Chef Shen Tan has many opinions about food and we respect her all the more for it. “I have to admit,” she says, “I’m not about the tweezers and microgreens. It’s one of my bugbears. I don’t get it — what’s with the flowers and the dots of oil? So when I eat, I have to drag my food through all the dots?”
Instead, Shen tells us her approach to cooking has always been more “rough and ready”. She believes the proof is in how something tastes, and as a self-taught chef, is more interested in making food accessible. This means her social media accounts are filled with cooking tutorials; she makes time to hold cooking classes, and is always ready with a funny quip to assure novice cooks — “there is nothing you can ask that is stupid, honestly, and even if you make a mistake, unlike being a doctor or lawyer, nobody dies… unless they get really bad food poisoning.”
As a veteran of the industry, Shen has a heady list of accomplishments to her name. First, she opened Madam Tan’s Nasi Lemak at Maxwell Food Centre, where she confesses she was “a total idiot who didn’t even know how to turn on the gas and where to buy tins of oil”. Then came her first restaurant, The Wok & Barrel, with its mod-Sin cuisine, followed by her second restaurant, Ujong. Ownself Make Chef, which began in 2017, is Shen’s creative playground of cooking classes and themed private dining events, which she ambitiously juggled alongside running OG Lemak in Newton Food Centre during the Covid years.
But what Shen is proudest of is where she’s at in her life now — which, she says, could have never happened without her food journey. These life lessons will soon be collated in a cookbook that Shen is writing, but before she goes on sabbatical to work on it, she has promised us one last hurrah with a one-night-only private dinner featuring a menu of cured food.
Growing up, I had a weird relationship with food. It would take two hours for me to finish each meal.
It was only after I went to live with my maternal grandmother that I started enjoying my meals. That was a magical time to me. It was actually like an extended sleepover, because my grandmother lived with my aunt and my uncle, and people were over all the time. There were always massive communal meals.
My grandmother, who is Cantonese, would ask me every morning, ‘what would you like to eat for dinner and lunch?’ She would then walk to the Red Hill market and buy whatever food she was going to cook that night. So if I wanted to eat steamed pomfret with ginger, she would go and buy the pomfret.
On hindsight, I was probably just not very happy with being told what to eat as a child, so my grandma asking me what I wanted to eat opened up a whole new world. That ignited my love for food.
(LO)-Hei it’s me, I am the problem it’s me photographed on 15cm Free Form Pastry Plate in Makrut (extended collection) and Custard Apple Free Form Side Plate (extended collection).I did Theatre Studies at A-Levels and was part of the inaugural batch of Theatre Studies students. It was a big jump because I was a triple science student in secondary school and I switched to humanities in junior college.
Having studied theatre, I think that food too can tell a story. When people go for a private dining experience, they really want to interact with the chef. They want to know what is the inspiration behind the dish and the provenance of your produce. In a way, private dining is performance art — you stand there, welcome everyone in, explain the dish etc. You even put on a costume: your chef’s jacket!
Honestly, I think everything I cooked was a bit of a disaster in the beginning because when you don’t have confidence in your technique and your abilities, you think, let’s throw the kitchen sink in there. I look back at the dishes I used to make and think, oh my god, what was I thinking? It’s so cliched. But if you are in an industry for long enough, it means you have survived and hopefully learned things along the way.
I have learned to trust my own gut a little more as I have moved on in my career, but as a woman, imposter syndrome pops up every now and then — I don’t think we are ever able to fully trust our gut.
I have more confidence now, but I wouldn’t say it’s absolute confidence. The trick, I think, is finding that balance. Very often, we have so little compassion for ourselves. The biggest gift I’ve given to myself the last two years is self-compassion — to recognise, hey, you’re trying your best. Chill. But also to put on that lens and be able to objectively taste something and be honest with yourself.
Pizza Amuse Bouche with house-cured bacon, photographed on Gold Leaf Free-Form Dinner Plate
I have the luxury of dictating the terms of my work. In a way, I have now structured my life such that I am able to put into effect things that are important to me, like a balance between sleep, exercise, and doing things I enjoy. This was a hard thing to put into place at first, because I think in this capitalistic society, our work is determined by how much money you make.
Only in the last two years have I started to question what success is to me. And I realised that it isn’t about having 100 outlets nationally with my name on it, but the ability to share the love I have for food, and that people get to enjoy my food. I want it to be accessible that way.
That’s why I started the cooking classes and also putting out content on Instagram and TikTok — because I want to actively encourage questions about cooking. Like: why do we start cooking fish in a cold pan? (So the fish can be fully cooked AND develop a crust on the flesh side.) Or, why do you put water in when you’re rendering lard? (So the fat can render without burning the protein.)
My conversations with people are always about what we need, why we do it a certain way, how we can improve the texture and save time. It’s about sharing information.
As Pirandello says in Six Characters in Search of an Author, everybody has a different persona for different situations. And of course, in my first corporate job, I had to present a certain persona.
But I was able to get more and more in touch with my true self when I started running my own business. It has been absolutely liberating to be able to cook the food I like, to do what I like, and to set my hours. When I need to rest, I rest. This is why I’m taking a break at the end of the year — to write my book. It will be called Ownself Make Chef — Recipes to a Better Life. This is basically my journey in discovering myself through food. It’s part memoir, part cookbook, and means so much to me.
Our one-time only KRA Private Dining Food Tour with Chef Shen Tan is now sold out.
Follow Shen on social media to learn more about her book — coming soon!