Nurdin Topham of Nur Restaurant experiments with new flavours
Chef explores Asian and European fermentation, pickling and salting techniques, and puts some of them into action on menus; he dreams of having his own food laboratory one day
While you're reading this, Topham is likely to be taking a leaf out of the Noma book and foraging for produce on the outskirts of Copenhagen.
Nur Restaurant's head chef is holidaying in northern Europe, but his influences don't just come from the leader of the new Scandinavian trend, where he worked researching new dishes. The chef, who also worked for Raymond Blanc for 10 years, has a background in nutritional therapy and a longstanding interest in Chinese and other Asian cuisines - influences apparent in his cooking.
Topham has been learning kung fu for 10 years and when he came to Hong Kong three years ago he found a sifu who could teach him not only the martial art but also about tea. The nutritional therapy he studied was based on the Western scientific tradition but he says he also has respect for traditional Chinese medicine and the Ayurvedic tradition. To that end, Topham is now working with a Chinese herbalist, Marcus Gadau.
Located on the corner of Wellington Street and Lyndhurst Terrace, Nur is not too far from the specialist soy sauce shop Pat Chun and many other sources of Chinese fermented and dried goods. "We're still a very young restaurant and our aim is to express something of the region we're in, but that takes time without a food research laboratory, which is my ultimate dream."
We’re still a very young restaurant and our aim is to express something of the region we’re in, but that takes time without a food research laboratory, which is my ultimate dream
That means that despite the aims, the restaurant has so far not moved beyond using Chinese mushrooms and dried scallops and Japanese kombu for stocks. Topham isn't joking about experimenting with Asian food, though. At the back of his restaurant is a large earthenware jar of home-made Korean soy sauce, a test batch definitely not to be given to customers. Topham describes the smell as "funky". A better word for this experiment might be "rank" - as Topham says, "It's not for the faint-hearted."