Chef Santi dies in his kitchen in Singapore

By Dr. Michael Lim The Travelling Gourmet

Michelin Star chefs, especially 3 Michelin star chefs are hard to find. My friend, Chef Santi Santamaria of Barcelona was the Guru of Catalonian cuisine. He could make culinary magic with just the best ingredients and salt and pepper. He taught me personally how to make one of his Murcian inspired specialities, namely, a whole fish baked in a salt crust. A boorish, asinine so-called food critic once told me gushingly, “There is a Hakka dish like it!” As the Germans say, “Quatsch!”

On 16 Feb, 2011, in the kitchen of his restaurant “Santi” in the Marina Bay Sands casino in Singapore, at about 7.30pm, he collapsed due to a heart attack. Suprisingly, NOT ONE person used CPR or an AED to save him. They simply called for the ambulance and waited. The ambulance came to late at 7.44pm by which time there was no pulse.

Sadly, Santi died.

I really cannot understand why no one and not one Marina Bay Sands staff used CPR or an AED to help Santi. He might be alive today.

And another thing, apart from Spain, there does not seem to be much reaction to his passing in the culinary world.

Does no food lover care that Santi has gone to the big kitchen in the sky?? Well, at least he died in his favourite place…the kitchen.

Double dealing in London… 

On another gastronomic matter, Heston Blumenthal has opened his restaurant in London to great fanfare, but not many realise that the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London has treated the former Chef Chris Staines of Foliage in the same hotel very badly and shabbily. They evicted him although his restaurant which had 1 Michelin star was very successful, and Chris is a great chef. His slow braised beef cheek was ‘superbe’! He was evicted for no fault of his own but just to make way for Heston Blumenthal, who I think should be satisfied with his Fat Duck and not want to open another molecular gastronomy place. For the uninitiated, the amount of chemicals in a dish cooked by molecular gastronomy is so huge you would not eat one spoon if you knew about the lecithin, lutein, calcium digluconate, sodium alginate, pectin, liquid Nitrogen and other things…Incidentally, Dental Surgeons use sodium alginate to take impressions of your teeth. Bite on that, Ha! Ha!

It is a cold, cruel, heartless world not only in the caves of  Afghanistan where the SAS combat Al Qaeda terorists but also in  world of gastronomy…

Man kann sagen: Es ist mir Currywurst oder?

So ist das Leben…