SINGAPORE – American chef Nancy Silverton will be converting Osteria Mozza, her Italian restaurant at Hilton Singapore Orchard into Chi Spacca, branded as a forward-thinking Italian grill, that will run for a year. It will open in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Its menu will be similar to that of the original Chi Spacca in Los Angeles, featuring meat dishes that are meant to be shared and savoury pies, filled with ingredients like lobster and bone marrow. The restaurant’s cheesy Focaccia di Recco will be served here too.
“Our menu will be based on utilising and embracing the wood-fired oven that we already have,” Silverton says. “But we’re going to keep the identities and the cuisine very different from what we’re serving at Mozza. So there will not be any pasta and there will not be any pizza at Chi Spacca.”
Food at the restaurant will be priced from around $50 to $100, with the average bill expected to come up to around $70 a person.
The 105-seat temporary restaurant will be headed by Ashley So, former head chef of the Central Boulevard Italian establishment Sospiri, in a year-long “residency”.
“Whenever we bring new brands into the market, especially in this economic climate, we need to do it carefully,” says Andrew Ing, chief operating officer of OUE Restaurants, the group behind Osteria Mozza in Singapore.
“The one-year residency allows us the flexibility to introduce Chi Spacca to Singapore in a very thoughtful and measured way. It gives us time to build awareness, get customer feedback and some real-time operating data.”
With that information, the group can decide whether to invest the necessary resources into a permanent restaurant, he adds. “In a way, you could say it’s the best form of market research.”
The new Osteria Mozza outlet at Ion Orchard will feature pizza alla pala.
Osteria Mozza, meanwhile, will be shifting to Ion Orchard and opening to the public on Sept 7. Instead of the round, puffy pizza served at the former Hilton outlet, the new menu will feature pizza alla pala – a longer, thinner version, with fewer toppings and more crunch.
Silverton says the change was in part necessitated by the lack of a wood-fired oven at the Ion Orchard restaurant. “The dough I developed for Hilton works best in a wood-fired oven. At Ion Orchard, we won’t have that, so I needed to come up with a new dough. I also felt like it was a more delicate pizza for the environment.”
Soft-serve ice cream is being added to the dessert menu too and will come in trendy flavours like truffle, encased in a coat of brown butter.
Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction
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