Chinese dining elevated at Cherry Garden by Chef Fei
The newly rebranded Cantonese-Teochew restaurant offers elegant and polished cuisine
RESTAURANT REVAMP Cherry Garden by Chef Fei Level 5, Mandarin Oriental Singapore 5 Raffles Avenue Singapore 039797 Tel: 6885-3500 Open daily for lunch and dinner: 12 pm to 2.30 pm; 6 pm to 10 pm
THEY say you shouldn’t gossip about your boss. But the way the Cherry Garden staff talk about their mysterious supervisor named Chef Fei, you can’t help but think:
- He really, really looks down on local preserved radish; and
- His idea of fun is picking out every itty bitty splinter from the notoriously bony crucian carp – just to make fish porridge the way he likes it.
But if being racist towards pickled turnips is what makes Mandarin Oriental’s newly revamped Chinese restaurant stand out, we’re all for it.
The titular Chef Fei – aka Huang Jing Hui from Chaosan in Guangdong province – is the kind of F&B consultant we long for. The kind that doesn’t only lend his name, he shapes a restaurant that does justice to it.
In this case, Chef Fei claims two Michelin-starred credibility for Jiang by Chef Fei in Guangzhou, and his reputation as a picky perfectionist trickles down to our table, filled with snacks that stand out for sheer attention to detail.
Note the radish – from Shandong because “Chef doesn’t like the ones in Singapore” – crunchy, savoury “chye po” lightly dressed in oil and chilli. But it’s the peanuts we fancy: still in their burnished skins, delicately pickled in vinegar so they’re sweet with a touch of tang. Super addictive.
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And the XO sauce isn’t a condiment, but threads of dried scallop in a little tangle, infused with a bit of oil and chilli that you can eat as is.
Any worry that the meal might go downhill from there is unfounded. The fancier dishes are pricey if you go a la carte; spring for the set menu, which offers tasting portions so you can tackle more of them.
A combination of Lotus (S$198) and Peony (S$268) between two people is a good strategy to sample a wide variety without overkill. It’s six courses versus eight, presented in a spruced-up dining room that’s easy on the eye with its modern Chinese aesthetic.
The cuisine is described as Cantonese-Teochew, but it impresses for Chef Fei’s polished self-restraint, where he pushes flavours to their peak while keeping ego and imagination in check. The simplicity is deceptive; the impact on the palate profound.
The appetisers are delicate, offering little tastes of the a la carte menu. The Lotus features a feather-light battered piece of cuttlefish with incredible crunch; sweet-sour pork is reinvented as another deep-fried morsel, lightly painted with a sweet hawthorn sauce and served with a ball of spun sugar for effect.
Meanwhile, the star of the Peony starter platter is a precision-scored piece of poached squid that comes alive in a bath of vibrant chilli oil studded with sesame seeds. There’s also a decent piece of char siew – juicy and not too sweet.
Double-boiled geoduck soup with seaweed and its Peony counterpart featuring whelk and basil each have their strengths: the former with its umami of dried toasted seaweed and tender geoduck; the latter with a fresh infusion of basil and thin slivers of shellfish.
But the other dishes stand out more. There’s lobster – usually buried under a cream sauce with token tobiko roe or worse, mentaiko – treated with respect here. It’s perfectly undercooked by seconds and barely glazed with a sauce made with condensed milk and garlic. You don’t taste any sweetness; just the creaminess with a hint of allium.
What could have been garden variety sauteed wagyu cubes in black pepper gets a lift from melty-chewy A3 beef flash-fried with Sichuan pepper, and garnished with curls of finely shredded chilli that look like saffron threads.
The piece de resistance – one of them, anyway – is a poached fillet of threadfin, all traces of muddiness disappearing in a thick enriched chicken broth deliberately made salty with preserved vegetables. The fish absorbs all the intense flavours and needs nothing else.
The second is the aforementioned crucian carp porridge: velvety, silky congee in comforting fish broth and melting-soft slices of the meticulously deboned fish.
The Lotus set feeds you with seafood fried rice, tossed with bits of black truffle and what seems like pork lard cubes turn out to be deep-fried foie gras – a surprisingly good touch.
In between, you’re served by a committed team that seems to actually care about what it does.
Leading the gang is Ricky Ng, whom we later find out is the director of operations but works the floor like a trouper. He has the demeanour of a Hougang boy and the voice of a BBC broadcaster – and occasionally the two clash. But he peppers the meal with vivid anecdotes about Chef Fei’s cooking process with entertaining flair, so he’s pretty fun.
The only misstep is dessert. Tremella soup with water chestnut and lime tastes as alien as it sounds, and is served with a deep-fried savoury pastry that might have escaped from the dim sum lunch menu. Lemongrass jelly with peach gum is familiar but predictable.
It took us a while to rediscover the new Cherry Garden, but we’re glad we finally got to it. Chef Fei may be a taskmaster, but the head chef he’s installed – Steven Luo – is an able disciple who’s a master in his own right.
Rating: 7.5
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