Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

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Winging It: An Easy Chicken Stew


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My mother will be the first to tell you that she is not a cook. 

(Even though she is. Sort of.)

In my family’s Singapore home, however, it is our maid Erlinda who does the magic in the kitchen most days. Her dishes are typically simple, delicious and never fail to hit the spot.

Like many good home cooks, improvisation has been the mother of many of Erlinda’s inventions. One of my favorite dishes is a super-easy chicken-wing stew that she first tossed together while thinking of the adobos she grew up eating in her hometown of Baguio in the Phillippines.

The stew she makes here, however, is quite different because my mother typically doesn’t stock vinegar in her kitchen. Instead, dark, sweet soy sauce is the main ingredient — but the result can be just as satisfying.

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Fifty Three: The Young And The Creative


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Singapore can be such a by-the-book place that when you come across something truly creative, you can’t help but stop for a moment to marvel and think: This must be applauded.

Dinner at Fifty Three, a fairly new addition to the Singapore dining scene, is filled with moments such as these. From the amuse bouche of a crispy potato chip dusted with sour yogurt powder to the inventive finale of a melt-in-your-mouth gin and tonic gummy candy, the restaurant had me enthralled through and through.

Chef Michael Han, a former lawyer turned chef who’s an alum of the Fat Duck in the U.K. and Noma in Denmark, may only be in his early 30s but his hand is sure, his vision is appealingly playful and his dishes will remain with you long after you’ve left.

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Mooncakes: The Taste of Sweet Rebellion


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You know you’re walking into a hardcore kitchen when the first thing you see is stacks upon stacks of boxes filled with gorgeous home-made mooncakes.

The women on my Dad’s side of the family in Singapore — they’re fearless cooks.

Pineapple tarts, bak-zhang (glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves), black vinegar-braised pig’s trotters? They could whip those together with their eyes closed.

Recently, however, the task at hand was Chinese mooncakes, eaten to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls this Saturday.

Now, there are a few old stories that explain the reason for eating these little cakes, which usually are filled with sweet lotus-seed paste and come either with a thin, baked crust or a soft, pliant dough skin that’s scented with pandan, a vanilla-like flavoring used in many Southeast Asian desserts. My favorite is the one of Ming revolutionaries planning to overthrow the Mongolian rulers of China during the Yuan dynasty and spreading word via letters baked into mooncakes. (Julia Child would’ve been so proud!)

During my Singaporean girlhood, I’d known the stories, I’d eaten the cakes. As for making them? That seemed so laughably difficult it never once crossed my mind.

It turns out, however, they’re incredibly easy to make — you just need the right teachers.

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Daniel Boulud on Beijing, Lotus Leaves & Duck A La Presse


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Daniel Boulud may like the potential of doing business in Beijing, but that doesn’t mean he likes Beijing.

Speaking via Skype to a small audience in Singapore Tuesday night from his home in New York City, where he was just getting his day started, Boulud was surprisingly candid about his thoughts on Beijing for a man who’d recently opened a restaurant in China’s capital. (Maison Boulud à Pékin opened in July, 2008.)

Boulud, who was dialling in to kick off the premiere of a reality TV-style show he’d done for the Asian Food Channel, recalled how he had flown to Singapore from Beijing during his trip last year.

“Coming from Beijing, I tell you, Singapore felt good — Singapore was a little more civilized,” he said, noting that one of the first things he did after getting off the plane was get a haircut. “I didn’t trust anyone in Beijing to cut my hair.”

Boulud, dressed in his chef’s whites and flanked with a portrait of himself hoisting a glass, then breezed on to close with a nugget, noting that he hoped to open a restaurant in Singapore. (A public relations person for Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands Resort & Casino was perched in the audience. Singapore’s first casinos, which are still under construction, have been courting high-end chefs to open in their establishments.)

Such frankness, unfortunately, was a little less apparent in the reality show, “One Night in Singapore — Daniel Boulud,” which chronicled the chef’s first trip to Singapore and his process of putting together a seven-course meal for a group of 50 diners.

The intention to showcase tension is there, of course — the show kicks off with a dramatic voiceover heavy with Discovery Channel gravitas that notes the obstacles Boulud has to overcome to make his dinner a success: “high humidity … a kitchen that is too far removed from the main dining area.” But Boulud is too skilled a chef for much of that to be believable.

Let’s face it, the man could probably toss together a seven-course meal with little problem if he were air-dropped into the middle of a desert and had one hand tied behind his back.

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Sin Huat Eating House: A Red-Light Special


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To say that the prospects of having a good meal at Sin Huat Eating House seemed dim when we first arrived would be quite an understatement.

For starters, it was hard find the place. Located in a desolate corner of Geylang, Singapore‘s big red-light district, this restaurant situated in an open-air coffeeshop was so dark that it blended right into the furtive blackness of its block. On top of that, every so often, its few fluorescent lights would flicker and go out for several seconds.

Then, there was the row of grimy, green fishtanks displayed front and center. And the sweaty cooks who would emerge now and then to reach into these fishtanks up to their arm-pits in order to scoop out shellfish whenever someone placed an order.

This was the place that Anthony Bourdain had included on his list of “13 Places To Eat Before You Die” for Men’s Health magazine?

In all my years of eating around Asia, however, I’ve come to learn that it’s usually the least appetizing-looking places that create the most memorable dishes. And in Singapore, some of the best places to eat are to be found in the seediest of neighborhoods. (In a travel story I did for the Washington Post this weekend, I list a number of mind-blowing places to check out in Singapore’s red-light districts. These would be places to eat. Food, that is.)

And Sin Huat, once you get past its stomach-churning trappings, definitely fits this bill.

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