Orient expressions

Executive chef Steve Munkley is in search of fresh coconut milk. It is the only ingredient he has not been able to source for the East Comes West menu that he has introduced to the Park Terrace restaurant at London's Royal Garden Hotel.

Items that he had previously never heard of, such as candle nut, pandan leaves and kang kong, are now all available at the supermarkets in Chinatown and the growing number of Oriental hypermarkets springing up around London. But the elusive fresh coconut milk is yet to be found - despite contacting leading Thai restaurants such as the Blue Elephant in Fulham.

The coconut milk Munkley uses in his Singapore laska soup and chicken curry is from Elephant, a Thai company, and is tinned. It is the best he could find in a tasting of around 12 canned and compressed milks, but he is acutely aware it is not the real thing.

"Short of cracking open coconuts and extracting the juice myself, I have no choice, but I would love to find someone in London supplying fresh coconut milk," he says. "In Singapore it is sold in Tetra-paks, but the problem is that it is only has a shelf life of two days."

Munkley is striving to create some of the most authentic-tasting Far Eastern dishes available in London. For him, it is not good enough if a dish is liked by a European but does not meet the approval of a diner from Singapore or Hong Kong. "Flavours need to be exact, and ingredients need to be correctly sourced to create a perfect dish," says Munkley. "Orientals expect a certain dish to taste the same wherever they go and they will soon pick out a component that is not right."

It is for this reason that Munkley has just employed Malaysian chef Muhammad Idris (better known as Ricky), who has been in England for five years and worked in a Japanese restaurant, to join his brigade of 54 chefs. "We want to take what we are doing one step further and I think we can only do that by bringing in someone who has been immersed in the cooking techniques of the Far East," says Munkley.

The East Comes West menu was introduced to the 90-seat Park Terrace (the hotel's second restaurant) last autumn, thanks largely to the influence of the Royal Garden's director, Jennifer Carmichael, who is from Singapore. The hotel's parent company - the Goodwood Group of Hotels - operates four hotels in Singapore, including the Goodwood Park, with which Munkley has close contact. Recipes provided by chefs at Goodwood Park helped Munkley draw up the initial menu, and then he spent 10 days in Singapore last November, experiencing Singaporean and Chinese cooking at first hand.

"It helped enormously to see the dishes being prepared in Singapore and go to the markets to look at the produce," says Munkley. "I gleaned a lot from the trip, discovering that there were one or two ingredients that we hadn't been using that can make all the difference to a finished dish. Chefs in Singapore can be quite cagey about imparting information - so I jotted down plenty of notes."

Popular menu

The East Comes West menu is offered alongside the Park Terrace's main menu, which offers a wide selection of light snacks, including omelettes, international dishes and grills. It is short, just 10 dishes - two soups, six main courses and two desserts - but is already immensely popular. Influences are mainly from Singapore, but also from China, Malaysia, Thailand and India.

Around 60% of customers who eat at the restaurant choose at least one dish from the Asian selection. Munkley has taken on board many of the comments from customers in the weeks following the launch of the menu, taking off and adjusting dishes accordingly. Diners are a good mix of residents and non-residents, Europeans and Asians.

One of the most popular dishes has proved to be the Singapore laska soup, which involves lengthy frying of a base paste of spices before adding any liquid. The paste is made from shallots, garlic, galanga ginger, yellow ginger, candle nuts (similar to almonds) and lemon grass - all puréed and combined with chilli powder and paste. After gently frying in oil with whole sticks of lemon grass for up to one-and-a-half hours, without colouring, the lemon grass is removed and a dried prawn purée added before frying for a further two minutes.

The liquid - in the form of water, coconut milk and evaporated milk - is added to the paste and brought to the boil. The soup is then garnished with dried bean curd and cooked rice noodles, prawns, bean sprouts, chicken and fish cake.

While Asian food is generally deemed to be healthy, Munkley explains that much of Singaporean food is in fact quite greasy. Char kway teow, for instance, is basically an egg-fried noodle dish in which the eggs are first fried in pork fat. Kway teow noodles (white wide noodles), yellow mee noodles (yellow spaghetti), bean sprouts, prawns, Chinese sausage and fish cake complete the dish, which is flavoured with fish sauce, dark soya sauce, sambal chilli and sweet sauce.

Healthy and fatty foods

The balance appears to be redressed by a healthy-looking dish called Hainanese chicken. This involves a whole chicken being poached in water to provide a meat which is very soft to eat. It is brushed with soy sauce and sesame oil for flavour. But there is no escaping the fat content, as the rice that is served with the dish is steamed with garlic and ginger which has been fried in rendered chicken fat. The completed dish is served with a blend of red chilli, garlic and young ginger, cooked together slowly.

"It has been great fun discovering new ingredients as we build up our repertoire of dishes," says Munkley. New items include kang kong and choy sum - both types of leaf vegetables.

The dishes on the East Comes West menu were a major talking point when they appeared on the lunch buffet at the 1997 Chef Conference, sponsored by British Meat, last month.

Chefs Fung Kam Cheung and John Lim from the Goodwood Park Hotel were flown over from Singapore to help prepare for the occasion. Future events include speciality Asian evenings once a week and a week-long promotion in September, once again supported by chefs from Singapore. Munkley hopes he will have found some fresh coconut milk by then.