Singapore, the food fan zone

The Singaporean scene is constantly reinventing itself, while preserving its fundamentals, in particular its hawker centers (street food markets) considered to be true national heritages. More and more chefs are coming from all over the world, attracted by the offers of hospitality groups, who are the real players on this scene. These chefs either work as consultants - attaching their names to restaurants whose kitchens they don't necessarily oversee - or decide to settle here for good, convinced by the quality of the offering and the clientele, the quality of life and also, most surprisingly, the quality of the ingredients! It's easy to imagine that everything you eat in Singapore is imported. This is indeed the case. But not necessarily from very far away, because in such a small country with marginal agriculture, the local corresponds in fact to the whole of Southeast Asia, and principally Malaysia, located some thirty kilometers away on the other side of the Straits of Johor. Although the Singaporean government's "30 by 30" plan aims to produce 30% of the island's nutritional requirements sustainably by 2030, this is still a long way off. On the other hand, this same government can be counted on to achieve its goals. The rigor and efficiency with which the country has been managed since its independence in 1965 bear witness to this. This is palpable throughout the city. Not only in its legendary cleanliness and safety, its manicured green spaces, its avant-garde architecture and its land reclaimed from the sea, but also in its public housing, where 78% of its inhabitants live: right from the country's creation, the government decided to allow the three main ethnic groups making up the population to live side by side: Chinese, Malays and Indians. This " mix " is essential to understanding the spirit of Singaporean cuisine. fifteen years ago, Singapore was heavily influenced by Western cuisines," explains Malcolm Lee, chef at Candelnut restaurant. In a way, it still is, because it's very open to foreign investors and anything that can make our country grow. Although the idea of cooking French cuisine had crossed my mind, I chose this profession for the tastes, aromas and memories of my family's cuisine. A Peranakan family. "A term which means " born here " and refers to the descendants of Chinese who, after crossing Indonesia, settled in the region in the 19th century and married Malaysian women. Malcolm Lee pays homage to his mother with typical Singaporean Peranakan recipes. my restaurant is a sanctuary for an endangered cuisine because it takes so much time to prepare," he continues. It takes two to three days to prepare a curry, and nobody has that kind of time any more. It's a skill my mother learned from my grandmother, but mainly because she didn't go to school. And in my family, I'm the only one who knows this cuisine. "

Gourmet street food

At Quenino, the name of head chef Sujatha Asokan hardly appears anywhere. Instead, it's that of Victor Liong, the Melbourne-based celebrity chef chosen by the Chinese Artyzen group to embody the restaurant at its Singapore hotel. Bolstered by a host of distinctions (" Top 5 Female Chefs in Singapore " and " Rising Chef of the Year " in 2019, " 50 Best Essence of Asia " in 2021), she applies her talent to a gastronomic menu drawing as much on French and Chinese techniques as on her origins. " My father is Indian, my mother Chinese. In our home, cooking was never entirely one or the other, but always a bit of both. I became interested in Spanish cuisine, and I traveled to Thailand and Vietnam. It was through a friend that I learned that Victor Liong was looking for someone to set up a refined Asian cuisine. I felt I'd ticked all the boxes. Here, I'm the one who makes things real. Victor has ideas that I transform into dishes. "While one of her flagship dishes is a simple - not so simple - fried rice inspired by Indonesian nasi ulam (a mixture of rice and aromatic herbs), her ambition is to take this cuisine towards gastronomic codes. " I have this constant worry about making dishes that would be too closely related to those of street food, sold for ten times less. At the same time, I don't want to stray from that either, because what I really want to do is cook the food of our region. "This balancing act is also reflected in his choice of ingredients. While his abalone comes from Australia, his caviar is produced in Malaysia. " You wouldn't think it possible to produce it there. I wouldn't say it's the best, but we have to support this producer so that he can improve. Plus, it's an interesting story to tell customers, who are very surprised to learn about it. "

Numerous urban farms

Julien Royer has been in Asia for fifteen years, and ten years since he opened Odette, his multi-award-winning gourmet restaurant in the heart of the National Gallery. Over the years, Julien Royer's undeniably French cuisine has been subtly tinged with Asian flavors. Lighter, punchier, spicier too, but always in a well-balanced, uncluttered way. When it comes to products, he doesn't shy away from anything, including importing them from France or Japan. However, he has succeeded in building up a network of small producers, most of them based in Malaysia. quality exists," he asserts. You just have to take the time to find it. A lot of people who used to farm intensively are going back to common sense. We work with farms in the Cameron Highlands, a high-altitude region where there are real temperature differences between day and night, which allows us to grow quality vegetables with exceptional nutrients. On the other hand, everything lemongrass, ginger, citrus, herbs and salads are grown here. "These products he, like many Singapore chefs, finds on urban farms like Edible Garden City, which supplies around 90 of the city's restaurants with herbs every week. Founded in 2012, the social enterprise operates two sites: one in the residential area of Queenstown, which also serves as an educational farm, the other on the roof of the Raffles City Shopping Center. Another part of the company's activities consists in setting up and cultivating vegetable gardens for others, such as the one at the top of the CapitaSpring skyscraper, which supplies the 1-Group restaurants located there. A production site as much as a place to visit, as many locals and tourists alike climb to the 51ᵉ floor free of charge and freely to stroll around and enjoy the spectacular views. " Certainly, thanks to this garden, in addition to the kitchens, we're feeding into the storytelling of the restaurants and different concepts we have here at CapitaSpring," says Christopher Millar, director of international business development at 1-Group. But we're also talking about Singapore's food heritage, with certain ingredients that have fallen into oblivion now growing around us again. This is useful in terms of educating young people, because in the urban jungle that is Singapore, they have no contact with agriculture. A showcase like this offers a different angle. However, it has to be useful and productive, otherwise it would be a very expensive decoration and not very interesting, really. "

A new generation of Singaporean chefs

In an ultra-competitive environment like Singapore's, everyone is looking for their own singularity, but also for a solid purpose that will allow them to endure. the wave of international chefs who put Singapore on the world gastronomic map is now being succeeded by a new generation of Singaporean chefs (whom customers like to see in the kitchen, rather than a name on a sign).here, as elsewhere, they are more inclined to offer casual, local cuisine rooted in reality, or rather in the island's cultural realities. what immediately appealed to me here was the emulation created by all these different ethnicities and religions living together without a care in the world," concludes Julien Royer. " We're really at a crossroads in Southeast Asia that everyone has crossed. And that creates, if you'll pardon the expression, an organized 'mess' of cultures, flavors and cuisines. It's all very exciting, but we mustn't rest on our laurels, because there are some great young chefs on the horizon. They've been in our kitchens, they've gone abroad to train, like Jimmy Lim from JL Studio in Taiwan or Kenneth Foong, who became head chef at the famous Danish restaurant Noma, and some of them are coming back. This desire to be enterprising, to do things well, is quite unique to this place. It's a flavor of Southeast Asia that's hard to describe, but it's there. There's an ambient electricity in this humidity and heat that creates constant excitement and renewal. "