Underdog Inn’s head chef Pete Smit wants to serve you the whole animal

If you want Pete Smit to do something, just tell him it can’t be done. “I’m stubborn,” said the 39-year-old head chef of Underdog Inn, a restaurant so-named, perhaps, for this very mindset. “If someone tells me I can’t do it, I will go and do it.”

Like creating a restaurant in Singapore centred around using every part of the animal. Foodies know the concept as “nose-to-tail”, but Smit would rather you didn’t use that term to describe the food at Underdog Inn. “I think it’s has been overused. And in Singapore, we have lots of restrictions against doing that because I can’t use things like lamb’s heart, pig’s blood and all those delicious parts,” he said.So, whole-animal cooking it is. Fish, seafood, chicken, pigs, lamb… “The only thing we don’t buy (whole) at the moment is the whole cow due to space constraints.”

Few chefs have succeeded in bringing this whole-animal dining concept to Singapore, but Smit seems to be hitting the mark. Since it opened in 2022, Underdog Inn has drawn curious diners away from the city’s more buttoned-up dining rooms with its offbeat dishes that include house-made sausages, smoked beef neck, lamb tartare and pig head croquettes with apple ketchup.

This approach to cooking began, of course, when someone told Smit it couldn’t be done. In 2018, he’d been working for a fine dining restaurant undergoing a causal transformation in the South of his native Australia. “The restaurant was located in the farmlands, so I pitched this idea of whole animal cooking. People told me it wasn’t possible, so I delved into it quite hard,” Smit said.

“And I did it,” he added proudly. “It got to a point where all my proteins came from between 10km and 20km from the restaurant.”

A SINGAPORE TURN 

Life — and his then-German-girlfriend whose visa had run out in Australia — led him to Singapore the following year. If you’ve ever encountered Smit and the Underdog Inn experience, you’d be surprised to learn that he was, for a time, head chef at the now-defunct contemporary restaurant Adrift by David Myers. “It was my first hotel venue (job) and definitely not something I’d do again,” is all he would laughingly say about it.

Shortly after, he pitched his idea for Dirty Supper, a series of pop-up dinners, to Jay Gray, founder and CEO of Sago House Group. Ten months later, Smit became the group’s executive chef. At that time, the group’s establishments included the bars Sago House and Low Tide, and F&B incubator space Ghostwriter.

When planning for what would become Underdog Inn began, Smit pitched his whole-animal dining concept. “I said, ‘There are so many bars in Singapore. Let’s try something that’s not done before,” he recalled. Gray agreed.

Smit isn’t the first to peddle the nose-to-tail concept here. Chef Alysia Chan, who headed Singapore’s first nose-to-tail restaurant, Wolf, back in 2013, has been a passionate champion of the concept in the decade since. When asked why she thinks the concept hasn’t caught on, Chan said: “I think there’s the perception that offal and off-cuts are cheap and people were or are not willing to pay restaurant prices for these dishes. But while they are cheap in raw ingredient cost, the skill and time required to prepare offal is substantial, which translates to high labour costs.”

Smit shares similar sentiments: “A lot of our dishes take a long time to make, so the cost is higher than usual. The sausage we make takes three days before the customer gets it. It’s a 110-gram sausage made from premium ingredients that costs S$18. People say it’s expensive, but you have to break it down. It’s not just something on a plate. It’s taken so much time. I think maybe that’s why (the concept) hasn’t worked before.”

Why, then, is Underdog Inn set to succeed where others before him have failed? Smit answered: “Often, when people want to do nose to tail, they’ll try to have one basic menu, which is difficult (because there are so many parts to an animal). It also takes a fair bit of education on both the customer and restaurant sides. (It helps that) in this age of people trying to target sustainability and less waste, I think people are more open-minded about trying new things.”

A pause and he added: “And I’m stubborn. I know this concept can work.”

A DIFFERENT ANIMAL

The signs are certainly encouraging. Underdog Inn’s dining room is an often raucous space. What struck me the night I dined there was the incredibly diverse crowd — bearded hipsters, sexy beatniks, Airism bros, and moneyed middle-agers of more different ethnicities than I have ever witnessed in a single Chinatown dining room. All there for a taste of something hitherto different, meaty… earthy.

Smit’s food occupies a sweet spot that’s been ignored by his peers in favour of more highfalutin cuisine. It toes finely the line between progressive and traditional, with prices just approachable enough to widen its appeal to a larger audience.

Diners can order dishes from the a la carte menu, with prices starting at S$14 for a saucer of pork scratchings to about S$40 for a main course of smoked beef neck. Smit also offers a S$90 Feed Me menu of about seven dishes of his choosing. “I try to give people the best of both the specials and regular menu when they choose the Feed Me option. There are limited portions of certain cuts like the pork belly rib. You get only two portions from one pig, so I try to put things like that into the (Feed Me) menu so that people know that they can come in and have something different each time,” he said.