Catch Signatures by Culinary Class Wars' Chef Choi Hyun-Seok at Solaire

(SPOT.ph) It seems Culinary Class Wars is the food show of the moment. The past couple of days has been a treat for fans of the show with the Korean chefs coming over to our shores—and cooking while they're at it, too. If you missed the Chef Choi Hyun-Seok menu at Finestra over at Solaire Resort (or if you couldn’t afford the whole meal with the wine pairings), you’re in luck: they’re extending the availability of the menu until July, and making his dishes available for ala-carte orders at Solaire's Parañaque and Quezon City outposts.

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Culinary Class Wars' Chef Choi Hyun-Seok at Solaire in Manila

Following the three-night only degustation dinners at Solaire Resort Entertainment City in Parañaque and Solaire North in Quezon City, they'll be serving five of the signature dishes the chef made during his time on the cooking reality competition show Culinary Class Wars. The full menu is available at Solaire Parañaque's Waterside; a selection of the dishes will also be available at Solaire Quezon City's Finestra. These are available from April 14 to July 6.

There are two small bites to kick things off with: Beans (P560 on the ala-carte menu) which is a kind of a take on chips and hummus, served with edible flowers, and Donut (P1,200), a little sweet corn dumpling topped with caviar. “Beans” boosts its chickpea spread with black garlic and cumin, while "donut" surprises with a burst of fresh, sweet corn flavor that provides a nice little bed for the fishy caviar.

Representing the soup course on the lineup is the Seaweed Soup (P680) from episode seven of the TV show. A piece of fried hairtail fish sits atop dark green soup. Just beneath it is a piece of braised radish. This is one of those deceptively simple dishes that grows in complexity and depth the more you sit with it. Each of the components is delicious by itself, with the radish in particular a rather remarkable showcase of flavor and technique. But taken all together, they present this striking harmony between land and sea – the sweet earthiness of the root vegetable and the fishy brine of the hairtail somehow bridged by the umami wholeness of the seaweed soup.

One of the most memorable moments of the show had Chef Choi forgetting to add garlic to his vongole, and he guaranteed at the start of the dinner that he remembered this time. And there is indeed garlic in this Vongole (P780), adding a slight tinge of heat to the buttery seafood sauce. The pasta is flat and square, half of it getting an extra seafood boost from squid ink. Texture becomes a big part of this dish, with the firm pasta and the chewy clams offer up these pleasantly toothsome bites that are able to carry all that richness from the sauce. 

As for more meat-centric mains, Solaire is serving what's called Three-Sauce Steak (P6680), pulled from episodes four and five where Chef Choi had to build a dish around the three staple Korean sauces: gochujang (red chili paste), doenjang (fermented soybean paste), and ganjang (soy sauce). As presented, the dish has three components: a rectangular block of pear, cut into thirds and dosed with truffle, a generous piece of Wagyu striploin in the center, and two asparagus spears topped with a bright orange colored sauce. The pear will likely surprise people, with the fruit used as a platform for very savory truffle. The steak is high quality and cooked and seasoned perfectly, and the asparagus is given a lift by a bright acidic note that cuts through everything. 

The dessert course is a spin on bingsu, simply called Korean Shaved Ice (P2,000). It’s topped with two other components—a matcha and red bean petit four, and a scoop of ice cream. This dessert seems to be very much in the wheelhouse of Chef Choi, who has built a career on the interplay between Asian and European flavors.

The Donut amuse bouche, the Vongole, and the Three-Sauce Steak will also be available at Finestra in Solaire North. So, for fans of Culinary Class Wars, or just fans of international haute cuisine in general, you’ve got a couple of months to try these dishes out.

Chef Choi gained popularity appearing on the cooking show Please Take Care of My Refrigerator in 2014 before joining Culinary Class Wars as a "white spoon" chef. He also had stints at La Cucina in Seoul, and Elbon the Table in Seoul and Goyang. Today he owns Choi Dot in Seoul, which is on the 50 Best Discovery List.

UPDATED (April 11, 3:23 p.m.): Solaire has moved the start date of the dishes' availability to April 14. The article has been updated to reflect this development.