Durian, in five movements

The brief, and the danger

The brief was durian: one fruit, a distinct technique to every course, for the Ambassador’s table. The danger in carrying a single fruit across a whole menu is not flavour. It is fatigue. Durian is loud, and the sweet custard most people know would, served first, leave the palate nowhere left to travel.

So the answer was to withhold. I moved durian through five states and released its sweetness only at the very end, so each course met a fruit the guest had not yet tasted. This is what I mean by French Borneo: not a fusion, but a method — study an indigenous Sarawak food technology, take the principle it holds, and carry it forward with contemporary French and Japanese technique, the community’s knowledge named at every step.

The five movements

It opened with tempoyak — durian soured under salt until it reads savoury, unrecognisable as the fruit — set against lightly cured kanpachi and a clear kombu jelly. The ferment is not mine; it is held by the Malay and Iban kitchens of Sarawak, and it opens the meal by serving the king of fruits in disguise.

Then the fruit as cream: folded fresh into a silken dashi custard with mud crab, comforting, still savoury. Over fire, it turned to toffee — the sweeter Black Thorn caramelised over binchotan beside a seared scallop and a charred lime. In the fourth movement durian all but vanished into the background of a roast duck, deepening the jus the way a spoonful of miso would, while the vegetables were smoked over the durian’s own spent husk. Nothing of the fruit was wasted, and Bario cinnamon — stewarded by the Kelabit — warmed the sauce.

Only at the last did I let durian be sweet: a frozen Black Thorn parfait, Bario cinnamon, calamansi. After holding back four times, the fruit arrived whole. Three palate cleansers sat between the courses — torch ginger and lime, green mango and laksa leaf, lemongrass and pandan — none of them durian, three clean returns to the hero.

The Atelier of Affinities

Before I cook a menu like this, I read it as a sky. I call it the Atelier of Affinities: the hero ingredient as a sun, its aroma families as the vocabulary, each course a small constellation bridged to the sun by the one note they share. The science is real, and cited; the affinities are mine — a chef’s reading, not a formula, and always open to the next pass.

Two fruits, used as two

The map has two suns because we used two durians as two different fruits. Musang King is the loud one — savoury, almost meaty, with a milky richness beneath — and it lit the savoury work: the ferment, the custard, the duck. Black Thorn is the quieter, sweeter sun, with close to double the sugar, and it was kept for the caramel and the final parfait. Where the fruit could not carry a note on its own — the toffee depth of the third movement — we built it, with palm sugar and fire. Honesty about that is part of the discipline.

Cooked with Taylor’s, kept with Sarawak

The dinner was prepared at Taylor’s Culinary Institute and finished at the Residence on the day, cooked with one sous chef and four final-year students, the pastry section holding the dessert and the three cleansers on their own. A way of working that cannot outlive its teacher has failed its purpose; the point was never one chef and one fruit, but the next hands learning to carry an indigenous larder forward — with the communities who keep it named at every step, and nothing of the fruit wasted.

A bridge, on a plate

The Ambassador told the room it had taken him three attempts to meet durian, and that the third was a revelation. That is the whole argument for an evening like this. A fruit that clears rooms in one country and is barely known in another, meeting on a single plate — gastronomy does what little else can. It lets two cultures recognise one another through pleasure, and through patience.