A NEW 300 sq ft kitchen awaits brothers Jonathan and Sean Gwee when they move into their new four-storey home off Bukit Timah Road in the next couple of months.
Not just any kitchen, mind you, but an industrial one, complete with, among other things, a huge four-door, 1,000-litre refrigerator, freezer and four-burner stove.
It is a set-up which will make most chefs beam except that the Gwee brothers are not chefs. Well, not professional ones anyway.
Both are teenagers. Jonathan, 18, is a first-year medical undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, while Sean, 15, is an Anglo-Chinese School (Barker) student sitting for his O levels next month.
Both, however, are mad about food and cooking. While most of their peers would probably be hard pressed to tell the difference between digestion and degustation, the duo can have passionate discourses on the virtues of tenderloin over sirloin.
Or how molecular methods - the application of scientific principles to preparing and cooking food - can, according to Jonathan, sometimes yield 'textures and flavours which transcend old ones'.
He adds: 'Molecular cooking has its applications but we don't do it for the sake of doing it. But we often use principles like measurements and temperatures which are especially good for meats and egg coagulation.'
It is both amusing and unsettling to hear such big words rolling off the tongues of the two articulate teenagers sitting in front of you. The older boy is slim and slender, the younger one cheerfully stocky.
Like a sage, Jonathan muses: 'The enjoyment of food is a pretty universal thing, isn't it?'
They certainly enjoy theirs, thanks to their information services manager mother who is an 'adventurous cook', and their doctor father, 'an adventurous eater'.
Sean says: 'We can't pinpoint when we became appreciative of food but we certainly got to mess around with pots and pans from a very young age.'
They started cooking seriously about five years ago.
Their first culinary attempt was 'roast peach pork' from a recipe in their mother's vast collection of cookbooks.
Jonathan says: 'It's pork stuffed with peach and then tied up and baked. After that, we started taking on entire meals.'
They hone their skills watching cooking shows on TV and poring over cookbooks.
Sean sighs.
'What would be nice to have is Larousse Gastronomique but it costs more than $300,' he says, referring to what is arguably the culinary world's most revered encyclopaedia.
From duplicating recipes, they went on to improvising and concocting their own dishes. Working in the kitchen has made them close.
At this point, Jonathan looks at his brother with affection: 'We both enjoy cooking but you started to think of it as a business. You're the entrepreneur.'
Indeed, Sean was the one who broached the idea of hosting private degustation dinners.
He says: 'It started in December 2005 when we cooked for some of my teachers, charging them a nominal sum. One of them liked it so much that she paid us to cook for her friends.'
With their parents' blessings, the duo has since tested their culinary skills at more than 15 such parties held during their school holidays.
Depending on the menu, they charge their clients - mostly friends and relatives - between $60 and $120 serving up delectable dishes like roast beef with marmalade glaze or their own concoctions such as pink ginger ice cream and mango yuzu foam with ikura (salmon roe).
Jonathan says: 'We do the parties at our home because it would be a logistical nightmare doing it elsewhere. We started offering about 13 items but have scaled it down to about seven.'
Each session ends with the boys - who call their outfit Bramble - earnestly getting feedback from diners.
'The response has been mostly positive although we've had dishes sent back too,' Jonathan says candidly, remembering a chocolate cake which failed to impress.
Their new kitchen will come in handy when the holidays roll around and they start a new 'season' of degustation dinners.
Although the boys have sampled the cooking of celebrity chefs like Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck (a three-Michelin star restaurant outside London) while on holiday, they eat out at places only when 'time and circumstances permit'.
They'll have you know they're not food snobs, rattling off places where one can get good oyster omelette (Newton Hawker Centre) and wonton mee (Lavendar Street).
So do they do the stuff that normal teenagers do?
'We both love movies. I like photography, play some computer games and am now into Japanese writers like Natsume Suseki and Haruki Murakami,' says Jonathan.
'I knit,' says Sean without missing a beat. 'I just asked my teacher and she taught me some basic stuff.'
His brother shakes his head: 'You're such a spinster.'
E-mail the Gwee brothers at enquiry.bramble@gmail.com if you want to find out more about their degustation dinners.
