Singapore restaurants reimagine grandma’s home cooking and revive lost dishes from Peranakan, or Straits Chinese, cuisine

Chefs in Singapore are mining the country’s culinary heritage in search of old recipes and dishes that were once commonly prepared at home or by food hawkers

Malcolm Lee at Pangium, Mel Dean at Permata and Damian D’Silva at Rempapa offer modern interpretations of Peranakan dishes from the islands of Southeast Asia

Reading Time:5 minutes

Dinner at Rempapa, a Singaporean restaurant. Chefs in the city state are rediscovering lesser known heritage dishes and showcasing them to a new generation of restaurant goers. Photo: Rempapa

Published: 7:15am, 20 Jul 2022

My first taste of ikan chuan chuan, a fish dish at newly opened contemporary Straits restaurant Pangium in Singapore, brings about a sudden jolt of nostalgia.

The flaky Glacier 51 toothfish, served with a sauce of Bentong ginger and taucheo – salted, fermented soy beans – reminds me of a much humbler version of the fried pomfret that my grandmother and mother used to cook when I was a child.

It is exactly the sort of reaction that chef-owner Malcolm Lee – whose other restaurant is the one-Michelin-star Peranakan establishment Candlenut – hopes to evoke in diners.

Peranakan cuisine combines Chinese, Eurasian, Indian and Southeast Asian ingredients and cooking methods. “I am a Singapore-born Peranakan, so I grew up enjoying Peranakan home cooking along with Cantonese and Hokkien dishes that were part of my mother’s repertoire,” says Lee.

“With this dish, the question I had was: ‘Why don’t people prepare this at home any more?’”

The ethos of Pangium’s cuisine is to showcase the food “our grandmothers and grandfathers first created with the knowledge, ingredients and tools they had at hand, reimagined for our lives today”, Lee adds.