Visit a fancy restaurant in Singapore.


PETER LEWIS: The chance to live and work in the bustling crossroads of South-East Asia continues to attract Australia's best and brightest, and for a young chef the opportunity to add his distinctive style to one of the region's more interesting eateries was too good to pass up.

LUCAS GLANVILLE: I've always … been cooking for nearly 20 years, I always had an interest in working in Asia and the opportunity came up and here I am.

PETER LEWIS: Lucas Glanville runs the Grand Hyatt's main restaurant 'Mezza9'. As the name suggests it occupies the entire mezzanine floor of the Singapore hotel and comprises nine different dining experiences from traditional Chinese seafood, Japanese sushi and sashimi, through to western grill, European delicatessen and desserts.

LUCAS GLANVILLE: Mezza9 is about five years old. We have 48 chefs in Mezza9, about 60 floor staff, we do about 20,000 covers a month with revenue of about $1 million, so for a restaurant it's a quite a large restaurant. And the shopping list every week is quite big. The apples and oranges, and potatoes and onions, it's a fair old show to drive every day.

LUCAS GLANVILLE: The funny thing about Singapore is there's no food produced or manufactured here so we buy our product from all over the world. We buy a lot of product from Europe, out of the States and also from Australia.

So it's proximity and it's availability. We can get product here very quickly.

As a regional hub, Singapore, I think most planes stop here to refuel in this area here so we can get product here very quickly. So it can be... we're talking supplies leaving Australia, in most capitals of Australia, and have product here with 24 to 36 hours.

I think the quality of vegetable, fruit, seafood... the quality of seafood coming out of Australia is exceptionally high because of the clean waters there and also the size of the country. You have tropical fish in the north and it goes all the way down to the shellfish from down south from crayfish, lobsters, oysters, scallops - a lot of the products there.

In Asia there's a lot of aquaculture going on so a lot of product we can get here but it's the premium products that sell, the products that people, abalone, spiny lobster, which is what they call crayfish in Australia, they are the premium products here which only come from Australia.

You can't farm them as well as the natural product so at the end of the day it's what the customer wants. So, they're the products that sell. I think the quality of product coming out of Australia is extremely high, and its proximity to Asia so they can get product here a lot quicker which is obviously cheaper. It is cheaper to get product here coming out of Australia then it is from Europe. So, you have the time on your side and also the cost of freight on your side. So if you can get the right product into the right place it's a pretty simple equation.