Theatre comes to a fine-dining restaurant for the first time at Michelin-starred Nouri

Restaurant Nouri is no stranger to collaboration with artists of various disciplines. Chef-owner Ivan Brehm has invited ceramicists, painters, musicians and fellow chefs into his one-Michelin-starred restaurant as part of its Four Hands series, exploring how different creative disciplines might reshape the dining experience. 

His latest collaboration, however, asks more of everyone involved, including himself.

For A Matter of Taste, created with Checkpoint Theatre’s Joint Artistic Director Huzir Sulaiman, Brehm steps out from behind the pass and into the spotlight. Over a 10-course meal, the Brazilian chef re-enacts the defining moments of his life, while Singaporean actor Ramzie Tahar inhabits the people who populate those memories — the Per Se chef who taught him to shell lobsters, the mentors who challenged him, even the voices of his mother and brother.

The performance, which marks the finale of Checkpoint Theatre’s 2026 season, is believed to be the first collaboration in Singapore between a Michelin-starred fine-dining restaurant and a theatre company. A Matter of Taste runs from August 18 to 30 at Nouri.

The subject matter, delivery and Nouri’s pedigree distinguish it from dinner theatre productions like Fried Rice Paradise and Divorce Party that Singaporean audiences are more accustomed to, where a middling meal accompanies the musical or comedy. In A Matter of Taste, each painstaking course is a taste of the time capsule captured in the last vignette.

I observed the rehearsal of a scene in which Brehm recalls landing a job at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York City. Fresh out of cooking school, the young Brehm is intimidated by the prospect of shelling 250 live lobsters before service every morning. He arrives hours before his shift begins, determined to get ahead of his tasks. Tahar steps into the role of the senior chef who one day comes in early to teach him the technique, urging Brehm to trust himself.

The scene — by turns funny and moving — conveys Brehm’s palpable fear and the quiet grace found in the most unexpected moments. Minutes later, diners are served a dish of brown butter-poached lobster with tomato hollandaise and relish inspired by a dish that often surprised him during his time in the United States.

On the dining stage

Brehm and Sulaiman were introduced in 2022 by Sulaiman’s former student and Nouri’s head chef, Beatrice Chin. Brehm initially invited the playwright to participate in Nouri’s Four Hands series, but as the friendship deepened, Sulaiman became convinced that the most compelling subject was the chef himself.

Over several months, the pair recorded some 20 hours of conversations before distilling them into a script charting Brehm’s journey from his childhood in Brazil, through the Culinary Institute of America and some of the world’s most celebrated kitchens — Per Se, Mugaritz, Hibiscus and The Fat Duck — to founding the now-defunct Bacchanalia and eventually Nouri in Singapore. Each of those milestones forms a chapter in the performance, paired with a newly created dish that revisits the flavours of that period.

Sulaiman recalls being moved to tears by his first meal at Nouri. “During our first conversation, I said I sensed something close to our mothers’ love in the cooking. And it’s so fascinating that in the course of interviewing Ivan for the show and working on the script, I realised that his mother’s support has been instrumental,” he explains.

“That really resonated with me because you can have very fancy cooking that looks beautiful but has no emotional content. But Ivan’s got the incredible aesthetics, the culinary technique, the finest ingredients, but his cooking also means something. And that’s so rare at this level.”

Ironically, the greatest challenge lay not in marrying theatre with fine dining, but in persuading Brehm to become the subject. This meant revisiting some of the most difficult periods of his life, from abusive kitchens and failed relationships to moments when his challenges seemed insurmountable. “There are some very personal moments, like breaking up in a relationship and working six days a week, 16 hours a day while having your heart broken... touching on those moments was very hard,” Brehm says.

Then there are the practical challenges. “People might want to go to the bathroom. They might want to get a glass of water. They might want to order a top up. How do we negotiate that (during the scenes)?” Brehm muses. At the time of writing, these issues were still in discussion. The pair said learning the systems of each other’s crafts is a constant process, as is the search for what Brehm describes as the “crossroads” between them.

The people behind his story

In the finale, Brehm brings out the Nouri brigade, including the dishwashers. “I asked Ivan to introduce the entire team because these are the people who made your dinner and they’re normally invisible. I want people to think about the amount of energy, care and labour and attention that went into this,” Sulaiman says. “To me, that’s very beautiful.”

Brehm adds, “Hindsight is always 20/20, but there is something beautiful about the human spirit, of being able to endure and also provide support to people who are going through it. I had help every step of the way. The harder the problem, the more intense the support. I just had people magically show up out of nowhere. I had my mum, and in the play, we make that observation of finding your mother in everyone — in the friend and the cab driver… that spirit of nourishment and care that you find everywhere.”

Nourishment is the Latin word from which Nouri is rooted, and in this performance, that ethos is extended from food to people. Ultimately, the most memorable element in A Matter of Taste is not the grilled fish or lobster, or Brehm’s Singaporean twist on akarajé (a Brazilian fritter spiced with citrus and chillies for this occasion). It is the reminder that behind every memorable dish is a remarkable human story.

A Matter of Taste runs from August 18 to 30 at Nouri, 72 Amoy Street.