If you’re the sort to skim through restaurant reviews and jump to the bottom to see if a place is worth visiting, let me save you the hassle. Yes, beg, steal or borrow a reservation to Chedi along Hamilton Road. (Also, something must be said about that area because other great restaurants like Fleurette are also setting up shop there.)
It’s an incredible culinary journey that explores Thailand’s different regions. Owner and chef K-Jin Lim stayed in Chiang Mai for several years, operating a restaurant there before returning to Singapore. In that time, he’s travelled up and down the country, ventured into decrepit eating places serving deliciously authentic Thai cuisine, and sampled ingredients whose names I won’t even try to pronounce.
He tells me he still flies up to the restaurant in Chiang Mai, “to whip my team back into shape”. After all, when the cat’s away, the mice come out and play (occasionally).
Chedi bills itself as a fine dining Thai restaurant, but chef Lim and his contemporary Miller Mai dispense with the usual theatrics of caviar or foie gras. Instead, they use typical ingredients you find in Thai cuisine such as shrimp paste, salted fish and street-style pork and elevate them using spices, cooking techniques and sheer creativity.
A great example is the tom kha gai, or baked chicken wings paired with sticky rice and spicy and sour chicken soup. The rice is stuffed into the deboned chicken wing and plated on a black ceramic bowl. The tom kha gai is plopped beside it. At first glance, it looks like a typical chicken wing. Bite into its tender meat, however, and you’ll experience an explosion of flavours typical of Thai cuisine—sweet, spicy, umami, tart coagulating into a beautiful mess.
Lim and Mai have also created a balanced tasting menu. Thai food can be heavy, but the duo has ensured that you can go from one course to the next without feeling like you need a break. A lighter, more piquant course usually precedes a heavy, spicy item. The eight-course menu has two additional options. For the main course, you can top up an additional $18 for the wagyu beef. I suggest sticking to the pork. One of the best dishes on the menu, it’s smoked perfectly with a char that you don’t get anywhere else except in Thailand. The secret is in the ingredients. Lim and Mai marinated the pork with Thai herbs of coriander root, Thai garlic and other accoutrements before charring it with palm sugar.
But, fork out money for that tantalising Chedi signature salted fish fried rice. It’s incredibly fragrant and gives you the complex flavours of the sea blended with that long-forgotten wok hei taste with every bite.
At $148, you might consider it expensive for Thai food. Yes, cheaper options abound in this category. But, if we’re happily paying double or triple that amount for omakase or other fine dining places, then I don’t see why chefs Lim and Mai deserve anything less. They’ve created something special with Chedi.
