu-trained Mr Leong admits to being enamoured of the nose-to-tail cooking philosophy, though not quite taking it to the extreme as Mr Henderson's St John's restaurant does.

So while you won't find any lungs or intestines on the menu at Dibs, neither will you get prime sirloin or tenderloin. It's not all bottom-of-the-barrel picks, either: the short ribs are from Black Angus cattle while the cheeks are from black pigs (kurobuta).

But the best part of the menu at Dibs is how the Asian elements play out in subtle, creative ways, such as a drizzle of fish sauce or gula melaka in the salad dressing, or a chicken roll with ginger, burnt rice and cucmber ($25) that's like a modern take on chicken rice. A starter of "meat butter", or bone marrow ($15), is laced with teriyaki sauce and bonito flakes for that extra umami and the bowl of smokey cockles ($8) is adapted from the favourite beer snack of kopitiam uncles, but dressed up with bacon dashi and a lively kick of smoked chillis.

The benefits of running a small restaurant is that new dishes are always being tinkered with, and the menu will evolve gradually, says Mr Leong, who previously worked at Italian restaurant Gaia at the Goodwood Park Hotel and Quest, a molecular Asian restaurant in Abu Dhabi. His two other partners, Jonathan Wee and Lawrence Lim, work in the finance and start-up industries respectively.

The restaurant currently seats 40 on the first floor, while a soon-to-open lofty second floor is used as a private events space for now. The trio also hope to open a second concept when things stabilise, such as a winebar offering homemade charcuterie, says Mr Leong.