Home Kitchen Cooks Up Satisfyingly Hearty Family Drama

There is a clever Chinese pun in the title of local group Nine Years Theatre's latest production which gets lost in translation into the rather pedestrian English Home Kitchen.

- Ong Sor Fern

The Chinese characters at first glance tell the story of the play – succession in a family restaurant business. But the homonyms are the words for add, subtract, multiply and divide, which signal the deeper themes in writer-director Nelson Chia's beautifully observed script, delving into everything from parent-child dynamics to the tension between heritage and modernity.

The premise is simple. Da Jin (a finely nuanced Rei Poh) is the patriarch running traditional Teochew restaurant Jin Xiang Yuan. Ren (Joel Tan), his youngest child, has returned to Singapore from Paris where he is working as a sous chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant because his mother Yoke Kum (Jodi Chan) is celebrating a milestone birthday and worried about Da Jin's health.

The rift between father and son propels the narrative – will they or won't they reconcile, and will Ren take over the 65-year-old family restaurant that is Da Jin's pride and joy?

It is easy to belittle the modest focus of Home Kitchen, commissioned by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre for its annual Cultural Extravaganza festival. Summed up thus, the story sounds suspiciously like a typical Channel 8 melodrama.