SO LONG, SINGAPORE
West-end Ottawa restaurant closes this week, after 34 years
During a recent lunchtime at Singapore Restaurant in Ottawa’s west end, laksa was on the tables and on the minds of nearly everyone in the room.
With just a few exceptions, guests were digging into deceptively small but filling bowls of the esteemed Malaysian soup, which at Singapore consists of a heap of thin rice noodles, topped with curry-tinged chicken, shrimp and egg, in an intriguingly savoury broth.
What’s more, when a restaurant regular entered, he was quickly swapping ideas with another customer about how to duplicate Singapore’s most popular dish at home before he could order a bowl of it for himself.
“The onions ... do you cook them till they’re brown or just translucent?” the regular asked.
Owner Ah Bah Lim could only laugh. He had given those customers a few hints about making Singapore’s laksa at home, but never the complete recipe. “I say, ‘You go figure it out.’ ”
The Singapore’s laksa-ologists have just a few more days to do their research: the restaurant will close this Friday after 34 years in business. Lim, 69, and his wife, Hsiao Foo Huang, the restaurant’s chef, are retiring.
Singapore’s building on Kempster Avenue, which followed an earlier Singapore in a Carling Avenue strip mall near Richmond Road, has been sold by Lim, who is not sure what kind of restaurant will take his business’s place.
Lim and his wife opened the first Singapore in 1982, two years after they emigrated from Malaysia to Ottawa to join Huang’s relatives, who had already come here. Lim and Huang had degrees in commerce and chemistry, respectively, from the University of Otago in New Zealand.
But Lim, who had worked as an auditor in his homeland, did not want to work for someone else in Ottawa after his initial job here. During the early 1980s recession, Lim worked for 15 months on the night shift at a bakery, before he and his family decided to give running a restaurant a shot.
Lim says that he and his wife didn’t lack for kitchen skills even if they weren’t formally trained.
“We were always cooking,” he says, explaining that while in university they cooked Malaysian-themed dinners. “As a student, you have to learn to cook, anyway. It’s not that difficult.”
The restaurant drew a dedicated clientele over the years, with a virtually unchanged menu — not just for laksa at lunch, but for a range of Malaysian, Chinese and other dishes, including tamarind-based assam dishes, curry puffs, satay skewers, turmeric chicken, and sambal shrimps with mee hun noodles.
Although Ottawa’s Asian food scene has advanced in the decades since Singapore Restaurant opened, few Malaysian restaurants have followed in Lim’s footsteps.
Other well-educated Malaysians who came to Ottawa found company jobs as the economy improved, says Lim. “Why would they want to go and do a restaurant? It’s not that easy. It’s easier to work for people.”
Lim recalls one Malaysian restaurant that was open briefly in the 1990s in Chinatown.
“Their laksa was totally bad!” he says, contending that the chicken meat in the soup had been boiled to make broth, and thus rendered flavourless. “How the hell is it going to be good?”
The restaurant enabled Lim and Huang to pay for the post-secondary studies of their four children, who pitched in at the restaurant as soon as they were able. But none will take over the business.
In recent years, over four lunch and five dinner services a week, the Singapore has been just a threeperson operation — Lim, Huang and longtime server Andrew Fraser, who “eats laksa almost every day,” Lim says.
The lean staffing is “the reason we can sustain it here,” Lim says.
Business has dropped over the past five years, he says. People’s tastes have changed, Lim says, pointing to the proliferation of Thai restaurants in the city.
“You think they’re doing great? There’s too many of them,” he says.
In the old days, Singapore Restaurant was full every Friday with guests who dressed up for a night out, Lim says.
“People don’t dress up now. It’s changing,” he says.
But while fewer people are coming in to eat, the cost of running the restaurant has not dropped.
“City hall is killing us,” says Lim, citing his property tax bill.
He says that after he closes the restaurant, he will have more time to visit his children who live out of town, and to return to Malaysia, which he has not visited in more than a dozen years.
He says he has positive feelings about his restaurant career, and just one regret: that he didn’t make more friends outside of long hours at the eatery.
“All of my friends here are my customers,” he says. “It’s not like I can go dining with them or hang out or visit them.”
Or share that laksa recipe with them. He has entrusted the formulation to just one person, a nephew who has a restaurant in Toronto. That relative, he says, is the son of the couple who sponsored Lim and his wife to come to Canada. “How can I refuse him?” Lim says. Here are three recipes for Singapore dishes that Lim and his wife shared at the Citizen’s request more than 25 years ago. Sadly, none is for laksa.