Momofuku Seiobo Champions Caribbean Food With Australia’s Bounty

SYDNEY — As a teenager in St. James Parish, Barbados, Paul Carmichael spent his free time writing letters to New York City restaurants. He had been dreaming of a cooking career in America ever since a home economics teacher, sensing talent, suggested he consider attending the Culinary Institute of America. At 15, Carmichael sent away for a Zagat Guide and began writing to the top-rated restaurants, asking for work. (Lespinasse was the only one to reply.)

Carmichael’s father had spent hard years working as a butler and bartender, and did not see it as a desirable path. He sought to break his son’s romantic notions by getting him an unpaid job at a local restaurant. The plan backfired — Carmichael became hooked.

When he made it to the Culinary Institute, his final thesis focused on Caribbean food. Then in his early 20s, he drew connections between slavery and colonialism and sustenance.

He studied the ways in which food was often one of the only aspects of African culture that maintained an unbroken thread through generations, as language and religion and family were purposefully and systematically stripped from enslaved people. He dug into the history of certain dishes, tracing the heritage of flavors and the people who brought them to the Caribbean, and focused on how those flavors were melded and reshaped by new ingredients and new generations of cooks.

Nearly 20 years later, in a multimillion-dollar kitchen in a casino here in Sydney, Carmichael is basically cooking that thesis, albeit through the lens of decades of experience in some of the best restaurants in America. (After graduation, he went on to work with Marcus Samuelsson, Wylie Dufresne and eventually David Chang.)

Momofuku Seiobo, which opened in the Star casino in 2011, is part of the sprawling Chang empire. But since Carmichael took over as the chef in 2015, Seiobo has had less and less in common with other Momofuku restaurants. Carmichael spent some time as the chef at Chang’s Má Pêche in New York, and the two men share a fascination with the place where texture and umami and sensuality meet.

Momofuku Seiobo’s website says that it draws inspiration from the bounty of Australian produce and suggests that it specializes in no particular cuisine. But if you ask Carmichael, he is clear on the matter: Momofuku Seiobo is a Caribbean restaurant.

That was not always the case. In the restaurant’s early days, the kitchen was headed by a British chef, Ben Greeno, who served Chang’s famous pork buns alongside a globally influenced menu. What remains from those days is the format: a $185-per-person meal that on its surface looks very much like high-end tasting menus everywhere.

At Má Pêche, but also early in his tenure at Seiobo, Carmichael says he was trying to be two people. One was the cook he imagined Chang wanted him to be, making food that was more in line with the rest of the Momofuku empire. The other was truer to his own sensibilities.

Carmichael says he didn’t know exactly what he was going to cook when he accepted Chang’s offer to move to Sydney, though he was given explicit instruction to do whatever he pleased.

He wasn’t quite prepared for the quality of tropical ingredients here — so much of what he had grown up eating and cooking in Barbados spilled forth from Sydney’s market stalls. Slowly, and with the encouragement of the longtime front-of-house manager Kylie Javier Ashton, a new Seiobo emerged.

The severe black-tiled room is often filled with the soft thrum of reggae music. Cooks deliver dishes and name-check origins: Antigua for sweet potato ducana with currants and a deep, sweet “Caribbean XO” sauce; Puerto Rico for a bowl of mofongo that arrives in a large mortar.

Customers are given a pestle and asked to grind the mixture of plantains, garlic and chicharrones into a thick paste themselves — one of many interactive interludes in the meal.

A shallow glass of intensely flavored pork broth accompanies the mofongo, made more extreme by a squiggle of smoked rendered pork fat. It delivers a level of pleasurable excess you might expect from a Chang restaurant, but set against the grounded moderation of the plantains, it provides elegant balance — porky treble to the dish’s starchy bass.

Cou cou, often considered the national dish of Barbados, is here re-imagined with fresh corn in place of cornmeal, and Sterling caviar in place of the flying fish the dish usually accompanies. The result is a dream of creamy puréed corn with a swoosh of okra and the saline pop of mellow caviar.

It makes for a glorious mouthful, modern and soulful and rooted in sense memory. Even if the memory is not your own, you taste its recollective pull.

The apex of the meal comes when servers present a pot holding live marron. A few minutes later, the shellfish are back again, split open and smothered in a bright, delicately spicy sofrito.

There is no way to approach the dish without making a glorious mess, while scooping the tender flesh awash in sticky sauce and just the right touch of stank from the roe and head of the spindly beasts.

This is the kind of food that requires full abandon. (Wet towels are provided.)

Carmichael is presenting a beautifully considered tribute to his birthplace, with all the thought and care and honor of fine dining, and all the fun of Momofuku. Many diners are likely to find the experience quite moving as well, particularly those with a personal connection to the history and culture upon which the chef’s long-ago thesis was based.

That audience is primarily elsewhere, and I can’t help but think how much America might benefit from this profoundly pleasurable expression of African and Caribbean foodways.

That this incarnation of Momofuku Seiobo exists in Australia makes us a lucky country indeed.

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80 Pyrmont St., Pyrmont, New South Wales; 02 9657 9169; seiobo.momofuku.com