The casual fine dining restaurant’s new menu boasts plenty of prized Irish produce and is perhaps its strongest yet
Hitting the five-year mark in Singapore’s restaurant industry is no small feat. In a city constantly in gastronomic flux, surviving the small domestic market, intense competition and whims of spoiled local diners is hard enough. Now throw in the travails of Covid-19 and it’s enough to send even the most passionate chefs into resigned hibernation.
But chefs are made of hardier stuff. If anyone needs convincing, those six months in 2020 when F&B businesses struggled to stay afloat should serve as firm testament. In that short space of time, chefs and restaurateurs went from dine-in to delivery in a matter of days before returning to business-as-usual almost as soon as the lockdown lifted.
This unanticipated hustle was hardly how Irish chef Andrew Walsh imagined he would be marking his restaurant’s fifth anniversary. His 40-seat Cure—derived from the Latin word “curare”, meaning to take care of—has always sat high on the list of must-visit restaurants in Singapore. Night after night, Walsh and his team welcomed eager diners who appreciated his special brand of modern European cuisine informed by his personal experiences living and working in the likes of Dubai, London and New York.
The celebratory plan was to fly in chefs Mickael Viljanen and Mark Moriarty from two-Michelin-starred restaurant The Greenhouse in Dublin for a special collaboration dinner. Until then, the 37-year-old pulled regular 18-hour days cooking at Cure, overseeing its sister restaurant Butcher Boy, and planning the opening of two new projects—the recently opened Catfish and a restaurant at One&Only Desaru Coast in Malaysia.
When Covid-19 reached Singapore in January and the island state was locked down in March, Walsh says it stopped him physically and mentally in his tracks. “Yes, we were busy figuring out a delivery platform and menu (during the Circuit Breaker from April to June), but it forced me to slow down,” he said. “I slept, exercised, ran and ate properly for a change and ‘Nua’ was born out of that.”
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