The transplantation of a culinary capital

Self-taught chefs make waves

But it's not just restaurant chains that are bringing a slice of Singaporean cuisine to China. In the past five years, self-taught Singaporean chefs have also been making waves with their comprehensive offerings of dishes from home, some of which are lesser known to the international community.

Among them is Mok Siew Lin, a former mergers and acquisitions lawyer who in 2015 pursued cooking as a second career. Called Eden's Kitchen, Mok's eatery first started out as a catering business before evolving into a delivery service that sells dishes such as Hainanese chicken rice, bak chor mee (minced pork noodles) and lor mee (yellow noodles in a savory brown gravy made with spices and starch).

Her best-selling dish, however, is the kway zhup, a meal comprising flat rice noodles in a dark broth served with a platter that contains pork belly, different types of tofu, hard boiled eggs, bean curd skin and pig intestines. So impressive is her kway zhup that some of her clients have even claimed that her version is better than those sold by hawkers in Singapore.

Mok's dedication to authenticity is also reflected in the lengths she goes to when preparing the respective chilli sauces for her dishes. Because these sauces vary in term of taste and texture－for instance, chicken rice chilli is vastly different from kway zhup chilli－and are not readily available, she spends hours just to create these peripheral yet indispensable elements of Singaporean dishes.

"One essential ingredient in some of these chilli sauces is hae bee, or dried shrimp. The version that we buy in China isn't quite ready-to-use we still have to spend time to comb through the mixture to remove stones, tiny pincers and other sediments," she said.