Established by feted chefs Matthew Orlando and Will Goldfarb, and entrepreneur Ronald Akili, AIR is sprawled over a 3,700m2 two-storey campus in Dempsey Hill, Singapore.
AIR – which stands for Awareness, Impact and Responsibility – is a restaurant, circular campus and cooking club, a multi-hyphenated space, where the founders’ purpose is to inspire thought about food.
The restaurant is helmed by Orlando, founder of Amass in Copenhagen, renowned as one of the most sustainable restaurants in the world. The menu here ranges from light bites like grilled Squid Salad with shaved vegetables and charred coconut to hearty mains such as a Roselle Glazed Duck Breast, grilled over charcoal, lacquered with a sticky roselle glaze, and served with cashew cream and smoked chilli oil.
There is also a Re-Incarnated “Chocolate” dessert made from the byproducts of three common processes: cocoa husks, which results from processing cocoa beans; cascara, the fruit that’s discarded in the process of making coffee; and coconut flesh, which is often discarded in the commercial use of coconuts. This trio of by-products is roasted and ground with cocoa butter and sugar to yield chocolate bars.
Sharing menu prices start from S$70++ (US$51.50) per head for lunch, up to S$300++ per head for a sit-down dinner. A vegan menu is also possible, and dietary requirements will be taken into consideration.
All the fixtures and furnishings in the restaurant were designed by Spanish product designer Andreu Carulla exclusively for AIR using recycled timber and plastic bottles (HDPE) sourced from a former art installation, as well as Styrofoam.
Aside from seating space, a portion of the second floor is dedicated to research, and visitors are welcome to wander around. Also held on the second floor is AIR’s Cooking Club. For a start, the space will host talks by farmers and producers who are telling their stories through food. Cooking classes and programmes will follow in the coming months.
Teambuilding activities facilitated by external companies, as well as dessert or cooking demonstrations can be arranged for second-floor buyouts.
To date, Air CCC has hosted several corporate groups which includes a second-floor buyout by a luxury lifestyle brand for 40 pax, and a whole space buyout by a tech brand for 300 guests.
In total, the first and second floors can take up to 100 seated guests, while the whole restaurant, including the deck and outdoor lawn, is good for 350 guests.
Minimum spend starts from S$4,000++ for a three-hour block on a weekday morning for the second-floor space buyout, and up to S$62,000++ for a 10-hour block on a weekend for the whole restaurant and outdoor area buyout.
Additionally, lining the outer perimeter of AIR, the Garden – run by an urban farming social enterprise City Sprouts – is where guests can learn about how food grows, taste what grows out of the earth, and realise their effects on the final dishes. Among the plant species are lantern chillies, starfruit, rambutan, bananas, wormwood, turmeric, moringa, belimbing, and even buah keluak.
