Diplomatic Service

Australian Good Taste - March 2004

Menu:
Green bean noodle and fruit salad
Crispy nori, prawn and pork pancake
Grilled seafood papaya
Roast duck curry with lychee
Sambal squid
Stir-fry Chinese vegetables and rice
Earl Grey sorbet and fruits

Gentle piano music drifts from a CD player on the bench as Chananwat (Charles) Duanchai deftly assembles a batch of prawn and nori pancakes in the kitchen of a spacious two-storey home in Canberra. “Four hours to go and I haven’t done anything,” he says, as he looks at his watch and realises it is 3pm. In fact, if he is panicking about tonight’s dinner party, he doesn’t show it. Dressed in an immaculate white chef’s jacket and wearing the same white slippers that one might wear from bath to bed, he looks a picture of calm. What many people would give to be so organised before a dinner party – the dishes are stacked on the bench ready for the food to be plated, the sorbet has been freezing nicely in the fridge for the past few days, and the martini glasses lined up on the bench are filled with a noodle salad that will be served as an appetizer.

Although it’s a grand home in Mugga Way, one of Canberra’s most expensive streets, its suburban setting belies the importance of this dinner party that preparations are underway for. Charles is the chef for the Singapore High Commissioner, Mr Joseph Koh, and his wife, Pei-fen. Tonight they will be farewelling one of their High Commission staff, and the special guests are the Ambassador for Thailand, Amb Suchitra Hiranprueck, and other representatives from the Thai embassy. The High Commission hosts an official dinner like this about once a week, and an extraordinary amount of planning and preparation goes into it to make sure the occasion is just right. The scene is a familiar one in diplomatic homes around Canberra, with many of the Embassies (or High Commissions in the case of Commonwealth countries) employing their own chefs.

When the Kohs took up their post in Canberra in October 2002, they initially relied on outside caterers to help with their official functions. But as Mr Koh is, in his wife’s words, “very particular about his food” and her predecessors were good cooks, which meant she had a reputation to live up to, they decided they needed help. Enter 30-year-old Charles, a Thai national who came to Australia in 1995 to study hotel management at the Canberra Institute of Technology. He worked for a number of restaurants and hotels in Canberra before going to work for the Kohs in April 2003. An innovative cook, he has been quick to embrace the fusion of eastern and western flavours in modern Australian cuisine, a factor which appealed to the Kohs when they appointed him.

“We love Australian food very much because we think it’s very innovative and creative,” said Mrs Koh who, like her husband, is of Cantonese descent. Most of Singapore’s traditional dishes are hawker food, snacks and simple dishes that are eaten at outdoor stalls, food that Mrs Koh says is not necessarily appropriate for serving at the dinner table. “The challenge for me is to make it presentable. My husband sets very high standards. He is a very fussy eater and he has been spoilt by good food so he expects a lot when he entertains at home.” She and Charles spend a lot of time browsing through recipe books, including one by leading Sydney chef Tetsuya Wakuda, which she bought after dining at his restaurant, Tetsuya’s. Although she claims not to be able to cook, she enjoys good food and works closely with Charles in devising the menus for their dinner parties and everyday meals.

“We have a lot of fun experimenting. I give him a challenge,” said Mrs Koh, who frequently returns from Australian and overseas trips with her husband, armed with ideas for dishes that she wants Charles to try. If they are not entertaining, lunch generally consists of a salad, noodles or pasta, while dinner might be a dish they are experimenting with or a dish from a recipe book, most likely Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Japanese or the Kohs’ favourite east-west style fusion dishes. If the dish is successful, it will almost certainly feature on the menu for one of their dinner parties. They generally host a lunch or dinner once a week, attended by anywhere from three to six people for lunch or 10 to 16 people for dinner. Charles’s shift begins at noon and finishes at about 7pm on weekdays, though he works later in the evenings or on weekends if he is cooking for a function.

On this occasion, it’s a Wednesday night and 12 people are expected for dinner at 7pm. While much of the meal will be assembled in the last few hours before the guests arrive, planning for the dinner began weeks ago when a secretary from the High Commission phoned everyone on the guest list to ask them if there were foods they wished to avoid. “We keep a register of what dish everyone has. If a guest has been here before, we can’t serve them the same dish [that they had previously],” Mrs Koh said. Together, she and Charles devise the seven-course menu and one week before the event they have a trial run, sampling all the dishes except for the roast duck curry which they have served many times before. Two days before the dinner, Charles makes the Earl Grey sorbet, a refreshing dessert which they hope will hit the right spot on a warm night. It was Mrs Koh’s idea to make a sorbet from her favourite Earl Grey tea, and Charles came up with the recipe by blending the usual sorbet base of sugar syrup and beaten egg white with a strong tea brew.

The day before the dinner, Charles sets the table and shops for the ingredients at Woden, one of Canberra’s several town centres. On the morning of the dinner, Mrs Koh arranges the flowers for the table and does a final check of how the room looks. The long, rectangular table is in a spacious dining room of understated elegance, decorated with Oriental artworks on the walls and several exquisite pieces on the sideboard. Each place setting on the table has a name card, and there is a buzzer beside Mrs Koh’s plate so that she can summon staff from the kitchen as needed. Two women who normally work in the High Commission’s Yarralumla office have been recruited to work as waitresses for the evening. Charles has help in the kitchen from a Filipino woman, Rubilyn Antonio, who begins with the food preparation in the afternoon and stays on after the dinner to do the washing up.

By mid-afternoon, Charles and Rubilyn have swung into action. With the CD playing to help him feel “calm and relaxed”, Charles is busy chopping cucumber while Rubilyn is getting the papaya ready for the third dish on the menu, grilled seafood papaya. This dish was inspired by one the Kohs enjoyed at a restaurant in Taipei, where they lived for six years on their previous posting. Made by chopping a red papaya in half, filling the cavity with pan-fried seafood and topping it with white sauce and parmesan cheese before placing it under the griller, it has an interesting contrast of flavours and textures in the salty cheese, sweet fruit and crunchy seafood. Charles says it took him many months to perfect the dish before it won Mr Koh’s approval.

At 3.15pm, Rubilyn is picking roses from the garden to garnish the plates that the papaya will be served on. It’s been raining and the roses are looking the worse for wear. A discussion follows - Charles thinks they should use the red carnations from the kitchen vase instead, and his opinion wins out. A gardener comes once a week to tend the garden, which has rosemary, mint and other herbs used in the kitchen. At 3.20pm, there is a change of pace and the air of calm gives way to a mild panic. Mrs Koh phones to say that she has been held up at the hospital, where her husband has been taken ill. The dinner can’t be postponed so Mrs Koh has already elected to host it in her husband’s absence, with the help of her husband’s deputy. Now she tells Charles that she won’t be home until 5pm. Charles and Rubilyn are on their own.

Charles begins assembling the crispy nori, prawn and pork pancakes so that they are ready to be shallow-fried just before the second course. He minced the prawn and pork mixture the day before and is now spreading it on lavash bread. The mixture is covered with a sheet of nori and another layer of lavash bread. A separate batch of pancakes is made for one of the Thai guests, a Muslim who cannot each pork. At 3.50pm, the High Commissioner’s driver arrives with containers of roast duck that have been ordered from one of the city’s Asian restaurants. Charles believes that this particular restaurant does Canberra’s best roast duck and in a few hours time, the guests will decide for themselves. Charles is serving his roast duck curry with lychees - like many Chinese, the Kohs like the inclusion of fruit in savoury dishes. Rubilyn spends a long time preparing the squid which will be tossed in sambal, the final dish to be prepared other than the stir-fried vegetables.

Now it’s just a matter of checking that all the crockery is in order. The plates - white with gold trim and featuring the Singapore coat of arms - are stacked with cheat sheets on which Charles has scribbled notes about serving portions and the guests’ food preferences. Mrs Koh arrives home to find everything nicely in order, and does a final check before her first guests arrive at 7pm. Each guest is welcomed with a Singapore Sling, the famous cocktail which was first served at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel in the 1920s. At 7.30pm the first course is brought to the table and the dishes come promptly after that, with the last dishes cleared away soon after 9pm. Despite Mr Koh’s unexpected hospitalisation, the dinner has gone remarkably smoothly and a dozen satisfied guests say their farewells.

The Kohs, who had two years in Singapore and a previous posting to Washington DC before coming to Australia, appreciate the diplomatic lifestyle in Canberra which they say is unique not only for the ease of getting around but also for the opportunity of getting to know people in such a small community. Mrs Koh plays golf with a number of other diplomatic wives and is making the most of her spare time by studying Australian history at the Australian National University. Charles plans to open his own restaurant in Canberra when the Kohs leave Australia to take up their next posting in 2005. Before then, though, there will be challenges aplenty. Charles has no time to rest on his laurels after tonight’s dinner party. Tomorrow six guests will be coming to lunch.

© Christine Salins

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