Celebrity chefs open Air, a new Dempsey restaurant with an edible garden, cooking club, research space

When I met Will Goldfarb last year at his restaurant Room4Dessert in Bali, he was clearly dying to spill the news. But, he made a good show of being all coy about it. All he would say was that he maybe, possibly, was working on a soon-to-open project in Singapore.

This, of course, was of interest to me, seeing as (a) he’s a world-famous chef with many accolades including World’s Best Pastry Chef 2021 and his own Chef’s Table: Pastry episode; and (b) Room4Dessert was full of Singaporean diners that evening and doubtless every other evening, too, so evidently it made perfect sense for him to open a restaurant in Singapore.

Well, as it turned out, he wasn’t just opening a restaurant; he was opening a “Circular Campus and Cooking Club” together with two other global industry heavyweights: Chef Matthew Orlando of now-closed Amass in Copenhagen, renowned for its gastronomic forays into sustainability; and entrepreneur Ronald Akili of Potato Head fame.

This month, Goldfarb finally welcomed me to their “crazy, enormous, super fun, ambitious project”.