CREATIVITY ran riot at Citrus Wine and Dine as owner and chef Simon Lee cooked up a storm to come up with a special dinner for Team Keris Bhd group executive chairman Datuk Lee Seng Hee and his guests.
Having a gauntlet thrown at him by Seng Hee to serve the dinner for 60 of his guests, including business partners, associates and colleagues in conjunction with Chinese New Year, Simon said he had prepared some traditional British dishes with an Asian twist.
“The dinner also has another theme to it, which is to come up with meals that are suitable for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said Simon.
For ‘breakfast’, Simon prepared the Eggs Benedict, which consisted of poached quail egg on smoked salmon and pumpkin bread with Hollandaise sauce, and a deconstructed seafood pie, which had seared Hokkaido scallop, Boston lobster meat and leek ragout.
For ‘lunch’, Vietnamese wrap with roasted duck and smoked duck salad were served, paired with ‘Liquid Gold’, a consomme with bread wrapped in edible gold flakes, sliced abalone and mushroom.
For dinner, a classic fish and chip with tomato chutney, Citrus salt and truffle french fries was served, followed by a Roasted Kobe Beef dish with potato cake, Brussels sprouts and assorted mushrooms.
Simon also prepared desserts that consisted of an assorted of British desserts and nian gao (sweet glutinous rice cake) fritter.
As a starter prior to the luxurious four-course dinner, Simon also created a yee sang dish, using non-traditional ingredients like Wagyu beef carpaccio, capsicums, mixed vegetables, pistachio nuts and black olives, tossed with pomegranate seeds, truffle oil and mustard.
To top it off, a specially made 1.8m-long and 1.5m-wide horse-shaped container was used to hold the ingredients together as Seng Hee and his colleagues tossed the yee sang.
On the challenge given by Seng Hee, Simon said that it was like being in the reality television cooking show ‘Iron Chef’ where he needed to come up with something original.
“Just like in the show where the chairman sets a theme for the contestants, Datuk (Seng Hee) also did it and he asked me to be playful with my ideas.
“Datuk is considered a pioneer in a lot of things, in terms of his ideas and it was these ideas that could bring us to another level,” he said.
“He pushes us to achieve more and to set a high benchmark for ourselves,” he added.
Simon said some of the dishes he had prepared for the night could be remade again, at the request of customers.
