Why some chefs are embracing inauthenticity

SINGAPORE – Try searching for a place to eat in Singapore and you will likely find yourself bombarded by this term.

It is everywhere, claimed by everyone, from your neighbourhood zi char joint to wood-panelled Italian restaurants in the centre of this South-east Asian city. 

In Singapore’s culinary landscape, few descriptors are sprinkled as liberally as the term “authentic”.

In fact, it is so ubiquitous that the Republic was named the world’s 15th most authentic food destination by travel insurance company InsureandGo in a report that trawled through more than one million Google Maps reviews of restaurants, cafes and bars in some 140 cities. They were then ranked according to how often food spots feel rooted in local culture. 

But what does authenticity really mean? Why does it continue to compel? And why, despite its powers of persuasion, have some Singaporean chefs decided that this concept no longer has a place in their kitchens? 

What is authentic food?

Typically used as a shorthand for time-honoured quality, authenticity is a term beloved by restaurants and food reviewers alike.

According to Associate Professor Lau Kong Cheen, head of Singapore University of Social Sciences’ marketing programme, there are several ways to back this claim up.

Restaurants might play up their historical origins, the faithfulness of their methods or the indigeneity of their ingredients. They might also employ effective interior design to transport diners to a different place or time. 

To understand its enduring appeal, one needs to look at food as a cultural product, says Dr Seshan Ramaswami, associate professor of marketing (education) at the Singapore Management University. 

“In partaking of that food, the consumer is experiencing a slice of history. That is always valuable for cultural products – clothes, food, the arts,” he adds.

“So, claims of authenticity will always be resonant in this category, not just as a temporary fad. This is especially so in Singapore, where restaurants from multiple cultures, local and international, jostle against one another in a very crowded and competitive market.” 

Besides, by accessing this “real and unfiltered” slice of tradition, diners get the chance to augment their cultural capital, points out Prof Lau. “These diners would be able to signal that they are ‘cultured’ enough to appreciate authentic cuisines. It is another means to convey bragging rights that one is a connoisseur of food,” he says.

The more niche the craft, the more impressive the claim. So, Mr Lee Yum Hwa, a self-taught pastaio, might be justifiably confident in touting the artisanality of his offerings. 

He runs Ben Fatto 95, a private-dining experience in Paya Lebar centred on pasta – and by pasta, he means first and foremost the dough, its shape and texture and bite. “Pasta, the protagonist. Sauce, if necessary”, goes his tagline. 

Few Singaporeans will recognise the pasta he serves. Forget linguine and rigatoni, or even bucatini and mafaldine. Ever heard of Trofie di recco? Lo strichetto? Su filindeu? 

These obscure Italian traditions took years of practice. Traditional recipes formed the bedrock of his training, and he refined his skills in the kitchens of Italian chefs and home cooks, based as far away as the hills of Abruzzo. Each pasta shape can take weeks or months to grasp. Some, he says, are an ongoing process. 

While he does not consider himself a master, he is certainly proficient and faithful to custom. He even has an official seal of approval to prove it: a temple from the Accademia Italiana Della Cucina, an institution that aims to safeguard Italian culinary traditions. It uses a system of one to four temples to grade the quality of Italian food around the world, a la the Michelin guide. 

“Authenticity forms the blueprint of what I do,” says the 44-year-old self-taught chef, who charges $1,980 for a table of 10. “The whole reason I went into this is because you don’t really see authentic handmade pastas in Singapore. It’s always about the sauce in most restaurants here. But for me, the real engine of the dish is texture. You need to know how to apply traditional techniques to get the perfect texture.” 

One might ask why a Singaporean chef would choose to dedicate his career to preserving the traditions of a country he first visited in his 30s. But one look at his home – a red-brick semi-detached designed by his parents, complete with Florentine arches and olive trees – and his affinity for the Mediterranean becomes abundantly clear. 

For him, this endeavour is a pursuit of both craft and culture. “I love Italian culture. I’ve visited its iconic places and driven across the country. So, when I make pasta, in a way, it brings me back to my travels.” 

There is an argument to be made for the importance of preserving these fading traditions, especially in a rapidly evolving world where trends are short and memories shorter still.

It is for this reason that Ms Emily Yeo and Ms Yeo Min founded Museum of Food, a roving initiative that has taken upon itself the duty of preserving Singapore’s culinary heritage. 

They organise workshops, costing around $50 each, where participants gather to make kueh, yong tau foo, achar and other classic Singaporean dishes. Wherever they go, they cart along a mobile museum of old-school kitchen tools and utensils. The plan is to eventually open a permanent space, where they can host regular workshops and work more closely with schools. 

“It’s not just about the past. We preserve the past, nurture the present generation and inspire the future of Singapore’s cooks,” says Ms Yeo Min, 30, a pastry chef and author of Chinese Pastry School, a book on Chinese desserts published in 2023.

The recipes they use are gleaned from archival materials and interviews conducted with seniors – an oft-overlooked resource that the pair call their “human library”. 

“There’s better effort and acknowledgement now that we’re on the brink of losing many of these recipes, so there’s a little more urgency now,” says Ms Emily Yeo, 39, an educator and author of 2022 cookbook, The Little Book Of Singapore Food Illustrated.

“People often say that Singapore is a melting pot with nothing to call our own, but there’s so much more than meets the eye. We want to pique interest in our food and give it the spotlight it deserves.” 

To Ms Yeo Min, this feels like a reasonable ask. “It’s clear that Singaporeans have the capacity to learn about our food. It’s just that we never quite bother to. Most of us know the names of various types of sashimi, but how many young people can name the types of fish at the wet market?” 

The issue with authenticity

But would they describe their work as authentic? They are undoubtedly dabbling in tradition, yet they flinch at the term. 

“It’s something we strive for, but we don’t market our things as authentic because it’s just too loaded,” says Ms Yeo Min. It implies the existence of a “true” version of a particular dish, but in reality, such singularity rarely exists. 

“When we interview seniors, everyone has a different way of preparing a certain dish that is authentic to them. The other day, we had two ah mas who almost fought over which brand of soya sauce to use for lor bak (braised pork). But they were talking about the same dish.” 

Ms Emily Yeo adds: “It’s important to know where we came from, but where we came from might be very different.” 

So, while attendees are presented with traditional recipes, they are also invited to share their own memories of how certain dishes were made. Plus, the duo make it a point to highlight the variations of a particular dish, delving into how it evolved in different communities. 

While Ms Yeo Min and Ms Emily Yeo hold the concept of authenticity with wary reverence, chef Bjorn Shen disavows it completely.

“I’ll never make authentic food,” says the 44-year-old chef behind pizza parlour Artichoke – formerly the “least Middle Eastern Middle Eastern restaurant” – and the new 10-seater Jellyfish Sushi, which serves raw fish on bread rather than rice. “Even if I were to make something traditional by sticking with the recipe, I know that everyone has a different perception of what’s authentic.” 

He was once confronted by a guest at an event in the Philippines. The guest said chef Shen’s chilli crab was not sweet enough and was therefore inauthentic, even though the decision to add more sambal was a deliberate choice, inspired by the versions chef Shen preferred. 

Culinarily speaking, the term is futile to him. “Maybe ‘authenticity’ is just people trying to sell a product. So, it’s marketeers who are now drawing a line in the sand. But what business do marketeers and stakeholders have deciding what’s authentic and what’s not? It’s a term that’s been abused too much.” 

A descriptor this loaded can also become a burden. It shackles restaurants to a certain method of preparation that is faithful to the past and the memories of its diners.

Prof Lau says: “On this premise, it gives a restaurant less space to experiment and be creative and introduce new dishes that may deviate from their roots.” 

And authenticity does not just extend to food. Sometimes, diners come to expect “authentic” – or low – prices too. This can be especially limiting for chefs of minority communities.

A 2019 report from US food website Eater studying 20,000 Yelp reviewers found that reviewers associated “authenticity” at non-European restaurants with dirt floors, plastic stools and kitschy decor. In contrast, an authentic European meal, to these reviewers, was a far more positive experience, trimmed with “old elegance” and “fresh flowers”. 

Misconceptions about the value of South-east Asian food plague even chefs in the region. Take, for instance, private chef Ilya Nur Fadhly, who runs Sudu by Ilya, a private-dining experience in Marsiling.

The 41-year-old MasterChef Singapore alumnus specialises in reinterpreted Malay food. His satay, for example, is accompanied by a pine nut and cashew sauce, while his paceri – a tangy relish – is served with granita and torched scallops. 

While he wants to honour his culture, he cannot afford to stick strictly to familiar recipes. “If not, people will compare,” he says. “They’ll ask: ‘Why am I paying this much for this kind of food, when I can spend much less for something similar at a hawker centre?’” 

Authenticity, then, is only part of his goal. His objective is twofold – to introduce diners of other races to the breadth of Malay cooking, and to test the limits of tradition. To convince guests to fork out $140 for the meal, he offers a full cultural immersion: a nine-course meal crafted around Malay folktales and set to traditional tunes with a modern lilt. 

“I want to show Malay guests what I can do with Malay food because, sometimes, we tend to be more protective of our own food. I know because I used to be like that,” he admits. “I’d see something that I thought wasn’t authentic and scoff. But eventually, I want to make Malay food known to the world, and to do that, I have to introduce it to a different market.”

Keeping it real

Over in Keong Saik Road, Maggie’s bistro is dressed up like a cross between a 1970s movie set and a hoarder auntie’s living room. It is unapologetically fussy in a charming, even familiar, way, with glass chandeliers and floral couches. 

The food, however, takes a sharp detour off the beaten path of Chinese convention. For instance, its version of you tiao, served with stracciatella, smoked olive oil and black bean chilli relish ($23++); or its roasted black pomfret (from $36++), which sounds familiar enough, until you get a lick of the green peppercorn salsa verde.

In other words, food that is “absolutely nothing like your grandma’s cooking (unless she had a wild streak and a taste for chaos)”, as its website reads. 

Such is the experience to be had at Maggie’s, a year-old bistro that prides itself on being the “least authentic Chinese restaurant in town”. To a generation that grew up on MasterChef and YouTube, that has feasted on a buffet of influences from all around the world, this is what gastronomic authenticity looks like instead. 

“We knew from the start that we wanted to bend some rules, borrow from tradition but ultimately do something that felt honest to our experiences here and abroad, rather than recreate a particular region or era perfectly,” says Mr Ryan Nile Choo, 35, chef-partner of Maggie’s. Born to a Chinese father and Filipino mother, he was raised on a cross-cultural diet and trained in restaurants such as Maven in San Francisco. 

Mr Goh Tong Hann, 32, founder of PleasureCraft Group, which runs Maggie’s, adds: “We felt there was a bit of a gap in the market in terms of being able to have fun with things that are familiar, but also new. We envisioned a place where you could go for a night out with friends.”

As most Chinese restaurants in Singapore are either casual spaces catering to large families or fine-dining establishments that attract guests of a certain affluence, Maggie’s occupies that elusive middle ground. Like any other millennial-approved restaurant, it has a cocktail menu – titled The Aunties Have Lived and named after fictional aunties such as Prim Pauline ($22++) and Fragrant Faye ($21++).

To chef Choo, venturing into this grey area between cuisines is far more worthwhile than clinging to tried-and-tested classics. “Truth be told, as a Singaporean, no matter how good you are at a particular cuisine – be it Italian, French or Japanese – few people are going to recognise your cooking as authentic because they’re not from that country or of that race.” 

Also marching to the beat of his own drum is chef Shen. For him, cooking has always been a vessel for creativity. “If I didn’t become a chef, I would have gone to design school,” he says.

So far, he has yet to find two cuisines that cannot be fused. “I believe you can always find parallels between different cultures,” he says, citing the unlikely example of “Thai sushi”, made with pandan-flavoured sticky rice and marinated fish.

The dishes at Jellyfish Sushi, which opened at New Bahru in January, follow in the same vein. With bread as its base, the $165++ menu is more sandwich than sushi – think ingredients like Shime Saba and stracciatella, encased in bread with salted zucchini and wasabi mayo. It is so different from the Japanese staple that chef Shen was initially reluctant to call it sushi at all. 

“I didn’t want diners to associate it with Japanese cuisine, but I needed to associate it with something for people to understand what I’m doing,” he says.  

Not everyone will get it, but that is fine with him. “Even if I get it wrong, I’ll have to apologise to only a small group of people.” 

Who’s afraid of inauthenticity?

Occasionally, that vocal minority levels the charge of cultural appropriation against him. “I suppose when you mess with something as iconic as a shawarma wrap, there’s more to criticise. So, yeah, we took our fair share of hits,” recalls chef Shen of his 15 years running Artichoke. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t lose a bit of sleep over it.”

At Jellyfish Sushi, his concessions to tradition are these: He emphasises the importance of slicing fish “properly” and uses sushi vinegar on his bread. “I want to maintain some semblance of the original eating experience.”  

Yet, he knows these considerations will do little to mollify naysayers. “It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. No matter how much sushi vinegar I put on my bread, it’s not going to neutralise what I’ve done with it.” 

Ironically, the guests who take offence are not those whose cultures he is experimenting with. A recent Japanese guest was laughing and having fun at Jellyfish Sushi; and back when Artichoke was slinging out burnt miso hummus, his Middle Eastern diners were the “chillest” ones. 

“But I’d get white expats coming in and saying, ‘I can’t decide if I should be offended by what you’re doing,’” he remembers. With Jellyfish Sushi, the sceptics have thus far been Singaporeans. 

In any case, his conscience is clear, as is the line he will not cross: no slurs, nothing politically insensitive. “I’m not trying to replace sushi. I’m just trying to give an alternative dining experience. I completely respect the original and I don’t think it’s going to go away.” 

Mr Ilya, on the other hand, has had to manage the expectations of his own community. “I’ve received mixed reviews from Malay guests. Some of them are very open, some aren’t. I’ve seen both extremes,” he says.  

It is easier for non-Malay guests, who make up 70 per cent of his clientele, to swallow his unorthodoxy because “they don’t have an existing benchmark”.

The way chef Choo sees it, pushback is confirmation that his dishes are bold enough and that he is moving in the right direction. But the realities of running a business mean that audacity always has to be tempered with a willingness to listen. 

“In the first few months, it was quite a journey of listening and recalibrating,” recalls Mr Goh. “We recalibrated the spice levels in our dishes, we recalibrated the number of peppercorns. We also worked brightness and acidity into the menu and toned down some of the funk.” 

But they will not compromise the restaurant’s ethos of cheeky unconventionality.

So far, the team has held off adding plain rice to the menu, despite requests from older patrons. Chef Choo hopes that by holding his ground, he will be able to coax more diners into embracing his version of “Chinese” food.