MEDIUM RARE
Q is for queue, but there’s no need to line up for cucumber juice, cucumber salad, or cucumber desserts at City of Dreams’ Nobu Japanese restaurant, a partnership between Robert De Niro and Chef Nobu, who own and manage restaurants all over the world.
The celebrity tandem aside, Qcumber has always been my favorite vegetable, but especially when the weather turns hot, humid, muggy. The sight of it is enough to bring down the temperature. Just look at it and touch its cool, smooth skin, in a refreshing shade of green (which can only be described as cucumber green). Qcumber has another effect, for as soon as you cover your closed eyelids with thin slices of it, it’s sure to relax your muscles and nerves, pronto! A soothing alternative to a trip to the spa, where they don’t serve Qcumber, only tea.
When Charisse Chuidian invited a group of “food content creators,” she asked if I wanted to join them last Saturday at Nobu's weekend brunch buffet. Neither a creator nor contented with my usual lunch-to-dinner fare, I hastily said yes! As it turned out, I was the only print journalist at Charisse’s table. (These days we are a minority, the majority being composed of techies with their ubiquitous screens and apps.)
Seated to my left was Sharwin Tee, also a chef, who knew everything else about food -- food not as an edible necessity but as a researcher’s subject, object, objective; food to write about, or in his and his colleagues’ language, to post and share. It would be interesting to read Sharwin's commentary, but for now I was only interested in the menu, after Charisse promised, “Lots of seafood!” She added, proudly, “We source most of our seafood locally.”
For indeed the buffet was a festive feast laden with Irish oysters, lobsters bigger than the palm of my hand, steamed crab (do bloggers tackle “alimango” differently, with their bare hands in public?). I noticed a colleague of Sharwin attacking plate after plate of oysters and reminded him to tell me later “if it’s true what they say about oysters as an aphrodisiac.”
Then I found myself going back to the buffet where Qcumber was Queen: juice, salad, pickles, popsicle, ice cream!