Tasty Travels

FoodService Director - What I Learned - Mark Zammit

As director of culinary support and development for Bon Appétit Management, it is Marc Zammit’s responsibility to support and train Bon Appétit chefs across the country. Additionally, Zammit is charged with researching and developing food programs and socially responsible initiatives. This last part of his job recently took him to Singapore to get hands-on training about the region’s foods and flavors. Zammit talks about what he took away from his trip to one of the world’s few remaining city-states.

“I was invited by International Enterprise Singapore—an agency under the Ministry of Trade, which is dedicated to promoting overseas growth of Singapore endeavors. They must have heard me present at a trade association conference and they remembered me. They thought that Bon Appétit would be a good match for what they’re trying to do, which is to get the word out about Singaporean food.

The goal of the trip was to gain hands-on experience with the diversity of Singaporean foods and determine ways to bring those flavors in our cafés. We are looking at ways to incorporate Singaporean foods and flavors and it’s something we may introduce at some of our sites later this year. The food will probably focus on our grill because that tends to lend itself best to the street foods of Singapore.

The schedule day after day was compact. I was eating from morning until night at lots of different places, everything from food hawkers to neighborhood restaurants to fine dining. The thing about Singapore is it’s a crossroads of Southeast Asia, so there is a variety of different ethnic foods, from Indian to Malaysian to Indonesian to what they call Singaporean. Items like chili crab—a dish made with hard shell crabs cooked in thick gravy with a tomato chili base—and fish head stew were on the menu and all were prepared very well.

I went to the National Museum, which has an entire wing dedicated to the foods of Singapore. What impressed me about the city and its people was the fact that they have a big food culture. Whenever they have a chance, they go out to eat. The population voted to devote a wing of the National Museum to food.

I brought home some Bak Kwa (preserved sweet meats), some chili sauce and other spices, dried noodles and Kaya, which is a curd made from egg and coconut that is great on toasts. Unfortunately, my Kaya was confiscated by U.S. airport security. I was so looking forward to having it at home, so that was a bummer.

The perfect preparation of authentic foods requires an inherited knowledge. The best way to prepare these foods in your operations is to hire people who learned from their parents or grandparents. But if you want to understand the foods of a country, traveling and spending time there is really the only way to truly understand it. Even if it’s just for a week, you have to understand the techniques behind that country’s cuisine and I got that chance in Singapore with the hands on training. Overall from this trip, I took away the culinary value of totally immersing yourself in the foods of a culture, morning, noon and night.”