June 15, 2010
Asian Film & Food Fest
Chef Farmerie is curating a fascinating Eurasion/Asian street food extravaganza. He will be pairing a variety of edibles with Asian films for the Fourth Annual NYC Food Film Festival next week. The concept is based on a ”taste what you see” idea, as Brad and friends (including Chefs Chris Rendell & Ryan Butler from Double Crown, Ratha Chau from Kampuchea and Adam Woodfield from Betel) prepare street treats while films referencing Asian night markets are screened. Yes…We have already bought our tickets and are waiting anxiously for the tasty fest to begin…
May 10, 2010
Famed Singapore Chef Cooks Up West-Eats-East
fusion at Double Crown
Chef Willin Low was invited by Chefs Farmerie and Rendell to jump into the kitchen last week to cross connect the Double Crown menu with his own Anglo-Asian creations. Willin is known internationally for his take on “Mod-Sin”, aka Modern Singapore cuisine, and for being an established lawyer in a former life chapter. Here’s a bit of the fun the chefs cooked up collaboratively…pay close attention to the Laksa Linguine with Tiger Prawns at bottom, which got rave reviews from diners that night. We may have to reprise that one.
April 23, 2010
The Examiner Food Critic:
On Anglo-Asian NONYA
The Examiner’s Food Critic Howard Portnoy popped in for a long and lovely Sunday Supper and reviewed Double Crown’s new dishes:
Double Crown’s Nonya Nights
“…Brad Farmerie and Chris Rendell’s Sunday Supper at Double Crown dazzles. Oh, I know, it’s not intended to, at least not in theory. They call it Nonya dining. Nonya—that’s a Malay honorific translating roughly to “housewife” and connoting home cooking. And this is presumably the kind of simple meal a Nonya might cobble together for her family in Malaysia or Singapore. And where exactly does your typical Nonya go to acquire buttery Wagyu beef for a Thai-style beef salad that also includes oyster mushrooms, garlic shoots, and fried basil leaves? Or juicy prawns the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fist, “crumbed” in oatmeal and fried, along with a fistful of garlic?
Double Crown’s culinary point of departure is the joint cuisines of the former British colonies in southeast Asia. These are cooking styles that draw on explosive flavors, here a blast of chili, there an earthy jolt from cilantro or a sour citrus note. On the four-course Nonya menu, which changes from week to week, you might thus find red curry, coconut milk, and kaffir lime joining forces as a poaching medium for a quartet of pristine oysters. Actually, the hot mixture is spooned on top of the oysters, which are still on the half shell, barely heating them through, somehow magnifying their briny sweetness—a dish that will wow even the most diehard raw oyster aficionado. Sometimes the kitchen strays beyond the borders of the old empire, serving for example a refreshing Japanese-inspired salad of braised hijiki and daikon radish as a counterpart to fanned slices of seared yellowtail. The salad and barely cooked fish are livened by a salty splash of citrus-soy dressing .
