At Restaurant Nouri, the ten-course tasting menu now comes with a script. Chef Ivan Brehm has teamed up with Checkpoint Theatre on a production called A Matter Of Taste, running through August 30, in which a ten-act play about Brehm's life unfolds course by course over roughly three hours, each act handing off to a dish tied to a specific stage of his career.
Not dinner theatre, something closer to a memoir read aloud
Huzir Sulaiman, Checkpoint Theatre's joint artistic director, wrote the script and says no Singapore fine-dining restaurant has attempted a collaboration quite like it before. The production deliberately avoids the props, costumes and audience-interaction bits that usually define dinner theatre. Instead, it plays out like Brehm narrating his own biography in real time from the restaurant's open kitchen while dinner service continues around him, with actor Ramzie Tahar voicing the other people in his stories and helping prep food between scenes.
A childhood soup, a shepherd's pie, and a decade of kitchens
The dishes double as memory triggers. An opening course of savoury vanilla rice custard, bafun uni and muscat vinegar reinterprets an orange soup Brehm remembers as the dessert that first showed him what food could do as a child. Later courses trace a shepherd's-pie-and-buffalo-wings dish back to his culinary school years in the US, and an agnolotti course back to a stretch working at a restaurant in rural Italy, part of a résumé that also includes Per Se, the Fat Duck and Mugaritz. Brehm says Huzir was the one who pitched turning his life into a script in the first place; he'd shared stories with him before but never expected them to become a play.
What theatre gave the food, and what the food gives back
Now roughly halfway through the run, Brehm says the experience has taught him how difficult acting actually is, and something less expected: that revisiting old memories through a script lets him decide, at a distance, how he feels about them now. Huzir says he's been surprised by how strongly audiences have responded, with some nights ending in tears and one table calling it the best experience of their lives. For Brehm, the pairing comes down to intimacy: cooking, he says, is already an act that ends up inside someone's body, which makes it a more sensitive job than chefs sometimes treat it as, and pairing it with a second art form built purely on what people see and hear is what makes the combination feel worth the risk.