Dining under a wandering star

Jeddah’s Qasr Al-Sharq currently has the pleasure to host a wandering star in the cooking world: Michelin-starred Chef de Cuisine, Domenico Acampora is in the hotel’s Italian Aromi Restaurant to present his exquisite dishes to Jeddawis, expats, and tourists alike, while his own restaurant in Chicago is being relocated. To celebrate his arrival, Aromi and Acampora have launched a completely new menu, inspired by Venetian cuisine but with a clear personal twist.
Cooking well all begins with a passion for food, according to Acampora. As an Italian chef who grew up in Milan, this passion is inherent in him: “It’s a family thing for us,” he confides.
Although he is the only professional in his family, “everybody in Italy loves to cook.” Not surprisingly, his earliest food memories are of Sunday afternoons, when everybody prepared a dish and gathered around a big table in the family home. He dreamily observes that he can still smell the various dishes everyone prepared, one of his favorites being his dad’s risotto.
However, Acampora is not the traditional Italian chef. Perhaps he developed his own style while attending the French Culinary Institute in New York, and further developed his style as a sous-chef working for Le Cirque, the famed New York City French fine dining restaurant frequented by singers, movie stars, and ambassadors.
“I was very lucky to get a job in Le Cirque, the ‘culinary center of the US’,” affirms Acampora. “There, I got the opportunity to work alongside master chefs Sotha Khunn and Pierre Schaedelin.”
Le Cirque also sent him every year for three months around the world to discover new food trends and restaurants and visit all the new Michelin restaurants. Subsequently, Acampora worked in restaurants in the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Egypt, USA, and Italy — where he picked up his Michelin star in 2005 — as well as on a cruise and in Riyadh’s Four Seasons.
The result of this blend — an Italian-born chef who underwent his apprenticeship in the heat of French restaurants with primarily Asian chefs — is an interesting “Fusion-Mediterranean” style, although Acampora does not really like labeling food.
“To me, there’s only good food and bad food. That’s all I care about.” According to him, you have to use your creativity to present something that is unique. Unique is definitely the Risotto con fragile fresche, glassa al balsamico e quenelle di Mascarpone al profumo di limone, a risotto with strawberry, balsamic glaze, and lemony mascarpone quenelle. You heard that right: risotto with strawberry! “Maybe you have to be a little daring to try this,” Acampora confesses, “but we try to be truly unique.”
The Italian master chef and his crew certainly triumph in being innovative. Aromi’s superb menu is a little adventurous for people accustomed to traditional dishes, with combinations that blend surprisingly well. One example is the Spicy avocado, saku tuna tartare and crab tian with mandarin sherbet. The refreshing mandarin sherbet perfectly complements the somewhat spicy avocado. The sample menu we tried continued with Tempura di calamari e salvia con gazpacho e olio al coriandolo, or Calamari and sage, milk tempura, gazpacho, and cilantro oil. The cilantro oil made a wonderful addition to the mildly seasoned gazpacho, which is softened by the milk.
The Chilean sea bass platter is another favorite. Sea bass from Chile is not the easiest thing to import, but Acampora has done everything to include this fish from this particular place in his menu, as it is one of his longtime specialties. The sea bass is served with a smooth celeriac brandade and creamy crustaceous bisque, topped with crispy leek. Here again, it is the contrast in texture and flavor that makes the creation a real treat to the taste buds.
It is clear: Eating food from this chef is never predictable or boring. “We try to be as simple and straightforward as possible in the cooking and keep good techniques, but in the end we want the food to be original,” said Acampora.
This eagerness to be inventive started while Acampora was working on a cruise line. According to him, the best advice he received as a culinary student was, “Try to diversify”. In other words, don’t work only in a top-notch restaurant, 5-star hotel or cruise line, but try a bit of everything. “This was a revelation for me, although at the beginning it was scary,” the chef acknowledges.
True, you need some boldness to leave a job in which you have established yourself to try something completely different. But the challenges he undertook — especially to work as a chef on a cruise line — made him the star he is today. “The challenges on a cruise ship come from the environment, because you cannot stop in ports everyday to get fresh food. So you really have to adjust your cooking to whatever is available,” he relates.
The experience even helps him today, in Saudi Arabia, where not everything is readily available. “I am aware of the restrictions and try to work my way around them.”
However, Acampora affirms he has nothing to complain about. “We are lucky enough to be in a beautiful place: a fantastic palace with a beautiful sea view.”
For the moment, the Italian chef and his crew are trying to establish themselves as a Mediterranean restaurant using international produce. “In the near future, we will try to incorporate some of the local culture and food in our menu, to get some more local produce, some local dishes — revisited perhaps.”
Acampora’s ultimate goals for Aromi is to take its clientele to a different level of experiencing food and have them rediscover the restaurant. That shouldn’t be too hard to achieve for a talented chef like Acampora, who currently carries one Michelin star and is likely to receive his second by the end of this year.
Just one small recommendation for chocolate aficionados when you dine at Aromi: Keep a free spot in your stomach for the Tortino di cioccolato con gelato al mango. Acampora combines the finest Belgian chocolate with his magic in an impossibly light case that looks innocent until you cut into it; it is far from innocent, it is pure chocolate wickedness and it is sontuoso!

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