In the Dining Spotlight

Renowned Dutch chef Sergio Herman, whose name has been associated with the Michelin Guide in the Netherlands and Belgium, is expanding his Asian footprint with his Singapore outpost, Le Pristine in Grand Hyatt Singapore.

- KENNETH SZ GOH

It may have been more than 15 years since renowned Dutch chef Sergio Herman made his first eye-opening trip to Singapore, but food memories run deep. Sitting down with The Peak, the 54-year-old, best known for running his family’s now-closed threeMichelin-starred restaurant Oud Sluis in the Netherlands, shares a vivid dining memory in Singapore, the first country in Asia he visited.

On top of his love for chilli and black pepper crabs, the suave chef with a glorious mane of salt-and-pepper hair, enthuses: “I will never forget my first love, the sambal stingray I had at a hawker centre on my first night here. For me, it was a new way of having stingray and citrus fruit, which I love. The calamansi (that is squeezed over the stingray) gave me goosebumps.”

Herman is channelling these memories into his style of New Italian cuisine at Le Pristine Singapore, his maiden Southeast Asia venture here. The restaurant, which opened on October 8, is the marquee dining concept at Grand Hyatt Singapore, which partially re-opened in July after a major renovation that started in late 2022.

The restaurant is ambitious, with 120 seats across an almost 7,000 sq ft space where buffet restaurant Mezza9 once stood. This marks the third branch of Le Pristine, which started in 2020 in Antwerp, where Herman is based.

Like in Le Pristine’s one-Michelinstarred flagship, Herman incorporates his seafood-driven Zeeland heritage into Italian cuisine, which he considers his favourite food, in the Singapore outpost.

Herman, who grew up in Zeeland, the southwestern coast of the Netherlands, says: “Besides making frequent trips to Italy, I grew up in a seafood restaurant, so cooking with seafood and pairing it with Italian flavours feels like a part of my DNA.” The enigmatic chef is known for championing Zeeland seafood and shellfish use when molecular gastronomy was in vogue in the early noughties.