DEAILLE TAM
closure, it felt risky and reckless. Plus, the pair were being head hunted by restaurants around the world, with offers from Osaka to San Francisco. They spent their time off travelling through China and internationally. “We were actually very close to leaving China but then Covid-19 hit,” she says. With the economy rattled, investor
plans changed across the globe. Tam and Wong had come back to Shanghai just before Chinese New Year and hunkered down at home with the rest of the country. It was the first break either had since culinary school. As they cooked for themselves and did nothing, they thought about the future – to stay or to go? By month three, realizing that there was still plenty to discover in China and a huge untapped market for their concept and food, Tam explains, they decided to stay. Just over six months later in November of 2020, Obscura opened. Set in a three-story villa in the center of Shanghai, the 12-seat restaurant is intimate and personal. A curved bar snakes through the space allowing the chefs to serve each guest directly, telling the story of each dish. In a sense, the pair is carrying on where they left off at Bo Shanghai – innovating and reimagining classic regional Chinese flavors – but with an agenda entirely set by themselves, more freewheeling and unfettered. Obscura’s simplified tagline is “taking classic Chinese flavors from different parts of China, and reimaging and recreating it into a new experience”. But the reality is more layered and nuanced. Dishes are emotional and evocative – each a microcosm reflecting the stories of places and people they meet, each wrought with an intense precision and intention. Asked to describe her food in brief, Tam laughs: “Simon is going to have to do this. I can’t do it in a couple words because my ideas are too big.”
Storytelling is at the heart of the food.
“I really want to travel, to discover the actual things that connect the locals with the area. Because that’s what we want to
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share with people here,” she says. “Unless you are there and eating with the locals you really can’t see or hear it in the same way.” She and Wong travel once or twice a month and during these discovery trips, locals are eager to share their lives with them, says Tam. “We get so much love from them, so we put that back in the food when we are back in the restaurant.” Tam looks to dive beneath the surface,
to uncover the surprising details about a place and present it on a plate to guests. “We take those small elements. They are very hidden, even for people in China if you think about it,” she says. “Why is one area’s cuisine so stereotyped by other people outside of the area? It’s because all of the truly memorable, important elements that touch the hearts of the people from the area are not really shared with people outside.”
On the table, this might look like albino trout sourced from Sichuan, lightly poached and perfumed with the unexpectedly tropical aromas of Xishuangbanna in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan. Or it might be
“We get so much love from them, so we put that back in the food when we are back in the restaurant”
seafood canapés from China’s northeast region, typically known for big portions and strong flavors. “I had my first meal in Dongbei, which was a seafood feast with shellfish I’ve never had before and sea urchin – huge ones,” says Tam of her first trip to the region. “I was given a 360-spin on what I had initially imagined it to be.” Dishes celebrate the seasonal and evoke a sense of place, often inspired by a chanced-upon ingredient. “It sounds very unplanned but actually it gives us
the most surprises, just letting resources come to us,” says Tam as she describes the thrill of discovering exceptional chestnuts, once destined solely for export to Japan, from one of her staff’s hometowns. “When we see it being useful, we start planning a whole dish based around an ingredient. It gives us a lot of freedom to be creative as well, instead of saying ‘this is what I need to do, OK now I start looking for ingredients.’” That’s not to say it’s a laidback
process. In fact, quite the opposite – Tam is uncompromising. In a video interview, Wong describes her as someone who never gives up, tenderly calling her “stubborn.” To me, she says she was, “the type that always tried to get perfect in everything,” during culinary school. For a dish, they might try 20 types of duck or 10 kinds of lamb before settling on the right variety to realize their particular vision. It’s this precision and dedication that creates the singular cuisine that sets Obscura apart. She likes to be a little bit different in what she does. “I believe uniqueness and individuality can leave a mark on this world,” she says. Running her own restaurant this early into her career might not have been the plan, but she has no regrets. “It has been a really fun journey after Bo closed down to be honest,” she says. “It gave us a lot of time and opportunity to step out of our comfort zone and immerse ourselves in the environment to rediscover and relearn what Chinese food is about from a very different perspective.” One year in, and the learning and
discovery certainly haven’t stopped. Despite all their trips, there’s still exploring to be done in this country where they’re building their future. “I feel like we haven’t really travelled enough yet,” says Tam. “Especially now after the restaurant has opened, every day there’s researching and finding new ideas to make new plates so you feel, ‘I’ve never been there and I want to.’ There’s so much that you can draw inspiration from in China.”
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CODY DUNCAN / JOSH NILAND / ROB PALMER
WORLDWIDE
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