Asia Major

Call it a longing for nostalgic flavours or a greater recognition for home-grown talents, modern Southeast Asian cuisine looks set to be more than a flash in the pan.

- Leena NG

A fascination with our diverse cultures and how this has stirred our cuisines, as well as our food definitions and preparations are just some of the starting points for the bevy of inquisitive chefs who are driving an evolution of Southeast Asian cuisines. Their aim for thrusting new representations of Singaporean, Filipino, Malaysian or Thai fare to the aces is not so much about shunning their respective native cookery, but rather a way of trickling down respect to its very roots.

To set themselves apart, there are many restaurants that offer deconstructed classics and reimagined staples done "differently" occasionally with mixed results. It’s difficult to strike a balance between the homespun and the out-of-the-box. But it takes places at the establishments profiled in this story, run by people who dare to be inventive with their traditional food without losing sight of the familiar flavours we crave.

These chefs take the conventional and make it confounding, achieving a fine balance that can so easily tip to campy. In their clever hands, they have successfully spun a neo-cuisine that has international foodies talking.

Sin(ful) Appeal 

Restaurateur and self-taught chef Shen Tan is a true trailblazer and paragon of following your passion. Ditching her career in marketing during the global financial crisis of 2008, she turned to her love for cooking and opened up a hawker food stall at Maxwell Centre despite not having a real clue about the food business. But Tan was set on a mission— to update Singaporean cuisine for the 21st century.