Fresh off its first year since opening, Fiz has been awarded a MICHELIN Green Star, an accolade given only to restaurants that display a remarkable commitment to sustainability. It now joins Seroja as the only two restaurants in Singapore to have been recognised for their efforts in sustainable dining.
To find out just what Fiz has done to achieve this, we visited the restaurant to chat with its chef-owner Hafizzul Hashim. Situated at the corner of the ever-bustling Tanjong Pagar, Fiz stands out with an elegant wooden door fitted adjacent to the main road with a minimalist sign next to it spelling out “Fiz”. In the window next to the door, is a supersized mortar and pestle and granite slab, which gives diners a glimpse of what they can expect from the restaurant.
Upon stepping inside, the kitchen is ablaze with a flurry of activity despite it being the end of lunch service. A wave of delicious aromas come wafting from the restaurant’s open kitchen. “It’s the stock,” Hafizzul explains. “We’re in the process of making that right now.” The team at Fiz makes the stock with trimmings, one of their zero-waste initiatives.
The Natural Sustainability of Nusantara Cuisine
We asked how Hafizzul felt about being awarded a MICHELIN Green Star, to which he replied, “I am honoured, of course, but I cannot take credit for it. The beauty of nusantara cuisine is that there is always something to make at any time of the food’s life cycle. The concept of nusantara cuisine is sustainable in itself.”
Nusantara is a Javanese term that translates to “outer islands”. Today, it generally refers to food and culture of Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, and the like. At the heart of its cuisine, Hafizzul shares, is a multi-faceted approach to food and cooking, which includes foraging for ingredients, adhering to the seasons, advocating for zero waste, and of course, fermentation. “Sustainable cooking is something I grew up with,” he expounds. ”It is a way of life.”
Raised in the coastal town of Lumut, Malaysia, Hafizzul spent many a time fishing with his Malaysian father, and whenever they manage a bountiful catch, some of the fish will naturally find themselves in an ikan gerang, a stew made specifically with fresh-caught fish. Any unused parts will be then pickled, salted and smoked.
“At the end of the day, sustainability is about respecting the produce,” the chef explains. “I don’t mean just placing the best part of an ingredient on a plate and letting it shine. It is about respecting the ingredient in its entirety and doing what we can with whatever we have.”
(Left Image: Seasonal Fish Pekasam)
Hafizzul heads into the kitchen and starts pulling containers open. The first of it features aromatic slivers of roasted shallot and garlic skins. “We don’t need to use wood chips in our smoking because we already have the skins of our bawang (onions), garlic, and other ingredients. It smells incredible. Why would we throw them away? All this is our base for smoking,” he says, pointing to where glistening golden chickens were being cooked through this traditional Malaysian slow-smoking technique called salai.
“And, of course, all the bones and trimmings go into the stock,” he says, gesturing to the pots on the stove before pulling out vacuum-sealed bags of fermented fish and aged beef. “In Nusantara cuisine, we have been fermenting and ageing meats long before it became trendy!” he exclaims. “Southeast Asia is so warm, climate-wise. We did not have much of a choice.”
(Right Photo: Cage Free Half Chicken)
Coming Full Circle
While Hafizzul was born and raised in Malaysia, he spent most of his life cooking other cuisines elsewhere, focusing on French-forward plates at highly lauded restaurants such as Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s JG in Tokyo and MICHELIN-Starred Chez Bruce in London.
“It was the natural path for chefs at the time,” the 42-year-old chef muses. “You study abroad, graduate, work at MICHELIN-Starred restaurants, and cook.”
“You know how they say 'life begins at 40'? I really felt that,” shares Hafizzul. It was when he found himself working with familiar ingredients such as galangal and kaffir lime leaves at Jean-Georges in 2015 that he felt the pull to retrace his roots. “Here I was, working in a French restaurant with ingredients from my Southeast Asian heritage. I asked myself, "What am I doing?”
Shortly after that epiphany, Hafizzul packed his bags and returned to his home country, where he became executive chef of Isabel Restaurant and Bar in Kuala Lumpur, cooking dishes inspired from his childhood and local adventures.
“I enjoy talking to people and finding out how each region cooks their sambal and how each household makes their rempah (spice paste). The best thing? They are all different!” he says with a laugh. “And you shouldn’t ask them whose recipe is the best,” he warns.
Hafizzul shares that his own sambal tumis (sambal used for sautéing) is derived from a combination of recipes from his two food mentors: his grandmother and chef Jasman Saidin, a decorated Malaysian chef whom Hafizzul cooked for at one point of his career.
As he travelled throughout Malaysia and expanded his knowledge on the cuisine, he felt another pull. This time, he wanted to combine his knowledge in nusantara food with his training in fine dining. So when the opportunity came for him to open his own restaurant that allowed him to combine both culinary practices in the highly competitive and multicultural dining stage of Singapore, Hafizzul could not resist.
“I would love to see Southeast Asian cuisine appreciated and acknowledged the way we do for cuisines like French and Japanese,” he says earnestly. “To me, the Southeast Asian way of dining, with its multiple shared plates — we call this the hidang style — in a communal setting nourishes more than just the body. It nourishes the mind through the establishment of relationships.”
It is this pursuit for nourishment that strives Hafizzul to cook sustainably at Fiz. “While cooking tasty food is naturally important, it should not be the only thing we focus on,” he says softly, almost absorbed in his own thoughts. “How can we nourish the body, mind, and soul if we cook in a wasteful manner? After all, being mindful about everything we do and respecting all forms of life is what makes us human.”
Fiz is located at #01-01/02, 21 Tanjong Pagar Road, 088444, Singapore. Book your table here.
All photos courtesy of Fiz.
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