Past Fusion, at Meta

Meta has been arguing, for years, that the word fusion should be retired from the conversation about its food.

That argument isn't pedantic. Fusion implies that two cuisines stay visible as separate elements juxtaposed on a plate: the Korean ingredient sitting next to the French sauce, the French technique applied to the Korean fish, the cultural references combined for novelty rather than coherence. In most kitchens, fusion is a marketing position rather than a cooking one.

Meta's chef has spent years cooking food that is no longer fusion in this sense. In the kitchen's working version, the Korean ingredients and the French techniques have become a single grammar. The food doesn't read as French food with Korean accents or as Korean food with French technique. It reads as the chef's own cuisine, which happens to draw from both traditions and use both fluently. That's a higher achievement than fusion, and a harder one to defend. You can measure a fusion restaurant against either of its source cuisines, but a restaurant whose cuisine has become its own grammar has to be judged on its own terms, which the audience is still learning to do.

I ordered the full tasting menu. The format is the kitchen's working statement, and the room is sized for it rather than for casual ordering.

The room

Meta opened in November 2015 at its original Keong Saik shophouse under chef Sun Kim, who is South Korean, ex-Tetsuya's Sydney, ex-Waku Ghin Singapore. The kitchen is in the process of moving to a twenty-six-seat dining room at 9 Mohamed Sultan Road, a deliberate aesthetic reset that will be more minimalist than the warmer Keong Saik shophouse. The current room is restrained, neutral walls, dark wood furnishings, a long counter facing the open kitchen, with Sun Kim visible at the pass. The format is the counter-led tasting menu that has become a Singapore fine-dining standard. The diner sits facing the kitchen. The food arrives in sequence. The chef stays visible throughout the meal. The service is calibrated to the pace of the kitchen.

That format suits this cuisine. The kitchen's argument is best made when the diner can see the work. The Korean-French grammar is unusual enough that watching the chef plate, watching the components come together, watching the techniques applied to the ingredients makes the cooking more legible. A back-room dining experience would have asked the diner to judge the cuisine on the food alone, without the visible context of the kitchen. The counter adds the kitchen as a supporting element to the meal.

The opening of the tasting menu shows how coherent the kitchen really is. A fusion restaurant's opening would have alternated, a Korean bite, a French bite, a Korean bite, to demonstrate the range. Meta's opening is more integrated. Each bite uses both Korean and French elements without making the duality visible as a juxtaposition. A small piece of cured fish, with a French-style sauce built on a Korean fermented base. A small composition of vegetable, with both Korean preserved elements and French technique-led preparation. The diner isn't being asked to admire the cleverness of the combination. They're being asked to taste the dish as a single thing.

The Carabinero

The Carabinero course was the kitchen's clearest argument on the night.

The plate arrived as a single large Carabinero prawn, deep-red translucent flesh, just-set at the centre, cooked à la minute and finished with the prawn-head oil drawn from the shells. The supporting components were a small spoonful of butternut purée and a few charred Brussels sprout leaves, with a mound of Korean short-grain rice underneath that had been laced with a small amount of house sambal.

The prawn was cooked correctly, the centre warm but not opaque, the flesh dense and slightly sweet, the prawn-head oil pooling on the plate in a dark amber slick that smelled of the shell more than of the meat. The butternut purée gave the small sweet-savoury counterpoint the prawn's richness needed. The Brussels sprout leaves added the bitterness and the char that lifted the plate off pure richness. The sambal rice underneath was where the dish showed its grammar: Korean short-grain (the sticky-chewy texture is Korean), sambal (the heat is regional Asian), and the rice sitting underneath a Mediterranean protein with a French finishing technique.

That stack is the kitchen's actual cuisine. The prawn is the visible Mediterranean reference. The rice is the Korean rice-bowl form, brought over intact. The sambal is the Southeast Asian seasoning that grounds the dish in Singapore. The French part is invisible, the sauce-from-shells technique, the plating discipline, the controlled à la minute cook, which is the right place for technique to sit. It's in the method, not in the visible content.

By the second bite I had stopped trying to identify the components. The dish read as itself. The chef hasn't been embarrassed about the rice-bowl form underneath; he hasn't flattened it into a generic plated grain. The rice anchored the dish, the prawn carried it, the sambal tied the two together, and the French technique sat underneath all of it without ever announcing itself.

What surprised me, eating the dish, was a smaller move. The prawn-head oil had been poured at the pass, not at the table, so the dish arrived already dressed, with no theatrical drizzle in front of me. A more performative restaurant would have made the oil-pour the moment. Meta let the oil reach the plate before I saw it. Whatever theatre there was had happened in the kitchen, not in front of me.

What the integration costs and gives

The wine list at Meta is competent for the format. The pairings are difficult, since Korean-influenced food pairs unconventionally with wine, and the sommelier team has built a list that includes both expected and unexpected pairings. The Riesling depth is good. The lighter reds are well chosen. The sake selection is also serious, which the cuisine often benefits from more than wine. Running wine and sake as parallel pairings is the right approach for a Korean-French restaurant whose food doesn't lean exclusively in either direction.

The friction with Meta is that the kitchen's cuisine is, by design, hard to categorise. A diner expecting French food will find more Korean influence than they expected. A diner expecting Korean food will find more French technique than they expected. The cuisine sits in a position that matches neither source. That position is the chef's editorial choice. The kitchen has decided its food is its food. The diner has to accept that on the kitchen's terms.

The other friction is the price. The tasting menu at Meta is, by Singapore fine-dining standards, on the higher side. The bill reflects the small room, the careful sourcing, the labour-intensive cooking. Whether the bill is a fair price is a personal judgement.

Meta is one of the more legitimate chef-driven restaurants in Singapore where the kitchen has built its own cuisine over years. Sun Kim hasn't been a fusion chef. He's been a chef whose cuisine has absorbed two traditions deeply enough to become its own thing. The Carabinero, the Korean short-grain rice underneath, and the prawn-head oil poured at the pass rather than at the table all show the same cooking, the oil being the small invisible move that, on the night, made the most-photographed dish on the menu work as cooking rather than as theatre. You can taste how Korean and French sit in one dish without separating, and the kitchen has cooked it the same way for years.