A Food Trend That Has Legs

Move over calamari, the octopus is the hottest cephalopod in Singapore’s restaurants right now.

- Annette Tan

They’ve been known to open jars and predict the outcome of football matches. They can change shape and colour, and project images on their bodies. They are intelligent creatures, able to navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly, and remember the solutions, at least for the short term. No doubt, octopuses are impressively smart, but that hasn’t stopped them from making their way to the dinner plates of restaurants across Singapore of late.

At newly minted one-Michelin-star restaurant Whitegrass, chef Sam Aisbett gently poaches octopus from the waters of Fremantle in Western Australia with ginger and spring onions, lays their thin slices atop steamed garlic custard, and garnishes the lot with wakame (Japanese seaweed), young almonds and garlic cream.

At the temperature-controlled indoor garden restaurant Pollen, chef Steve Allen uses octopus from Ria de Arousa in the northwest of Spain to make a dish of grilled octopus legs with charred padron peppers, bagna càuda and tomatoes.

Meanwhile, chef Daniel Chavez of Peruvian restaurant Tono Cevicheria carves slivers of octopus, dresses them with lemon juice, and then blankets it all in a black olive mayonnaise and chimichurri.

Suffice to say, the list of octopus delights is wide-ranging and surely a testament to the octopuses' path to usurping their calamari cousins as the cephalopods du jour.

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

The longstanding myth about cooking octopus is that making it palatable, let alone delicious, requires plenty of labour. With little fat, octopus flesh requires intense tenderising, which is typically done by massaging, blanching, blunt force or braising—or a combination of all those methods.