Dave Pynt And The Fires Of Creation

The Aussie face behind the flames at Singapore's award-winning restaurant Burnt Ends.

Describing Dave Pynt's cooking is one of those tasks that show the limitations of language. Countless scribes, attempting to categorise the cooking that has garnered Pynt a Michelin star and earned his Singapore restaurant Burnt Ends an unshakeable spot in the upper echelons of any global restaurant ranking that counts, clumsily conflate his nationality and his preferred heat source and declare Pynt the king of 'Australian Barbeque.' Wherever that phrase might take your mind, to split snags or cremated chops, it's sure to be a million miles from the flame licked artistry that has made Dave Pynt one of the world's hottest chefs. Literally.

Pynt's food has as much in common with your backyard barbeque as the Mona Lisa has with the smudged jailhouse tattoo on a prisoner's arse. His is a cuisine that taps into the elemental to create the transcendental, harnessing humanity's greatest tool to satisfy its greatest need in astounding ways. And it all began under a railway bridge in London in the Olympian summer of 2012. 

The boy from Perth had been travelling and doing stages in some of the world's best kitchens, Noma and Asador Etxebarri among them, when he was approached to create a pop up by Climpson & Sons Roastery, in Helmsley Place, London. Peng's original idea was a yakitori joint. "I hadn't even been to Japan at that point. Who was I to be doing yakitori?" says Pynt. Instead, he knew his future lay in elevating what he'd started in that railway arch in London. "My jam is those big brute ovens and adjustable grills. The physical nature of that setup was always going to shape what I did next." 

So Pynt set about engineering the kitchen he needed in a classic old terrace in Singapore's Chinatown. At first, Burnt Ends - the Finnesque spelling of the London pop-up giving way to greater accuracy in Singapore - was greeted with  a mixture of trepidation and confusion.

Nobody really knew what to make of a place that looked like it had a crematorium in the kitchen: not even the chefs he'd hired to work alongside him. "I was copping flat out criticism from the crew in the kitchen," Pynt remembers. "They just didn't get what I was trying to do. It was pretty rough." But soon trickling custom turned into a flood, Burnt Ends became the hottest place in town, and the kitchen crew clicked. "The great irony of those early days is the guy I had the biggest dust ups with in the kitchen, really serious blues, now has his own bloody barbeque restaurant in Taipei," laughs Pynt. "So obviously I won him over eventually."

BURNT ENDS WINE LIST - THE MOST IMPORTANT COLLECTION OF AUSTRALIAN WINE OVERSEAS?

He won everyone over, including Michelin. The guide awarded him a star in 2018 and it is retained to this day. Pynt and Peng moved Burnt Ends to the salubrious and leafy Dempsey Hill in 2022. Greater space hasn't made it any easier to get a table - the waiting list for reservations still stretches out across months - but more room to move has allowed Pynt's vision to expand and evolve. The new Burnt Ends now includes private dining spaces and a garden, a bakery driven by an 8-and-a-half-tonne wood burning oven just for bread, and what Pynt describes with thirsty pride as "a seriously f*cking good bar." And, crucially, a spectacular cellar housing arguably the most important collection of Australian wine beyond our shores.

An entirely Australian wine list, with the minor exception of a few listings for Champagne and port, has been an important part of the Burnt Ends DNA from the start, even if it wasn't in the original plan. "We started out with an international list just like every other joint in Singapore," Pynt says. "But we only had two little wine fridges and in a town where a lot of people like to throw their weight around with their knowledge of bloody vintages and appellations and whatever, that was pretty limiting and frankly, too much hassle." 

So, Pynt decided to specialise, to do one thing and do it well. "I'm bloody proud of the wines Australia makes so why wouldn't I want to celebrate that?" That so many of Australia's best bottles are showcased daily alongside some of the most exciting food in the world in one of the most dynamic gastronomic destinations on earth is something for which the Australian wine industry should be exceedingly grateful. 

With 2024 marking 10 years since the original Burnt Ends opened in Singapore, Pynt thought it might be time to take stock, reflect and do something he always said he wouldn't do: write a book. Just don't call it a cookbook.

This is not a simple collection of recipes. In fact, he had to be persuaded to include recipes at all, and even then they are the recipes as written for the unique processes of his unique kitchen. Adapting for home is something readers will have to work out themselves. It's really more a manifesto, a distillation of the thinking and learning behind the development of Pynt's distinctive cooking.

When asked to summarise what all that means, Pynt neatly encapsulates it into three principles he first learned working at global gastronomy's fiery Vatican, Asador Etxebarri. "Find the greatest produce. Take the care with it that it deserves. Develop the techniques required to do it justice." And what's the one thing Australia's greatest fire-wrangling export sees people get wrong when they dust off their own backyard barbeque? "People are scared of cooking over fire," says Pynt.

"Being timid will get you into trouble. Watch it, work with it, think about what you're cooking and how that needs to be exposed to the flame to get the best out of it," he advises. "And don't let it bloody flare up! Raging flame all over what you're cooking makes it acrid and bitter. Nothing f*cks up a great steak faster than that."

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