Shaking Things Up At Mozaic.
Chef Chris Salans has put Bali on the culinary map with his much-awarded restaurant, Mozaic, and a fresh approach to French cuisine incorporating local Balinese ingredients.
The Ubud garden restaurant and lounge recently hosted a young team of bartenders recently to attempt a cocktail matching dinner. The two Singapore-based bartenders worked with the chef and his team to match flavours with his inspired and complicated dishes.
Chris’ cuisine is characterised as ingredient driven; dishes that spark the imagination and very often include fruit. Matching cocktails with these flavours was surprisingly successful.
The team from Barkode, a new addition to Singapore’s scene, are two twenty seven year old women, surprisingly confidant in this arena.
“ We toned down the sweetness on many of the cocktails so as not to overpower the food,” explains Karen, one of the team. They also incorporated ingredients like bell peppers (roasted in one cocktail and fresh in another), ginger flower, coconut, mango, earl grey tea, pineapple and kaffir lime.
As Mozaic is a fine dining destination with chef’s degustation dinners offered with wine pairing, this was a culinary departure that was successful in some cases but not always completely.
Chris Salans agreed that this was a bit of a wild card but, as the food offered in their cocktail lounge offers a slice of Mozaic’s dining room experience, the cocktails will make a remarkable addition to the bar and can be matched to the tapas style menu offered there.
Chris Salans has just released his first cookbook, a masterful recreation of his singular approach to food. Often asked to appear on the guest chef circuit, he has always enjoyed blazing his own culinary trail. How often this cocktail matching will appear is anyone’s guess. By the time the cheese course and the dessert was served, the flavours and the variety of alcohol threatened to overwhelm some diners. Many approved and agreed that, although they may not choose to go this way often, it was a lot of fun. For more information: www.mozaic-bali.com
Sarah Dougherty. sarahdinbali.
