Imperial Herbal Sin Chi Cafe

‘You’ve not been sleeping well,’ says Li Lian Xing, the resident sinseh at Metropole Herbal Restaurant. He keeps a fi rm grip on my wrist. ‘You have a lot of yin in you – you’ve been eating a lot of salads? Your blood is not circulating well and your spleen is cold, but your lungs are heaty. You need to drink more herbal soups with red dates’.

And just like that, I am a child again. And not in a good way; because, foodwise, it wasn’t easy growing up Chinese in the 1970s. I remember an endless procession of meals centred around huge pots of steaming soups crowded with black kampong chicken and unidentifi - able bits – lurid red squishy nubs and shards of something else. It was horrid.

 But herbal soups have come back in a big way. No longer are they the province of the sick or the old, of reluctant children or mothers enduring a month of confi nement. At Soup Restaurant, a clientele of smartly dressed suits and young hipsters from the post-MTV generation confi dently navigate the soup section of the menu. At Imperial Herbal Sin Chi Café, young execs lounge on velour seats next to a huge medicinal cabinet stuffed with dried cordyceps, deer tendons, lily bulbs, fritillary (or crushed pearls) powder and polygonatums.

At the newly opened Taste, the entire menu is Western dishes that incorporate small amounts of TCM herbs for fl avour and presentation. And it’s a sign of these progressive culinary times that Metropole Herbal – resplendent in its chinoiserie decor of antique furniture and ink-brush paintings – recently opened in the club-strewn Clarke Quay, right across from the avant-garde molecular gastronomy temple, Aurum.

These savvy attempts to repackage herbal cuisine into a more modern mould refl ect a simple fact: TCM is big business in Singapore. It’s estimated that our total import of raw herbs and fi nished TCM products is worth $546 million.

But beyond the numbers, restaurateurs believe that consumers are actually motivated to sup at herbal restaurants not because of a passing fad (albeit an old one since the Chinese have been practising TCM for more than 4,000 years), but because of genuine concern for their health and for their heritage.

The thought is that consumers – often the same ones who, as children, turned up their noses at herbal soups and anything TCM – are starting to realise that they’re losing an important part of their culinary past. ‘Most people no longer know how to prepare herbal soups,’ say Wang-Lee Tee Eng, the owner of Imperial Herbal Sin Chi Café. ‘The recipes aren’t being passed down because the daughters, the traditional family cooks, now work outside the home.’ Besides, some double-boiled soups can sometimes take half a day to cook – that’s a luxury of time few Blackberrytoting execs can afford to spend sweating over a stove.

After my session with sinseh Li, manager Doris Ho recommends I drink some of her double-boiled sharks fi n cartilage with panax ginseng and pilose antlers. ‘I can tell you’re stressed,’ she says, staring intently at my earlobes. ‘Stress ages you. This soup slows the aging process.’ Old phobias die hard. I smile politely and ask for hawthorn juice instead.