Saturday 20 / April / 2024
Al Bustan Palace, A Ritz-Carlton Hotel recently hosted a troupe of travelling chefs who are planning to visit 20 cities across 20 countries in 20 months. Called One Star House Party (OSHP), the group spend three weeks foraging for some of the best ingredients in the countries they visit, before setting up a pop-up restaurant for discerning diners in the final week.
OSHP are a group of chefs led by James Sharman, Trisha, and Kevin McCrae, who are travelling around the world in search of culinary experiences you can never find inside a restaurant. A rotating roster of chefs works with them for the experience, which is truly unique, as they travel around the world learning new techniques and experimenting with local cuisine.
Muscat was their only stop in the Middle East, and their trained eye procured some of Oman’s finest and freshest ingredients. Their seven-course menu was less sit down dinner and more of a gastronomical journey. OSHP’s culinary escapade displayed not just their keen eyes when it came to spotting quality ingredients, but their superb skills to convert even the simplest of components into food that made your heart swoon and your tongue sing in unabashed glee.
Every dish they brought out was an amazing mélange of tried and tested techniques infused with new, bold experiments that have been refined over the last three weeks. No two places offer up the same ingredients, which means every pop-up restaurant OSHP makes, is different from every other one.
From their pan-seared Omani mackerel salad with a side of East-meets-West tabbouleh, presented in the form of an amazing mint and lemon jelly and cucumber salad, to their stunning eggplant focaccia that was served with an infusion of ricotta and the finest honey procured from Oman’s famed apiaries.
Next on this panoply of fusion food was a delightful slab of some tenderest meat we had ever eaten. The fish was served in a dee-lish cashew and milk sauce, the cuts of lamb came with a piquantly flavourful eggplant dip and a roasted chickpea hummus that easily surpasses any other version I’ve consumed. Just when you think the good folks from OSHP have surpassed themselves, they one-up your palate even further.
A palate cleanser like never before was deftly placed, a wonderfully sweet and citrus lemon sorbet made from a foundation of dried Omani lemons. Every dish spoke volumes of the traditions, the cuisine, and the food that shaped the Sultanate of Oman: Date puree has long been a staple of Oman, but turns out that when you reduce it down with caramel, palm vinegar and serve it with some velvety-smooth baked cream, you experience a sensation that is, well, indescribable.
Under the tiki torches and starlight, with the waves lapping the shore in the distance, we savoured a meal that spoke volumes of the culture, the people, and the history of Oman.
All about One Star House Party
What is One Star House Party?
One Star House Party is a travelling restaurant. This means we are constantly on the move, building our restaurants wherever we find ourselves. The name is a nod to our fine dining training, but also to the intimate dinner party atmosphere we are known for.
What inspired OSHP to go around the world and create these pop-up restaurants?
The idea was born from curiosity. By moving to a new country each month, we arrived into a different season, and therefore have a new set of ingredients and techniques to play with - An exciting prospect for any chef.
Why did you choose these locations?
We chose each location based on its potential to challenge the expectation of what a restaurant should be. Our first pop-up restaurant was born in an apartment, there we found an intimacy that we felt made for a unique experience. Whether it is a furniture showroom in Vietnam, Base Camp of Everest or a secluded beach in Oman, we aim to bring the same unique intimacy to each of our dinners.
Is there a message you wish to send to the world with this endeavour?
We want to prove that a restaurant need not be defined by convention, we believe it is not the building in which it resides, or the fancy artwork on the wall that makes a restaurant memorable, instead it is the relationship between the chefs, the food and the guests dining with us. Through this idea, our restaurant can exist anywhere and we want to show as many people as we can.
You've set up pop-ups in some of the world's most challenging locations, such as Mount Everest. Tell us a bit about that.
Mount Everest was our most challenging and ambitious restaurant yet, i suppose in this case we really where trying to prove that our restaurant can exist anywhere, even at 18,000 feet! We hiked for 9 days to reach the location of our restaurant, bringing with us tables, chairs, ingredients and 15 guests who trekked and dined with us. When it came to the food we were challenged far beyond a normal kitchen environment, the food had to be designed for longevity, pickles, ferments and dried meats where a great way to combat this, some things we started in Kathmandu and only became edible once we had reached base camp, we foraged as much as we could for edible mosses and fresh herbs and cooked everything by tiny gas burners, which struggled to work with the altitude and wind. We stuck to our values throughout the whole trip and resisted the temptation to chopper in some caviar.
In terms of money, is it as rewarding as working in any other restaurant? How do you manage your finances then?
Our journey for us is not about making money, in fact we actually all work unpaid. Each pop-up restaurant we do makes just enough money to cover the costs of the restaurant and get us to the next country to build the next one. We are gaining knowledge that we would never gain being back in the kitchen lives we used to lead, learning how people live and eat in the Himalayas to the streets of Vietnam we are gaining an invaluable understanding and perception of food that we never knew existed.
Money aside, there must surely be something intangible that no other job can offer. How would you describe that?
Of course the ingredients and techniques are the driving force behind what we do, and was the driving force behind this project. The truth is building OSHP has become as much a sociological challenge as it is a culinary endeavour, when we look back at dishes we have created and the menus we have written in each country, I attribute each dish and everything we have learned to the people that have shown and guided us to these discoveries, and not to the discoveries themselves.
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