Mochi Mooncake

Bánh dẻo, the snow-skin cake of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Taro, red bean, salted egg and lotus seed are the house's favourite combination of fillings. Against the light sweetness of rice they read starchy and nutty, with a trace of umami.

The house draws on the traditional Vietnamese recipe for bánh dẻo. Glutinous rice flour blended with pomelo blossom water gives a soft, chewy texture, and coconut milk and benzoin bring a gentle sweetness and warmth, like a festival in autumn after dark. Bột nếp chín, the same flour roasted, adds a faint toasted glow and a hint of savoriness close to Maillard, a reminder of the baked cakes the house grew up with.

d.grayi is the work of James Nguyen, known also as Miju, a perfumer who came to scent as an adversary rather than a calling. A career spent around hair color and its chemicals left James allergic. Fragrance meant headaches and a throat swelling shut, and anything scented was avoided outright. Cosmetic chemistry, taken up as a hobby, brought the first turn: cosmetic raw materials that smelled unpleasant, and natural ingredients found to soften them.

Then came a dream, in which someone deeply important who had passed away returned and described a fragrance. It was not a scent so much as a complete story, vivid and pictured, and James woke and wrote down every detail. The quest to recreate it became the studio. Isolated aroma molecules, tried later, provoked nothing; the allergy had been to composition, not to any one material. James now builds olfactive stories unrestricted.