Into the belly of The Gathering Beast: Brilliant, sometimes bizarre ‘Chinese fusion' cooking in Aman Suria
For one, its sweeping exposed-brick facade, towering glass windows and abundance of potted plants make it look more like a chic downtown darling than a self-styled 'Chinese-fusion' restaurant in the suburbs.
The facade of the restaurant. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Inside, antique earthenware, ornate figurines and calligraphy on the walls all work to exude Chinese tradition, right down to the choice of round tables only, with Lazy Susans on the larger ones.
But it can also be very untraditional.
The open kitchen, with its loud, crashing woks and roaring jet engine-stoves, bellows at the dining room in a way never seen in a 'traditional' Chinese restaurant at this level.
Maybe at a dai chow, but no self-respecting banquet restaurant would ever let anyone hear the kitchen.
The result is a buzz, an energy that belies the restaurant's surprisingly small capacity.
Inside the main dining room. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Then there's the food.
Despite the menu's emphasis on shareable dishes, some feel more suited to the centre of a tiny table with multiple glasses of wine than sitting comically small on a wide Lazy Susan.
One of three cold starters, the Red Cabbage and Arugula Salad (RM28) sports unbelievably crisp, fresh leaves of red cabbage tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette with arugula and toasted pumpkin seeds.
Their nutty, toasted character complements the wholly unexpected addition of strawberry compote, a sweet flourish in an otherwise sharp and bracing dish.
Truth be told, I wasn't expecting to like this. The prospect of a compote that was either puckery or cloying didn't exactly fill me with anticipation. But the balance of sweet and sour was perfect.
Strawberries and red cabbage? It works. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Dry-aged Sashimi (RM58) is another cold starter that bears little resemblance to anything Chinese, swapping wasabi and shoyu for an aioli made with a proprietary garam masala blend and a burnt leek soy sauce, served over slices of firm, clean-tasting red emperor fish.
The warm, floral character of coriander seed burst through the aioli, leaving a peculiar taste in the mouth that was surprisingly pleasant.
Dry aged sashimi with 'garam masala' aioli, one of the more unique flavour profiles. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Fried Tofu (RM22) is a subdued riff on Taiwanese fried stinky tofu, getting all its funk from a healthy squirt of blue cheese dressing, offset by some pickled shallots.
It's a playful introduction to the possibilities of stinky food, with the sharpness of blue cheese but none of the bitterness of stinky tofu.
It is in the larger proteins that The Gathering Beast really shows its claws, none more so than the Beef Three Kingdom (RM56).
Three types of beef offal, tripe, tendon and cheek, are wok fried in a sort of gong bou style with cashew nuts, dried chillies and green onions.
Beef Three Kingdom was the best dish of the night. — Picture by Ethan Lau
These are then fused together with balsamic vinegar and, most interestingly, celeriac. Tender slices of the root join a few dollops of celeriac purée, its mild celery-like flavour and gentle sweetness recalling the kind of mash where celeriac is often used instead of potato in European-style beef stews, now showing its value here.
Unlike at most conventional Chinese restaurants, where main dishes are often designed to go with rice, much of the menu here is not built with that in mind. But this dish is an exception. It would be a dream to eat with a bowl of hot rice.
But like most conventional Chinese meals, especially when dining in a group, fish is a must.
Instead of the usual steamed preparation, the menu offers a grilled fish of the day (RM108), which on that night was a whole Malabar red snapper.
The fish arrives splayed out on a bed of peppercorn sauce, deliberately kept lighter than the rich, heavy au poivre typically served with steak, leaning instead on the fruity, spicy notes of the peppercorns.
The skin is blistered and charred in a few spots, the flesh moist and succulent. On top are a few blobs of caramelised soy aioli and a generous scattering of dill, whose citrus-liquorice profile plays naturally well with the fish.
Definitely not one to go with rice, but fret not.
'Ying yong', but make it with 'kuey teow'. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Like any proper Chinese meal, closing out with carbs is the way to go here, and the golden fried kuey teow (RM78) is more than up to the task.
The noodles are deep-fried and submerged in a rich fish broth, mimicking the crispy and saucy textural contrast of Cantonese-style ying yong noodles.
But here, the kuey teow is lighter and dissolves in the mouth rather than giving you something to crunch through, and the broth is intense and thick, with no egg in sight.
Enjoyed with green chilli or vinegar, it is a wholly unique preparation of fried kuey teow I have not had elsewhere, and one that feels entirely in step with the restaurant's 'Chinese-fusion' label.
Black sesame cake with 'crème Chantilly' on the side. — Picture by Ethan Lau
Of the three desserts, only one impressed: a simple-looking slice of black sesame cake (RM18), a butter cake flavoured with black sesame and lightly caramelised in the pan, served with crème Chantilly.
But it had been an impressive meal overall, with interesting and creative dishes, some clearly Chinese, others with Japanese, Indian or French inflections, but most importantly, executed with confidence.
When 'fusion' restaurants open, no matter how vague that term is, we seem not only to cut more slack, but sometimes even to celebrate them for folding local flavours, ingredients and techniques into something recognisably foreign.
Local seafood or herbs in a French or Japanese restaurant? How innovative, how creative! But flip it the other way, and the reception is rarely as generous. Why is that?
The Gathering Beast
29A-G, Jalan PJU 1/43,
Aman Suria, Petaling Jaya.
Open Wednesday to Monday, 5.30pm-12am. Open from 4.30pm on Friday to Sunday.
Tel: 010-246 3191
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* This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal.
* Follow us on Instagram for more food gems.
* Follow Ethan Lau on Instagram for more musings on food and mildly self-deprecating attempts at humour.
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National Geographic
30 minutes ago
- National Geographic
What do your dreams reveal about you? It depends where you're from.
Lu Chin's mid-16th century painting entitled "Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly." Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of China's Hundred Schools of Thought. Photograph by CPA Media Pte Ltd/Alamy Stock Your dreamscape is the land where anything is possible. One minute you're walking through a beautiful meadow—and the next you're falling to your death over a cliffside. Your teeth may fall out for no apparent reason, or you may see a snake slither out the corner of your eye. The average adult spends roughly a third of their life asleep, which means there are plenty of opportunities for our minds to experience these personalized dreamscapes. But do dreams actually mean anything? That depends on who you ask. 'Anthropologists say that if you understand what a given group believes about dreaming, you have understood their whole [culture],' says Robin Sheriff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire. Western psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have popularized some of the most well-known ideas about dream interpretation, but these doesn't necessarily align with how experts in fields like anthropology and folklore understand dreams. Here's what you need to know about dream interpretation and how your culture may influence what a dream means to you. What is dream interpretation? Dream interpretation can be traced back to ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, but Sheriff says the practice likely has roots in prehistoric cultures without written records. Before dream science, also known as oneirology, was developed, dream interpretation was a cultural practice that could connect people to cultural ancestors or spirits. 'Dreams held deep significance in traditional Chinese culture…particularly within a supernatural worldview where ghosts, spirits, and ancestral souls were believed to actively participate in human affairs,' said Ze Hong, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Macau who has researched Chinese dream interpretation from an evolutionary perspective. Dreams were often regarded as meaningful channels of communication from the spiritual realm, capable of revealing hidden truths or predicting future events, Hong says. In ancient Rome, records show that dreams were seen as divine communications from the gods, and dream oracles played an important role in interpretation. Hong says this kind of practice also existed during China's Zhou Dynasty, which lasted between 1046 B.C. to 256 B.C. Hong explains that oneiromancy, the practice of divinatory dream interpretation, became widely used to provide insight into personal relationships, illness, and even political decisions. However, this practice has declined in popularity over Chinese history, said Hong, particularly by the end of the Imperial era in the early 1900s. The connection between dreams and the spiritual realm is something that anthropologist Roger Lohmann also found while studying the dreaming culture in Papua New Guinea. Though Westerners might view dreams as purely metaphorical, Lohmann, an associate professor of anthropology at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, says dreams in Papua New Guinea can be interpreted as a parallel journey that your soul went on while you slept. This meant that dreams could be interpreted as being prophetic or revealing hidden information, Lohmann said. He recalls sleeping in a village near the border of Indonesia and waking up from a nightmare about his research notes catching fire. (This is the story of the world's oldest nightmare.) 'I interpreted that [dream] as an expression of my anxiety about that something going wrong with my computer,' he said. '[But] I told the story to a man who was visiting me that morning and he said 'Oh, you better watch out. Be very careful with the fireplace,' because he interpreted that dream to mean something that's likely to happen in the future.' The guidelines for interpreting dreams in Western cultures today typically come from psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The father of psychoanalytic theory, Freud wrote in 1900 that dreams represent the dormant wishes of our subconscious and could be a way to carry out repressed instinctual, or even hypersexual, desires. Over the next six decades, psychologist Carl Jung proposed his own interpretation of dream theory that says dreams might be a conversation between our conscious and subconscious selves. Jung, who had a complex friendship with Freud, believed that instead of revealing repressed desires, our dreams are meant to process our waking problems and find potential solutions. (The brilliant women of psychiatry who were overshadowed by Freud and Jung.) Jung's dream theory also includes the idea of a collective subconscious, which suggests dreams can be interpreted in a symbolic way through distinct archetypes, such as the hero, the mother, and the trickster. According to Jung, these archetypes could be found across cultures and had universal meanings. However, this theory is quite different from what anthropologists have found when studying the importance of dreams and their meaning across cultural contexts. Interpreting dream symbols across cultures Depending on what culture you are dreaming in, common themes or symbols can have drastically different meanings. Take a snake, for example. In Western cultures familiar with Freud, dreaming of a snake may be interpreted as something potentially sexual, Lohmann suggested, or Jung himself wrote of snakes as representing power or danger, declaring that a 'state of instinctual hell is represented as a snake with three heads.' Hindu interpretations, however, suggest that dreaming of snake could foretell wealth and fertility—if you're eating it in the dream, at least. Hopi and Pueblo tribes in the American Southwest also link fertility to snake dreams, although particularly in relation to agricultural cycles and the fertility of land. On the other hand, Pentecostal Christian communities in Zambia may interpret that snake in your dreams as proof of the devil. There isn't a set interpretation of snakes in the traditional Chinese practice, said Hong—Chinese dream interpretations were more likely to be concerned with more culturally significant symbols such as dragons or suns, signs of divine favor. But some historical documents suggest that a pregnant women dreaming of snakes once would have predicted the birth of a son—or, contradictorily, also a daughter. Do dreams mean anything? A person will have countless dreams in their lifetime, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all dreams are equally important. By the end of the Imperial period, which was right around when Freud and Jung were forming their dream theory, Hong said that it became popular to view the origins of dreams as supernatural and related to a person's psychological state. 'For instance, dreams caused by 'overthinking during the day' were often dismissed as uninterpretable and meaningless,' he said. (You can learn to control your dreams with lucid dreaming. Here's how.) In the Western tradition, how much or how little a dream means is up to the person having or interpreting the dream. 'Dreams, like poetry and art, offer ways to think about human experience,' Sherrif said. 'There may be better or worse interpretations or analyses but we have no objective means of ascertaining their accuracy.'
Newsweek
3 hours ago
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The song "Silver Lining," the first single released ahead of the new album, recalls early 1960s pop music; Laufey wrote it while she was at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. "I found this vintage electric guitar in a corner and was like, 'I want to write a '60s song with the fun strings and this mid-century vibe and reverbed-out kind of sound.' I wanted it to be a love song, but sarcastic. Icelanders are not good at saying things very directly. We find these side ways of saying it. And I think 'Silver Lining' was kind of my way to do that." Yet A Matter of Time isn't a drastic stylistic left turn from Laufey's first two albums—the lush and elegant arrangements and her sublime torchy singing voice remain the cores of her work, such as on the bossa-nova-styled "Lover Girl" and "Clockwork." But her perspectives about love and the world around her have matured. "It's definitely more bold as well," she says of the lyrics. "It's more honest. It's more raw. 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The first album also touched a lot on things like moving out of my childhood home and moving into a new city for the first time—being an adult. With this one, I've experienced a little bit more of that, and I'm writing about the magic in the love of being young."
San Francisco Chronicle
11 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Ne Zha 2' review: The record-breaking Chinese animated epic is a must-see in IMAX
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