Le Petit Chef Dining Experience Comes to Malta at Tiffany's!

This week I couldn’t have started off the week in a better way! I was invited by Mr. Manfred Unger and his wife Sandra to experience their new venture – Le Petit Chef at Tiffany’s Lounge – a world-renowned fine dining experience partnered with high tech 3D projection mapping and themed music showing a tiny chef creating various top dishes which you get to taste! I couldn’t wait!

Le Petit Chef is currently present in 15 restaurants in eight countries in the world. These restaurants are the world’s top restaurants. Some include the Grand Hyatt Singapore or the Sheraton Grande in Bangkok. The last addition to this list is Tiffany Lounge in Malta, only for 100 days. Isn’t that just incredible!

Le Petit Chef combines technology with theatrics. But does the food match the hype?

When someone mentions fine dining, people think large plates with small portions, where it is hard to tell the starter from the mains. So when I was invited for an experience by Le Petit Chef (described as a chef no higher than my thumb, cooking on my plate), I figured the food would certainly be microscopic.

This “Cinema on a Plate” is a first for the country. The concept, which uses 3D mapping, was developed in Belgium and made its way around the globe — Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, among others.

This tech has been used for everything from scientific to military and medical purposes, but when the guys in the white lab coats get bored, they do stuff like this. In an animation projection, a tiny chef walks on to your table and knocks together a meal.
For example, the first course was salad, so the table was a verdant garden where our little chef went about plucking vegetables, throwing them onto our plates and then dices them up. A small, quirky narrative accompanies each course — in this case, he tried to get rid of a garden mole — and once it is over, the servers bring in a plate with the exact same dish.

I was blown away by the the first couple of dishes – the excellent quality of the dishes and the utmost attention to detail, served with pairing wines. If I had to choose, the Maine lobster with black Venere rice, sea asparagus, lotus roots crisp and champagne sauce was my absolute favourite dish.

The food was prepared by in-house chefs who have worked with the design team to develop the recipes. Each course was well-prepared, cooked right and did not look like they needed to be eaten with mini-tweezers. Portions were definitely on the generous side. The general consensus — gathered while involuntarily eavesdropping — was that it had been a memorable experience for all persons present.