There are other fish in the sea

In a push to make conscious dining a prominent feature and not just an afterthought, W Singapore has collaborated with Australian celebrity chef Peter Kuruvita of Sydney’s Flying Fish Restaurant & Bar fame to launch a bold new proposition: The Kitchen Table’s inaugural Seafood From The Heart buffet, arguably Singapore’s first all-you-can-eat sustainable seafood dinner. The line-up is a comparatively modest one that changes according to availability, but it boasts some of the best catch — in every sense of the word.

“Freshness is the heart of everything,” said Kuruvita. “Expect to enjoy the finest seafood combined with a mix of rich Asian spices ... and know that you are also making better choices for our oceans.”

Born in England to a Sri Lankan father and Austrian mother, Kuruvita now calls Australia (Noosa in Queensland to be precise) home. Still, he borrows from his heritage for his dishes. “What I’ve tried to do the last few years is bring a little bit of Sri Lankan flavour through my food,” he said.

His jaffna kool for instance, is a Sri Lankan interpretation of the French bouillabaisse, a lighter but spicier rendition that revels in a sea of flavours — chockfull of clams, crabs, squid and prawns, as well as drummer fish. The dish is prepared with broken rice and seasoned with drumstick leaves and a lashing of homemade chilli. The same meaty fish was also brilliant in a full-flavoured Goan fish curry.

Kuruvita opened his first restaurant on Bondi Beach, but now runs four popular restaurants, three with Starwood Hotels — one in Noosa and two in Fiji. He also began to appreciate just how much we indulge in seafood we like. “When we open Flying Fish 10 years ago, across the water was a restaurant called the Boathouse and they were famous for their snapper pie. So I thought what I’ve got to do to get recognised is knocked this snapper pie off its perch.

“I came up with Sri Lankan snapper curry with basmati rice and condiments and about a year into it, we were going through probably 60 boxes of snapper a week. They were coming from New Zealand - each snapper was the same size and there were eight per box, every single one of them was perfect. Then I started to think: ‘How long can this carry on?’ That’s when we started ... looking at the fisheries, how the fish are caught - whether they’re line-caught or net-caught.”

The solution to this global problem of overfishing, he added, is not limited to the plight of a few key species, more famously the Bluefin tuna, shark and pacific salmon. It’s about understanding that seafood is not an unlimited resource and that there is actually enough variety to sustain our penchant and occasional indulgences if we knew where to look and what to eat.

“You know the stripy tuna (or bonito)? In Australia, they use them as bait.” he said. “But if you eat this fish on the day (it is caught), it is one of the most beautiful sashimi fish. In Sri Lanka, that’s all we have for curry. That fish can lay a hundred million eggs - it’s more sustainable than any other fish, and yet there are those who would still say they prefer Bluefin tuna.”

CHOICES GALORE

It makes even less sense when you consider that there are four major commercial varieties out of 14 true species of tuna. Thankfully, more chefs and consumers are increasingly intolerant of this blatant disregard.

“If Bluefin tuna comes to the Sydney fish markets now, they can’t sell it,” said Kuruvita. “None of the chefs will buy it. And it actually sells for less than a yellow fin.

“I think promotions such as (Seafood From The Heart) help people understand ... No one will complain about the selection of seafood we have on offer — there are lobsters, oysters and prawns, five to seven varieties of fin fish, there is plenty we can eat. We just have to understand and think a little bit about where we go and where we catch it from.”

Farming, he continued, is great as long as you look after the seabed, citing places such as Alligator Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory, where farmers farm barramundi in a river that flows, with the fish living in their natural habitat. In Tasmania, salmon farmers have pens that can be moved around, so that they never damage the sea floor.

Sustainability means not eating anything into extinction and caring for the environment, he added. “You should have a variety, you shouldn’t always eat snapper. We have a beautiful fish in Australia called the leatherjacket. People go ‘it’s a terrible fish’ and throw them back. But it is actually a wonderful fish to eat.”

Of course, making an informed choice begins with having the right information. Aquaculture, Kuruvita affirmed, is not a bad thing. “In Australia, some people will go, ‘I’m not going to buy Thai prawns; they are no good’. But Thai and Vietnamese aquaculture now are far more advance than Australia’s or any of the western countries. And they are producing clean, beautiful seafood in sustainable amounts and sustainable areas.”

So is a buffet the way to promote sustainable seafood? “What we do at Kitchen Table is more a show kitchen, it’s interactive,” said Chef Matthew Woolford, Director of Culinary at W Singapore. “It is also about creating a visual feast; it’s one thing to read about sustainable options on the menu and another to see this surprising array right before your eyes.

“When I started in Singapore almost three years ago, someone gave me a list of sustainable seafood and there were only four items on that list. Today, we have 120 options from four different suppliers.”

Kuruvita added: “To have a lot of seafood (at a buffet) that is sustainable is saying exactly what we want to say.”

The Seafood From The Heart buffet happens every Friday and Saturday from now until Nov next year at The Kitchen Table, W Singapore, Sentosa.