San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Singing the praises of Singapore
Chefs create their own Bay Area comfort zone of laksa and sambal
Bay Area welcomes burgeoning food scene.
For a very long time, it was hard to find any sort of Singaporean food in the Bay Area, though one would think the multicultural cuisine would fit very well here. Imagine a Dungeness crab, hacked into pieces and tossed in a wok with aromatics and thick chile sauce; skate wings slathered with sambal, wrapped in banana leaf and barbecued over hot charcoal; and casual, Singaporestyle cafes where you can get specialty coffee and thick toast topped with coconut jam.
That was all a futile dream, until now. The Bay Area has a burgeoning Singaporean food scene that has popped up during shelter in place: one where gourmands can wax poetic about their favorite versions of laksa or Hainanese chicken rice just as easily as they can name their can’tmiss dim sum or pizza joints. New businesses like Dabao and Makan Place have emerged in recent months; on top of that, established Singaporean chefs like Nora Haron and Marie Chia have been slowly cranking up the cultural influence in their own cooking, hooking their loyal followings on newer, bigger flavors.
“It’s wild that we can talk about a microSingaporean food movement in the Bay,” said Chia, a Singapore native and coowner of the 7yearold S+M Vegan popup in Oakland. Chia and partner Shane Stanbridge have become known for their skillful blending of their respective roots in Singaporean and CalifornianItalian cuisine.
Singapore’s polyglot food culture, informed by the ebbs and flows of immigration, trade with its Southeast Asian neighbors and occupation by Japan and the British Empire, is hard to define and even more impossible to contain within one restaurant. To truly experience it, you need to try a lot of it. Its famous hawker centres are cities in themselves, where rows upon rows of vendors sell a mindmelting variety of dishes: from fish head curry to wonton noodle soup.
Though Singaporean food is one of the citystate’s international calling cards, Chia wasn’t sure it would go over well here when she and Stanbridge started in 2013, given its relative absence in the food scene. Nobody seemed to know or care about Singaporean cuisine out here, so introducing something so different when they were just starting out felt like a huge risk. Success would mean swallowing her pride and doing what everyone else was doing.
So when she and Stanbridge launched their popup and catering company, they stuck to making vegan po’boys, tacos and Italian food.
“It didn’t occur to me that I could cook my own food yet,” she said. “A lot of people had no idea what Singapore was, what it meant.” On top of that, their food was already on the fringes by virtue of being vegan. “It felt like, are we just pushing it too far?”
In her time working as a culinary operations manager for Blue Bottle in 201516, Haron, who is Indonesian and Indian and grew up in Singapore, faced a similar hesitation, though external. Asked to pair dishes to the company’s coffees, which are sourced from around the world, she was inspired to bring in culinary influences from Indonesia and Singapore but said she was told that her food was too “ethnic.”
“Whoa, that set off the
TNT in me,” she said.
So after Blue Bottle, she went hard on those flavors at Drip Line, the cafe she ran in West Oakland. “It was all me!” she said. Haron sauced breakfast sandwiches with molasseslike kecap manis, served sweet potato fries with sambal mixed with aioli, and dressed farro, asparagus and golden beets with peanut sauce in her gado gado salad. “My mother would shake her head,” Haron said with a laugh. “Even if it’s modern, Cali, progressive — the flavors are still home.”
At her new gig at San Francisco’s Local Kitchen, Haron transformed the cuisine, gradually replacing the restaurant’s menu of Italian pastas and pizzas with laksa, chicken curry and tempeh dishes. Haron said, “I wanted to start really slow and build the spice level up: make it craveable and get people hooked.”
While furloughed from Local Kitchen recently, Haron spent a few weeks operating a Singaporean popup at Tay Ho in Oakland. Its success has only affirmed her decision to shift Local Kitchen’s menu to Singaporean fare. Now, she and her partners are looking at opening another Singaporeaninspired restaurant in Oakland. What happened along the way is Haron’s laksa and Chia’s sambal dishes became a beacon for the Bay Area’s Singaporean community. Immigrants and their families would show up in droves, thrilled to experience a taste of home.
“We suddenly realized that there were a bunch of Singaporeans in the Bay Area!” said Chia. “They were so excited and supportive — it was amazing when I never had really known many since leaving.”
The 2010 U.S. Census recorded just over 600 individuals with Singaporean ancestry in the Bay Area, making it the highest concentration in the country. Many are in whitecollar or tech jobs, craving dishes from home but with little interest in starting restaurants of their own.
“There aren’t a lot who would want to do cheftype things,” said Em, who cofounded the Dabao Singapore popup with pastry chef Erika. (The chefs asked that we don’t use their last names because they are concerned about the status of their immigration visas.) The two are childhood friends who both came to the Bay Area from Singapore to cook at restaurants. Unsatisfied with the available offerings and unable to go out to eat much on a cook’s wages, they spent their free time recreating the flavors of home in their apartment kitchens, relying on sense memory alone.
“I was obsessed with making noodles every day lah,” said Em. Even now, the two women speak in a distinct Singlish dialect and tend to punctuate with that exclamation.
Both had their hours essentially eliminated during the pandemic, which inspired them to turn their hobby into a business. Angelina Teo and Shanna Vatsaloo, cofounders of Makan Place in San Francisco, went through the same thing. In another serendipitous series of twists, all of the people involved in these two new postcoronavirus operations attended the Culinary Institute of America in Singapore before coming to the Bay Area, and they all work for the same restaurant group.
“One door closes ... and a window of opportunity opens!” Em and Erika wrote in Dabao Singapore’s first Instagram post. Since March 20, they have been rolling out weekly menus, with Em taking on the savory items and Erika tackling desserts. “With shelter in place, it was an opportunity to break off from what’s safe: It was our dream to do hawker food,” said Em.
Though trained in Europeanstyle patisserie, Erika’s approach to dessert is a skillful representation of the diversity of Singapore’s cuisine, based on her grandmother’s recipes: You might see a colorful coconut milk dessert loaded with chopped fresh fruits, black eyed peas and tapioca jelly one week, then Teochewstyle steamed taro with candied gingko nuts the next. A tart and sweet mango sago dessert with an elegant sprinkle of fresh pomelo pulp seems straight out of a Hong Kong dim sum restaurant. Back home, the market was saturated with this kind of food; but here, her work can stand out.
Em and Erika’s peers, Teo and Vatsaloo, had the same idea with Makan Place. Like many restaurant workers who had been furloughed or laid off during the pandemic, they spent their newfound downtime dreaming up ways to keep cooking for their community. And like many people in general, they were craving comfort food. So they started testing recipes at home and began taking orders over Instagram.
The response has been overwhelming, Teo said. After the business was featured on Eater, she now fields hundreds of requests for orders a day from an enthusiastic public.
With a concept aimed at homesick Singaporeans like themselves, Teo and Vatsaloo felt no reason to change their recipes to fit local tastes. Indeed, the first time I had it, their Katong laksa was unlike any I’d had in the States: The pure seafood aroma of the gorgeous, prawninfused coconut gravy was like an exhalation of ocean air, and the bean sproutsize rice noodles were so much fun to eat. It was transportive. I confess that I spent the first minute or so just breathing in the scent of the bowl.
The Makan team is speaking with their lawyers in the hope of reconfiguring their immigration visas in order to make this vision a reality. Em and Erika are also working on formalizing their business, in the form of a deliveryonly ghost kitchen.
“The goal of our dishes is to send that person straight home. When clients say, ‘Oh my god, this reminds me of how my mom cooks it,’ it feels good lah,” said Em.
She’s encouraged by the response she and Erika have gotten in the Bay Area and says they’ve felt what Singaporeans call kampong spirit — a strong sense of communality and mutual support.
“What I do think is cool about it is to my knowledge, it’s mostly womenled,” said Chia. “Women from Singapore who are really proud of their heritage, representing the bold, funky flavors that characterize Singaporean food.” And, she added, it’s great that these women of different ethnic backgrounds — Indonesian, Chinese, Malay — also represent the diversity of the people of Singapore.
As far as Haron is concerned, this day has been a long time coming. “There’s demand now — people know how to eat this food,” Haron said. “That’s been my mission all along, to push for awareness. Eight years later, people are eating this food.”