Comfort food - Basic instincts

Forsaking foie gras and gimmicky restaurant fads, more and more diners are rediscovering the pleasures of homegrown staples, writes Daven Wu 

‘My children belong to the McDonald’s Generation,’ Violet Oon announces as we flip through her favourite cookbooks from the ’60s and ’70s. ‘Yet they get so incredibly excited when they come across a new zhi-char stall.’ 

I’m in Oon’s apartment, surrounded by the cooking paraphernalia – pots, pans, ladles and reference books – that made her the reigning Delia Smith of my mother’s generation. And thanks to her uncanny ability to parse the nation’s very fickle taste buds (to wit, www.violetoon.com), it’s a title she shows no sign of relinquishing. 

I’ve come to her because something very interesting is happening to the food scene in Singapore, and I wanted her take on it. 

I tell Oon of observing thirtysomething foodies travelling in packs and clutching copies of their trusty Makansutra; I marvel at their energy as they scour the island, hunting down eateries in unfashionable districts that serve old-fashioned dishes (sweet-and sour pork, anyone?) in vast quantities and with tremendous verve. Sometimes, the locales are authentic, traffic-fumed lanes, but just as often they’re in sexy designer settings. 

The great culinary pendulum in Singapore seems to be swinging – away from the past decade’s mindless parroting of the latest fancy-schmancy food trends from Europe and America – toward our gastronomic past: the food of our childhood and further back. In other words, comfort food. 

Along the East Coast, True Blue Cuisine draws an enthusiastic crowd, with its painstakingly prepared versions of Peranakan favourites in a slick, Asian-inflected, colonial-Europe dining room. In the Orchard Road belt, hawker food is served in multimillion-dollar interiors like Straits Kitchen. In Outram Park, the Tiffin Club, a lunchtime service delivering Eurasian classics like stews, fish curries and pickled salads, does brisk business with the area’s stylish creative mavens. At places like Garuda Padang Cuisine and Sticky Rice, classic Indonesian and Thai cuisines, respectively, are being repackaged in swish dining rooms of blinding white Corian and lacquered red-wall panels. 

And the clientele? Not just our parents or grandparents, but a surprising number of the McDonald’s Generation: the cosmocrats who came into their gastronomic maturity in the ’80s and ’90s, and who can identify a bowl of Sevruga from across the room and still tell you where to find the best chicken rice in town. 

Oon is not surprised. Over a plate of soon kueh from her neighbourhood market, we talk about this morphing food scene – the emerging sense among the younger set that homegrown comfort food is something to celebrate and indulge. She uses, as an example, her son and his friends. ‘They have such developed taste buds and get all happy when they come across a braised teochew duck,’ she says. Just a few years ago, they wouldn’t have given this kind of food a second glance. 

And restaurants are responding. Three years ago this December, the Grand Hyatt unveiled its $15m Straits Kitchen, a slick steel-and-stone setting serving up what is essentially hawkerstall food. ‘At the time we opened, the focus [of Singaporean diners] was on fusion and French,’ says Suresh Govindasamy, the hotel’s assistant F&B director. ‘We wanted to bring simple, authentic local food into a five-star environment.’ There’s even a teh-tarik man, who used to ply his business in a hawker centre before the hotel lured him to its more salubrious setting. The gamble worked. No one seems fazed by the idea of paying $20-plus for chicken rice. Today, more than 80 per cent of the Straits Kitchen’s clientele are local, with a significant number Muslim – the restaurant is entirely halal. 

Andrew Tjioe, CEO of the Tung Lok group of restaurants, believes more Singaporean diners are looking for the casual local dining experience and are prepared to pay a little bit more. One of his latest offerings, Garuda, is a sleek, all white restaurant where diners feast on nasi padang at expensive Corian tables. What’s important, he says, is that ‘they want friendly food that is consistently good and simple’. 

Ajai Zecha raided his Eurasian family’s recipe books to create the Tiffin Club. Every lunchtime, his team delivers to offices dishes like beef daube, chicken stews, achar and Sri Lankan vegetable curries in glossy tiffin carriers – a nostalgic stunt if ever there was one. Zecha notes that regulars tend to order the same thing every time – the very concept of comfort food. ‘We’ve kept the menu simple and predictable. It’s very unpolished food,’ he admits. ‘A trained chef would be horrified.’ But not his loyal customers of architects, advertising Turks and graphic designers. 

And one of the latest additions to the dining scene is Cz’Zar, an upmarket restaurant in a shopping mall that serves, well, zhi-char. 

All this begs the question: why this shift from the fusion and foie-gras menus that dominated the late ’90s and early part of this decade to something as ‘mundane’ as zhi-char? There are people like Tjioe who prefer to see it not as a return to one’s roots, but as ‘a desire by the dining community to add diversity, to have a new dining experience’. But this may be too flippant an explanation. As Oon points out, fi ve years ago, fancy restaurants like Cz’Zar and Garuda selling hawker fare would not have been possible. Pay $20 to $40 a head for beef rendang and sayur lodeh? Not. 

‘The clientele of these places… these young people don’t take land transportation to see a friend, or to have a great meal,’ says Oon. ‘They hop on a plane. But the thing is, it’s not a put-on act. They don’t regard it as trying to be chic or trendy, that’s just how it is. But there comes a certain tipping point when it becomes important to them to be local about their food, and they get all sentimental for home cooking.’ 

And it’s precisely this sentimentality that appears to be fuelling what Oon hopes is an enduring interest in comfort food – whether it’s the humble teochew porridge, or a fish steamed in nothing more than chilli and assam. ‘For many young people, it’s often an epicurean revelation,’ she says. 

Similarly, food writer Amy Van thinks people will always be drawn to comfort food. She still remembers the amazing Peranakan and Eurasian food dished out by Damian D’Silva, an aeronautical engineer-turned-chef, at his now-closed restaurant Soul Kitchen, where she and her journalist and PR friends would gather for blow-out feasts. ‘After the hype of the latest food fad fizzles, we will always return to comforting, home-style cooking that we love and are familiar with,’ says Van. ‘But lately, I think we’re staying longer on each of these return trips. We’re really appreciating what we have in our backyard a lot more.’ 

‘There could be two scenarios here,’ says Katrina Karim, whose public relations company specialises in restaurants and food consultancy. ‘One is that we have grown so familiar with Western food, especially if you’ve lived overseas, so we miss Asian food and have a current craving for it. The second is that, at the end of the day, as Asians, we return to our roots, but want to dine in clean, cool comfort. We dress and spend better. We hold better jobs. So we don’t mind spending more and eating on nice tables and sitting on imported dining chairs, in air-conditioned dining rooms and be waited on by polite, trained waiters.’ 

Shermay Lee offers a more global perspective. A sixth-generation Peranakan, hers is the quintessential story of the returning diaspora. She studied political science at Brown University in the US and worked as an investment banker in Hong Kong and Singapore. Between deals, she trained at Le Cordon Bleu in London. 

‘When you spend a lot of time overseas, you become even more aware of your identity as a Singaporean and an Asian,’ she says. ‘What I find fantastic is that so many people are returning and bringing back the best of their overseas experiences. Working abroad, I missed home.’ Worse, she found that banking did not suit her personality. Eventually, she left the industry. ‘I had to invent my own path,’ she says. 

That path led her back to cooking, a passion she has had since first learning the basics from her late grandmother, Mrs Lee Chin Koon, an accomplished cook and the Minister Mentor’s mother. She opened a boutique cooking school in Holland Village and, in late 2003, edited and re-published, to much acclaim, her grandmother’s classic Mrs Lee’s Cookbook. In the process, she introduced, as did her grandmother before her, an entire generation of Singaporeans, expatriates and a fair number of tourists to home-cooked Peranakan cuisine, many of whom now crowd her cooking school. ‘Embedded in my grandmother’s text is our culinary and indigenous history,’ Lee says. 

Not surprisingly, Oon is happy that more young people are rediscovering their culinary heritage. ‘It’s an ongoing process,’ she says, stressing, as Lee does, the importance of preserving the food we and our parents grew up on. ‘We are such a young nation and, right from the beginning, have always been impressed by what’s happening overseas. But I think, as the years go on, we’re getting more confident in our own tastes, especially to honour the past. And in the process, this kind of food becomes chic.’ 

As I take my leave of Oon, I suddenly remember a conversation I had some years back with KF Seetoh, founding editor for Makansutra. He told me one of the reasons he was so passionate about his street-food bible was because he despaired for the state of taste buds in Singapore. ‘Our taste is less refined now,’ he said at the time. ‘We don’t have a reverence for our own food. We don’t celebrate it and the food culture doesn’t make you proud to cook. Food courts have made everything safe and clinical – they’ve taken the ‘cult’ out of food ‘culture’. They’ve killed something. Food is now just something that people put into their stomachs. I want to create a new platform for people to enjoy their meals, to help start new legends and new cults.’ 

We may not have fulfilled Seetoh’s gastronomic vision but, one meal, one Garuda, one Tiffin Club at a time, we’re getting there.

See also, 'Comfort food, Where to Eat', and 'Now you're cooking'.