Founding chef of Whitegrass, Sam Aisbett, is opening Akuna, a new restaurant in Vietnam
After a five-year break, Sam Aisbett has found his fire again and is back in the game with a new restaurant Akuna.
A Michelin star and a place on the prestigious Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It is everything every chef worth his Piedmont truffles dreams about. Yet, at the height of his career, Sam Aisbett packed up his knives and threw in the towel at Whitegrass, the fine-dining restaurant he founded in Singapore in 2016.
“I think I was getting bored,” said the good-natured Australian somewhat sheepishly over a video call. “There was so much pressure trying to keep doing what we were doing… and I was missing the love that you need to do that. So I thought, ‘You know what? Screw it. I don’t have to do this. Let’s do something else’.”
Off to Australia he went in 2018, spending time with his ailing father and catching up with old friends. He took a trip to Thailand where, he says, he ate everything and got fat. “It was amazing.”
The year 2020 brought the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown. “And that was amazing too!” he laughed before adding. “I mean, it wasn’t, obviously. But it was. I got to chill and didn’t have to worry about anything.” While his peers were stressing over how to keep their restaurants afloat, Aisbett was… “just chilling. Watching Netflix. I’d been working for 20 years (by that time) and I don’t think I ever took a holiday. I never had this kind of chill,” he explained.
Then on May 26, 2021, Aisbett stepped into the astounding cacophony of Vietnam. Amid the roar of motorbikes and the chaotic circles of traffic, he found himself excited by the prospect of cooking again. “I’d been here a few times on holiday and I’ve always loved it, but this time I guess I was thinking differently about it, maybe because I hadn’t been working and had a more open mind. I love the people, the crazy chaos… I saw the potential to do something here,” he said.
Cut to when Aisbett met the investors of his soon-to-open restaurant Akuna. “They are well-travelled and wanted to do something amazing and fancy, and change the dining scene in Vietnam. I was like, ‘I’m your man!’,” he said laughing, his excitement bubbling over from across the screen.
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Sprawled over 4,300 sq ft in Le Meridien Saigon, Akuna — named after the Australian Aboriginal word for ‘flowing water’ — will seat 45 and serve two tasting menus when it opens on July 19. As he did at Whitegrass, Aisbett will create dishes that defy easy categorisation. As he tells it, it will be a mash-up of things he loves to eat (and there are many) and ingredients from Vietnam that he is delighting in discovering, informed by the technique honed during his years working at the likes of Peter Gilmore’s Quay and Tetsuya Wakuda’s eponymous restaurant in Sydney.
“I just cook what I want to cook, which is good in a way because I can kind of acclimatise anywhere I go. There’s some Japanese in there because that’s what I love… and I’m experimenting with ingredients like a dried worm here (sa sung), which is like a dried scallop that you would use in a Chinese-style broth… or the gac fruit (a type of melon). My main goal is to try and use things that are familiar to the Vietnamese, but in a way that they’ve never had before,” he said.
If Aisbett left Whitegrass to escape the burnout of running his own high-end restaurant, then he is about to run head-first into the fire all over again. Only, this time, practically blindfolded and gagged. The Vietnamese language is notoriously difficult to decipher, let alone master; as is the Australian accent for Vietnam’s largely non-English-fluent population. “I’ve had the same problems here as when I first came to Singapore… like talking to contractors who may not speak English. But you just wing it and somehow it all works,” he said with enviable nonchalance and a wide smile.
It helps that manpower, the dominating challenge in Singapore’s restaurant scene, is not a problem in Vietnam whose 97.47-million population makes for an eager workforce. “They are all so passionate and hardworking,” Aisbett said of his team. “I have two (English-speaking) local sous chefs who will basically run the kitchen and I have chefs who literally don’t speak any English, so I have (my sous chefs) to train them. It’s really down to me to train my sous chefs to be mini me’s.
“My whole life I’ve always been able to talk to people and ask them questions like ‘how do I use this ingredient’, but now I can’t. I have to use Google Translate when I go to the farms. It’s super challenging and some days I just think to myself, ‘what the hell am I doing?’ and other days, I think, ‘this is so cool!’.”
Evidently, Aisbett has gotten his groove back, but being a professional chef is much like being an elite athlete — it’s a young person’s game. Now pushing 40, Aisbett is banking on operating in a lower gear. “I’m a bit older now. I’ve sort of changed the way I think and know to let some things go.
“At Whitegrass, we did every single thing ourselves — HR, accounts…,” he said of himself and his wife Annette who managed the restaurant with him. This time around, he is joined by his former general manager of Whitegrass, Desiderio Bevilaqua, who will be managing operations at Akuna. “I also get to use the hotel’s resources, which takes the rest of the stress off me.
“Plus, I’ve got experience now. The mistakes I made while in Singapore, I won’t make them here. Like when I was opening Whitegrass, I wanted every little detail to be a certain way, I wanted a specific chair… Now I think about it and it’s like, ‘does anyone even care?’ So things like that. Now I know what to look out for.”
And with that, Aisbett signs off to have a little nap.
Akuna opens on July 19 at Le Meridien Saigon.
