Dishes from Singapore's Candlenut, the world's first Michelin-starred Peranakan restaurant. Photo / Candlenut and Como Dempsey
With Singapore about to host the 'Oscars of food', Mary Lussiana takes a culinary tour.
'Things I ATE in Singapore," the orange lettering on the postcard announced. Underneath, dishes had been sketched in blue and orange with their names curled around them in complicated script. There was durian fruit, famous for its repugnant smell and banned on Singapore's public transport — although sufficiently loved to be the nickname given to the Esplanade performing arts centre, a landmark whose silver spiked domes are considered to resemble Singapore's national fruit.
Then there was satay, a Malay and Indonesian dish — meat skewered in kebab fashion with a little pot of spicy peanut sauce next to it. Another sketch depicted chilli crab, a signature dish of Singapore made from mud crabs stir-fried in a thick tomato and chilli sauce. And there were a further nine dishes, as yet unknown to me, but clearly deemed worth sharing with the world.
The postcard was the first thing I saw in the bookshop across the road from my hotel, evidence that I had come to the right city — food-obsessed Singapore, where even stalls selling street food were awarded stars in Michelin's first Singapore guide in 2016.
The World's 50 Best Restaurants awards ceremony will be held here for the next three years, the first occasion being this Tuesday, June 25. Then, in 2021, Singapore will host the World's 50 Best Bars awards — the first city outside London to do so. That choice reflects Singapore's growing reputation as a premium cocktail destination, with an abundance of exceptional bars. These range from the glittering art-deco Atlas, with its soaring three-storey gin tower (ranked No 8 in last year's World's 50 Best Bars listing) to the dimly lit, speakeasy dive Operation Dagger (ranked 23rd) and the softly seductive Manhattan (placed third among the World's 50 Best, and ranked No 2 in the whole of Asia). Its New York Sours alone are well worth the journey.
Why all this culinary diversity and cocktail creativity? Positioned at the crossroads of Southeast Asia, Singapore has taken all the different ethnic threads that have converged here over the years and woven them into a rich national tapestry.
Street food is a good place to start — and proof that eating well in Singapore can be done cheaply. Stalls that were originally on the streets were moved by the government into air-conditioned "hawker centres" in the 1970s. Michelin-starred stalls sell chicken rice and noodles with pork for the astonishing sum of just two Singapore dollars ($2.25) ****START CUT HERE FOR PRINT****, but I wanted to sample food from the one remaining street market.
Lau Pa Sat dates from the 19th century and, despite restorations and relocations, has retained its elegant Victorian columns and arches. On my first morning I was pulled in all directions by smells savoury and sweet (especially that of laksa — noodles with prawns in a coconut broth, which I tried later at 328 Katong Laksa. In the end I was won over by the tempting aroma of fresh roti prata, a traditional breakfast dish of Indian flatbread with curry, typically accompanied by teh tarik — "pulled" tea which is poured from cup to cup and flavoured with ginger and condensed milk.
Also popular for breakfast is kaya, a sweet jam made from eggs, coconut milk and sugar, infused with the fragrant pandan leaf. It is used as a filling in fresh white rolls, often grilled over charcoal. However, my favourite breakfast dish was chwee kueh, steamed rice-flour cakes filled with chives or preserved radish together with pork, garlic and chilli. I tried them at Kim Choo Kueh Chang in the Joo Chiat district. They were melt-in-the-mouth delicious.*****END CUT HERE FOR PRINT*****
You might think that the hawker food markets (open 24 hours a day) and the fine dining scene are two separate worlds, but they interact in a way that is crucial to Singapore's culinary success. "Three or four times a week we go out as a team and chat over supper once the service is finished," said Steven Mason, general manager at Odette, one of Singapore's acclaimed restaurants. "There is nowhere else in the world you can find places still open for a community of chefs once their restaurants have closed. It bonds us together as members of the food industry, which attracts 30 per cent of our tourism."
Odette — an essay in elegant femininity, with dishes that dazzle and dangling decor that dances on the brisk breeze of the service — is the leader of the 39-strong Michelin pack in Singapore. It is ranked No 1 in the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants listing and No 28 in the World's 50 Best. Among its specialities are Hokkaido uni — a dish of spot prawn tartare, mussel cloud and Royal Schrenski caviar — and pigeon "beak to tail" served with Jerusalem artichoke, Kampot pepper and black garlic. Both were exquisite representations of classic French cooking with Asian accents, a style perfected by French chef and co-owner Julien Royer, who told me how inspiring it is to work in Singapore right now.
"The logistics are superb," he said, "with deliveries every day from Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and four times a week from Europe. Vegetables, on which there is a growing focus, are sourced from around us in Southeast Asia. We have the world on our doorstep. That, combined with Singapore's variety of religions, nationalities and cuisines and an increasingly sophisticated public, produces an inspirational mix."
Similarly inspirational is Singaporean chef Malcolm Lee at Candlenut, the world's first Michelin-starred Peranakan restaurant. Peranakan is the name given to the early immigrants from the Straits who settled in Singapore, many of whom were Chinese. They had their own clothes, customs and food, which Lee remembers from his childhood, having watched his mother and grandmother cook.
"Peranakan cuisine is an amalgamation of the ethnic cultures of the Chinese, the Malays and the Indonesians, for whom communal-style dining is a tradition," Lee told me over a velvety rich dish of braised chicken with buah keluak (a raw seed, cured, which along with candlenuts is a key ingredient in his kitchen) and black nut sambal. Intense flavours of tamarind, turmeric, chilli and lime leaf are the props for Lee's contemporary take on his grandmother's cooking. His beautifully balanced finale, resembling a panna cotta, was Candlenut's classic chendol cream, fragrant with pandan jelly and gula melaka, the local palm sugar.
Janice Wong has built her success on desserts and chocolates. Indeed, using this formula (in the form of her fun chocolate crayons), she recently opened a concession at Harrods in London. Her outlets in Singapore include the restaurant at the National Museum, where I had lunch. The dessert menu is divided into classics and contemporary dishes, all with suggested pairings with wine or sparkling sake. Before I even got to the cassis plum bombe with elderflower yogurt foam and yuzu pearls, I swooned at the taste of the chilli crab radish puff, the chicken chilli oil wonton and the scallop somen with salmon eggs and tiny shrimps.
Wong is clearly a perfectionist but one with a sense of fun. She loves to create edible art installations, and joyful is the word that sums up her vibrantly coloured chocolates, many of which draw on local flavours such as gingerflower, laksa leaf and lemon grass. "Play," she told me "is an important part of my food."
Similarly playful is the signature dish of chef Jason Tan at his Corner House restaurant. A late convert to vegetables, he champions them on his "gastro-botanica" menu. In an early 20th-century house set within the Botanic Gardens, Tan rolled out delicacy after delicacy. His signature "interpretation of my favourite vegetable" was a homage to the Cevennes onion, served baked and filled with onion puree and truffle, as a tart, as a crisp and as a tea.
With botanicals on my mind, I finished my gourmet gallop at Native. Founded by Vijay Mudaliar, it was ranked 13th in the World's 50 Best Bars 2018 listing and is committed to using only locally foraged ingredients in its cocktails. For me, this meant grasshoppers which had been fermented for two weeks, muddled with lemon grass, Thai basil, coconut ice cream and rum.
By the end of my time in Singapore, I hadn't tried everything on that postcard — but after downing the (surprisingly delicious) Grasshopper, I had total clarity as to why the World's 50 Best are Singapore-bound.