Flying the coop

For five years, Chris Donnellan brought an urban flair into the Southeast Asian cuisine at Teage Ezard’s Gingerboy restaurant where he worked as head chef—think soy-cured ocean trout with shiso, turmeric and coconut caramel, and seabass in lemongrass curry. Now the 27-year-old has transplanted himself from the hip Melburnian restaurant into another contemporary playground in Singapore. As the new executive chef of Graze at Rochester Park, and Graze, Kha and Provisions at Martin No 38, the young talent has been keeping himself busy injecting a modern Asian-Japanese bent into the restaurants’ new menus, starting with Graze.

Despite a mass of dragon and phoenix tattoos (“I love Asian culture.”) running across his right arm, and a penchant for dirt-bike riding, skateboarding and snowboarding, in person, Donnellan is surprisingly soft-spoken and goes about the kitchens in a quiet, unassuming manner. His culinary upbringing is as Asian as it can get; instead of fish and chips, he shares with epicure that family meals for him back home would consist of curries and sushi and other Asian fare which he ate “90 percent of the time.”

Despite having worked at the Michelin-starred Nobu Parklane in 2005, and receiving the accolade of Young Chef of the Year 2009 by The Age Good Food Guide, Donnellan is under no illusion that his food will be embraced wholeheartedly in Singapore, a city where diners know their Asian food at the back of their fingertips. He adds, “Being new in the city, I’m willing to listen to feedback from my customers.”

Excerpt from the October issue of epicure.