Leading fashion magazine, L’Officiel, did a spread on the My Day with Dior event at the Ly Club in Ho Chi Minh City. Amongst the photos is a spiffily dressed Mood Therapist knocking out a selection of cocktails for Christian Dior’s VIP Clients. [Read more…]
What do you get when you put together an experimental chef and a self-styled mood therapist? Something explosive. Words by Nick Ross. Photos by Vu Bao Khanh
At the start of September, photos circulated around the Hanoi online ether of two men dressed up in nuclear reactor-style protective clothing. Surrounded by smoke and with a large canister of liquid nitrogen in the background, the men were compared by some to characters in the TV series, Breaking Bad.
But these were no former high-school chemistry teachers, no Walter Whites. Instead, the man in the glasses is the chef de cuisine of the JW Marriott, Raphael Szurek, and the guy with the Fidel Castro-like beard is Richard McDonough, a modernist cocktail maker or, as he likes to call himself, a mood therapist. Together they were teaming up to create probably the most unusual dinner ever seen in Vietnam — Molecular Night
Maroued on a Dessert Island is a decadent rum based cocktail featuring premium Vietnamese cacao from my friends at the artisanal chocolatiers, Marou. The cacao nibs from Ben Tre province are pressure-infused using an ISI siphon into 7 or 12 year old Flor de Cana rum (depending on how flush I’m feeling) which helps release all the deliciously rich chocolate notes without any bitterness or the need for sugar. [Read more…]
The Vietnamese Basil Daiquiri is a blatant rip off of Dave Arnold’s masterpiece the Thai Basil Daiquiri, developed for his New York bar, Booker and Dax, but we’re hardly going to be using that Thai stuff around here, eh? It’s a relatively simple drink (if you happen to have liquid nitrogen knocking around your house) but is just so fresh, intensely herbacious and tasty that it packs a punch well above it’s weight class.
The problem with using delicate herbs like basil in cocktails is [Read more…]
Inspired by the Hot Frozen Gin Fizz served up at Ferran Adria’s El Bulli restaurant, the Passion Hot / Passion Not features one of Vietnam’s natural flavour heavyweights – the passion fruit.
This layered drink consists of a frozen gin, centrifuge clarified passion fruit juice and simple syrup mix, topped with a hot foam of the same flavours and stabilised with egg whites. [Read more…]
The Seoul Drifter is a ‘drink’ that I developed for a string of ‘Molecular Nights’ at the French Grill restaurant at the JW Marriott Hanoi. The intended pairing with fine de claire oysters was foremost in my mind when developing the menu and to serve a [Read more…]
A glass of fizz always goes down well, but wait? What’s this?? It looks like champagne and has the characteristic finish of champagne on the tongue but there’s clearly something else going on here… [Read more…]
The Mood Therapist was delighted to serve up a selection of modernist cocktails to a great crowd, including the Ambassador to the United States of America, Mr. Ted Osius, at the ASEAN Pride Festival 2015 held at the American Club in Hanoi on 20 June 2015. [Read more…]