Inside Vow’s Singapore dining adventure

For now, it is the quail parfait. And with Veen, Separovich and chef Adem Kurcan as my guides, I am about to have a sneak-taste.

Vow, founded in 2019, is among an emerging group of start-ups experimenting with growing meat in laboratories. The method obviously requires no agricultural land, and no animals have to die. (Vow markets the quail parfait as being of a “bird without a heart, brain, feathers or bones”.) But production is also expensive and still in its infancy. As such, many companies are struggling to get their products to the table – and to stay there.

As reported recently in this masthead, alternatives to traditional meat, including plant-based products, have generally struggled to find a lasting nest in consumers’ hearts and minds.

The New York Times this year ran an opinion essay on the subject of cultivated meat titled “The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner”. As might be gleaned, it was not kind. Paraphrasing a deflated industry pioneer, the article mused the economics of lab-grown meat would never stack up unless factories could be built for a fraction of the price.

And are flaky fish-beef-chops a genuine prospect? Nothing yet to reach market has come close.

The alchemists of old never did work out how to make gold.

Veen, a true believer, explains the manufacturing process and I repeat it back to him in crude terms to make sure I understand: You essentially put animal cells in a giant vat and mix them with just-right nutrients and gases?

Essentially, yes.

The idea is not only to produce sustainable meat but to “create entirely new meats”, according to Vow. This way, the company, via its brand Forged, relieves itself of the burden of replicating identical meat flavours and textures, and hopes to make something even better.

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Key to this goal is isolating the desirable cells from animal hosts and discarding the rest, Veen says.

“For instance, a piece of chicken has a dozen different cell types in there, right? There’s nervous tissue, connective tissue, muscle tissue and, really, most of them actually hamper the taste of that product,” he says. “This product you’re about to try consists solely of one very specific cell of the Japanese quail.”

The dream is tantalising. I ask if the method could grow, say, shark fin meat for the Asian market, thereby sparing endangered wild species.

“Yep,” he says. “That’s actually something we’ve already looked into.”

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From cells in Sydney to table service in Singapore, Veen says the quail parfait process takes only about five weeks, including shipping.

And why Singapore? For starters, it is one of the world’s great food cities. Pragmatically, however, there is a lack of other options. Only Singapore and the United States have granted regulatory approval for cultivated meat so far. Israel recently granted preliminary permission for beef. Vow is hopeful Australia and New Zealand will join in this year.

Singapore, with negligible agriculture of its own, has been particularly progressive in encouraging new means of food production and sustainability. The government here has a goal of “30 by 30” – that is, to sustainably produce 30 per cent of its citizens’ nutritional needs by 2030.

In late 2020 it became the first nation to green-light lab meat for retail and, within days, San Francisco-based company Eat Just launched “chicken bites” – a world first.

But this was not the beginning of a food insurgency as the industry, activists and conservationists might have hoped.

Singapore’s Straits Times wrote last month that Eat Just, which had also been planning to launch in the United States, had paused operations. This left Vow.

“This will be the only venue in the world that actually serves cultivated meat,” Veen says. “Some [other companies] are unfortunately struggling because they’re creating chicken. Getting chicken right is difficult and, even if you do, it is an extremely cheap product, so you would have to match the price point, or at least get closer.”

The first course of our abridged service arrives courtesy of chef Kurcan, who has just finished dousing it with applewood smoke “for a little more depth – and because it looks pretty cool”.

It is the Forged Monaka, he explains: a Japanese rice cracker filled with the quail parfait, topped with Japanese pickle, ginger flower and pepperberry leaf.

“Put it together like an ice-cream sandwich, take two bites and enjoy,” Kurcan says.

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The Monaka is followed by the Hokkaido Wagyu Sando – real A5-grade beef topped with the parfait and served on a milk bun. To cleanse the palate, Kurcan serves a kingfish ceviche – without any lab product – and brings home our service with the showstopper: the Forged Brulee, a kind of sweet and savoury trifle filled with Sydney product.

The verdict? First, it must be said I may be the easiest eater to please in all of Singapore. But for what it’s worth, it is very good – and unique.

The parfait, pinky-caramel in colour, is rich, creamy and slightly sweet. I blurt out that it would be excellent on toast, revealing my culinary baseness while also probably disrespecting the hours chefs spent pairing these flavours.

To my relief, Kurcan agrees with me. Not that you’d be likely to slap it on Wonder White anyway: Forged parfait will sell to restaurants for about $300 a kilogram.

In part because the costs of production remain high, Vow’s strategy for the Forged brand is fine dining – reaching discerning Singaporeans craving something new and objectively other-animalian. In time the company hopes to feed millions or even billions.

For obvious reasons, some voices in traditional meat industries have been none too pleased about this emerging technology. But there is nothing to fear for now. In any case, the world will soon have close to 10 billion people to feed amid climate change and constraints on agricultural land. There may just be space for everyone. Bon appetit.

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