Chef Johan Akueng Has a Passion For Serving
Chef Johan Akeung’s Guinness-infused sticky wings are well worth a trip to his Basil Bistro on Ariapita Avenue in Woodbrook.
Delightfully pungent, the wings balanced sweet and savoury on a knife edge and called for a downing of cutlery in a full breach of dinning etiquette on Saturday night. Many red-faced guests were spotted licking the delicious gooey sauce off their fingers during the bistro’s ongoing St Patrick’s month-long celebration.
“The secret is you not making your barbecue sauce and throwing Guinness in it. What I did was reduce the Guinness with brown sugar. As it reduces, the flavours become more pungent. It also gets it sticky. Then I add my seasoned barbecue sauce and put a lil lemon to it. You can flour fry your wings or with a light fry… garnish with parmesan cheese and garnish with parsley and voila,” Chef Johan shared when he sat with the Express at his popular restaurant after dinner on Saturday.
March has been dubbed Guinness St Patrick’s Month in Trinidad and Tobago. A total of 15 restaurants and 40 restaurant/bars across the islands will infuse the famous dark Irish stout into their food and drink cocktail menus, in celebration of the feast of St Patrick.
Basil Bistro is excited to be a part of the celebration which hopefully will help jumpstart activity following the pandemic-forced slowdown of the restaurant industry, Johan said.
He and his mother Ann Marie Akeung manage the unique hybrid of décor and food that is Basil Bistro. The location originally housed i-Deacor, a popular pit stop for one-of-a-kind home decor pieces. Ann Marie, a veteran food caterer, however decided to marry her love for culinary arts with interior design, resulting in the creation of a picture-perfect restaurant front house.
“Everything is for sale. We have unique pieces that customers can sit and enjoy and even buy on the spot,” Ann Marie said, waving an arm at an olio of beautiful paintings and drop-jaw gorgeous figurines and candles.
“The ambience inside is so nice when customers come, they don’t want to get up and leave quickly,” she continued, prompting all at the table to check the time on their wristwatches and phones.
It was already 11.30 p.m. and hardly felt like three and a half hours had elapsed from our 8 p.m. reservation. It would be some time yet till departing as Chef Johan’s special desserts of Guinness-infused bread pudding served with Guinness ice cream and Guinness creme brulee were just being served.
A passion for serving
“How’s the crème brulee? It nice, ent? Yeh, I’m actually quite happy with how that came out,” Johan said to full mouths and nodding heads.
Earlier, he served a classic St Paddy’s main course choice of Irish roast beef served with a choice of white rice or colcannon (mashed potato with cabbage and spring onions) and sautéed vegetables or crispy Guinness-infused fish and chips with coleslaw.
Chef Johan, a graduate of the Trinidad and Tobago Hospitality and Tourism institute (TTHI) and Fanshawe College culinary programme in Ontario, Canada, said he put a lot of research into this year’s Irish themed menu.
“Fish and chips is a classic so we kept that on the menu from last year. I changed my batter a little bit and did a lil work on it, so this is the fish and chips 2.0 S,” the affable chef joked.
“We just wanted to do something a little different than the clod (traditionally used in Irish stew). People like roast beef, the stew is the same stew just served on top. In the stew you will find chunks of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and, of course, Guinness,” he continued more seriously.
Chef Johan’s kitchen journey is a story of resilience. Growing up with a food caterer as a mother, he first dreamed of a career in medicine or law, but upon graduation from high school decided to dive into the family business.
“If I tell you the real reason, I became a chef, eh. I saw movies and women always loved a man who could cook, so I figured,” he said with a laugh.
Suffering from epilepsy, however, made his kitchen ambitions a dangerous prospect.
“It is one of my greatest challenges in this industry. I feel like an old man; I drop down and get seizures. I’m in danger everywhere as so many things can trigger an episode ranging from exhaustion, heat, knives, the hot grill, fryer,” he lamented.
Johan, who worked in restaurants in Canada and back home in T&T before taking up his leadership role at Basil, says, despite those challenges, he has decided “to live my life normally”.
“What don’t kill makes you stronger. It doesn’t stop me from doing what I love and when you get favourable feedback from guests it makes it all worth it,” he said.
Culinary enthusiasts around the island would be happy to know that Basil Bistro has now made its popular Guinness-infused sticky wings a permanent fixture on its evolving menu.
