He is 58mm tall. But this thumb-sized character is among the fastest and most audacious chefs you could ever meet.
He climbs snow mountains, dives in wicked seas, roams outlandish villages and crosses deserts in search of ingredients. He also grows potatoes and broccoli that are 10 times larger than him, catches giant octopus with his bare hands and almost caught on fire while charcoal-grilling steaks for his guests.
Over the past three years, this cooking sensation widely known by the name "Le Petit Chef" has relentlessly concocted dish after dish in front of hundreds of thousands diners in big cities worldwide including Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dubai, Frankfurt, Madrid, Mallorca, Moscow, Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai and the United Arab Emirates, to name just a few.
For the first time in Thailand, the globetrotting chef has arrived in the Kingdom to share his culinary adventure to his audience through a dinner built on multidimensions of flavours, sights and sounds at the Embassy Room of Park Hyatt Bangkok.
A brilliant unification of digital savvy and theatrical art, Le Petit Chef is in fact an original 3D character and dining concept created in a Belgian art studio founded by award-winning filmmaker Filip Sterckx and owner Antoon Verbeeck.
Le Petit Chef dinner is a uniquely-curated experience using state-of-the-art visual technology to create a storytelling animation on top of the tablecloth. The animation looks so real many audiences find it hard not to be physically and mentally drawn in.
The thumb-sized chef shares his culinary journey with diners.
The menu chosen for Bangkok diners, dubbed "In The Footsteps Of Marco Polo", is inspired by a Silk Road journey of the legendary traveller.
The six-course meal takes guests on a two-hour culinary expedition from Marseilles (believed to be the little chef's hometown) to Arabia, India, the Himalayas and China.
Yet despite the fanciful visual and entertaining theme, the quality of the cuisine is said to be the main focus of the experience. Thus, dishes are professionally crafted and prepared by the Embassy Room's French chef de cuisine Pierre Tavernier, who proved to have done so exceptional a job he simply outshone his little guest chef (sorry shorty).
There are two menu options, priced 3,299 baht per person and 3,999 baht per person. Additional wine-pairing packages cost from 1,199 baht per person to 1,599 baht per person.
My dinner there last week kicked off deliciously with a duo of French-styled bite-sized starters. Of it, a mini gingerbread sandwich came with a creamy duck foie gras filling and quince paste jelly, which together made a divine combination. While an accompanying mini choux cream puff reveals inside a savoury mixture of black truffle, celeriac gougere and aged Comte cheese.
The second course is described as "Arabia".
To create the dishes (there are three of them in the course), Tavernier takes cues from different cuisines of different parts of Saudi Arabia and came up with a very refreshing and naturally flavoursome dish of smoked eggplant, herbs and pomegranate; skewered minced lamb with bulgar wheat, strained yoghurt and garlic; and sumac-spiced grilled prawn, which was firm and juicy reflecting their super-fresh quality, on a fattoush salad. All the three dishes were impeccably good.
Ayurvedic ideology is applied when it comes to portraying the cuisine of India. To cater to all six types of tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent, based on Ayurveda, Tavernier presents to his diners three classic Indian dishes with his own ingenious twist.
His superb rendition of Madras curry came with a big plump scallop, fine morsels of toasted dehydrated cauliflower, sweet golden-fried shallots and Oscietra caviar. Butter chicken was succulent and divine, complemented nicely by naan bread. While a mildly sweet and tangy creamy red lentil soup with onion and lemon zest fantastically represented his worldly-wise interpretation of the classic dal.
Pineapple and ginger sorbet with vodka was served next and proved the best palate-cleanser I could ever ask for. The in-depth heat from the ginger and vodka lent to the frothy fruity sweet sorbet a marvellous complementing contrast.
As the dinner was about to proceed to main course, we followed the tiny chef to the Great Wall Of China and watched him dodge a fire-breathing dragon.
The cuisine to match up with the story impressively portrayed China's abundance of fresh vegetables and seafood.
The steamed sea bass and bok choy, soy and ginger featured a generous fillet that was so plump it was almost springy. The vegetable was also perfectly cooked to retain its bright green hue and natural crunchy sweet quality, while the ginger-seethed soy sauce was on par with that at a top Cantonese restaurant. Accompanying the fish and equally excellent was lobster dim sum. The steamed delicacy, served piping hot in a bamboo basket, came with big chunks of naturally sweet lobster meat tightly encased in a very fine dumpling skin.
Wrapping up the evening was a dessert that combines all the culinary flair Le Petit Chef has cultivated from his cross-continent journey. I strongly guarantee that the saffron-scented crème brûlée and cardamom Ispahan sorbet (a unification of rose, lychee and raspberry purée) will send dessert lovers to a sweet paradise.
"Le Petit Chef: In The Footsteps Of Marco Polo" is set at a private dining chamber of the Embassy Room restaurant. It runs 10 times a week at 7pm everyday and also 9.30pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Each dinner seats up to 16 guests upon reservation at two communal tables. Bookings can be done only through online reservation at lepetitchef.asia/parkhyattbangkok.
