CATERING standards have improved in the last few years, but when an events management company decides to hire a private chef specifically for their new catering arm, you know that party dining is now in another league.
Especially when the chef in question used to helm one of Bali's most famous restaurants for three years, and is already coming up with a new dining concept, besides the catering business.
Call it a coup, when The Hidden Host's Joyce Odom, 36, managed to snag Australian Rob Staedler, the former executive chef from Bali's renowned Ku De Ta restaurant, for her catering business.
Ms Odom, an American who came to Singapore six years ago, started The Hidden Host in 2003. 'The business was growing year on year, and then there was a couple of different events last year that made me realise it was time to grow the company. I did a very large event for the bulk of our corporate clients - in private banking and hedge funds - that created a lot of buzz, and I couldn't keep up with the work that was coming in,' she explains.
So she hired a few more event organisers, and decided that to really carve out The Hidden Host's own identity, 'we needed our own food culture'.
She had met chef Staedler when she booked Ku De Ta for her wedding party in 2005, one of the rare occasions when the restaurant was closed off for a private party. 'He'd spent so much time with us, going over the menu at the tasting. It was his attention to detail and his consistency that struck me,' she recalls.
Needless to say, the party was a success, so Staedler was the first chef that she thought of when it came to starting the catering business. She called chef Staedler just before Christmas, and by March, he was in Singapore to head up the catering business.
The Hidden Host has done a full range of catering since then, says Odom, from formal boardroom lunches to casual barbecues, canapes at luxury brands' parties to private dinners held at clients' homes.
For chef Staedler, the opportunity to be part of Singapore's changing food scene drew him here, even though he had started a restaurant in Melbourne after leaving Ku De Ta in early 2006. The 28-year-old had been with Ku De Ta from 2003 to 2006, overseeing a kitchen of 60 chefs.
What he brings with him is post-modern Australian, quips Ms Odom.
'I have a very modern approach to food - nothing deep-fried, for instance,' says chef Staedler. Trained in classical French with the six-star Como hotel group in his teens, Staedler apprenticed for two years under Australian chef Craig Hicks who later opened restaurants in Macau and Vietnam in the 1990s.
'He trained me in the modern French way of things, taking the best of the old techniques and methods and then linking them with modern approaches,' he says.
From his classical hotel training, he then went into the independent restaurant scene, being part of teams that opened seven restaurants in six years - all of them given one or two hats, as rated by the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide which is the Australian version of the Michelin guide.
Food as a branding tool
Why the necessity for a private chef when there are already a number of good chefs in Singapore who also do catering and private chef dining on demand?
'It's not just about quality control, but having the same standard and philosophy that carries through from an event to the food served there,' says Ms Odom, who previously worked in Jakarta with the United Nations.
'You can't separate an event from the food, or food from the event. When there is the same philosophy and approach, it makes a big difference. Plus, food is the glue of every social situation,' she points out.
Chef Staedler says that The Hidden Host doesn't offer 'set menus' for the food. 'Everything is customised,' he says, adding that it's almost the same as having a fine-dining restaurant brought to the venue; complete with bone China dishes and Schott Zwiesel glasses.
With the integrated resorts opening up in a couple of years time, the food scene has to change. 'Just knowing the chefs who will be coming here when the resorts open, knowing what's happening in places like Macau and Hong Kong now . . . it's always good to be at a place where something is happening,' he says.
Ms Odom and Chef Staedler have already started working on a new restaurant concept even as they're establishing the catering business. 'The site for the restaurant is being developed now, and we hope to open it next year. It'll take on shades of New York and London, with a gorgeous showroom kitchen. But we're keeping the lid on it for the moment,' says chef Staedler.
For now though, they're upping the stakes where quality catering in events is concerned and pushing it towards finer dining.
