Can heritage food be hip? Young F&B bosses show how

SINGAPORE – Think heritage food, and images of old kitchens probably come to mind. Cooks who work without written recipes. Mind-boggling processes and techniques. Delicious food not glammed up for social media. The taste of days gone by.

Some young people are working hard to stop the days from going by. They are making it their mission to keep heritage food relevant – and delicious – to new generations of eaters.

Cookbook authors Yeo Min, 30, and Emily Yeo, 39, have opened Museum Of Food in Joo Chiat Road, offering cooking classes and walking tours. Ms Shiny Phua, 28, runs Ah Ma’s Legacy in Sin Ming, selling ang ku kueh and muah chee made using her grandmother’s recipes. Then there is Mr Matthew Lim, 34, who has stepped in to run his family’s restaurant, Westlake, which marks its 52nd anniversary in 2026.

They have to tread a fine line – not watering down the taste of the food and, at the same time, presenting it in ways that will resonate with and excite younger people.

Where: 02-01, 102 Joo Chiat Road
Admission: By appointment only
Info: www.foodmuseumsg.com

At Museum Of Food, two-year-olds are encouraged to smell and squish pineapple tart dough together with their hands. Older kids knead dough, shape tarts and dollop jam on them.

Hands-on cooking classes can get messy, but founders Yeo Min and Emily Yeo are undeterred. They want kids to not just appreciate kueh and cookies, but also have lasting memories of them.

Ms Emily Yeo, 39, an educator and author of The Little Book Of Singapore Food Illustrated (2022), says: “It’s the idea of seeding a memory.”

The mother of four children, aged between 11 months and 11 years, has run cooking classes for kids. “Ten years ago, when I started, I wanted children to go into the kitchen. I’ve sort of achieved that. The average pre-schooler has done at least a pizza or a brownie or cookie class. They are comfortable coming into the kitchen and doing basic things.

“So, let’s use their interest in food to teach them about who we are as a people. What did our grandmothers eat? Yes, we have very indulgent McDonald’s meals, but beyond all of that, what is uniquely us?”

Reaching out to kids at a young age is crucial, Ms Yeo Min, 30, author of Chinese Pastry School (2023), believes.

“Singaporean kids are quite cultured,” she says. “We met some who looked at pandan leaves and asked if it was matcha. Their reference points are quite global, so we need to catch them fast.

“We are trying to seed that core memory for 30 years later, when these kids go out and remember making pineapple tarts. Even a vague memory is something. Hopefully, when they grow up, they will crave these heritage foods and become customers of heritage businesses. That’s how you have sustainability.”

They registered their non-profit in August 2024, and have been running cooking classes and other programmes since then in rented premises.

In April, they started operating from a proper physical space – the museum is on the second floor of a Joo Chiat Road shophouse. The new, 1,600 sq ft Museum Of Food has space for cooking classes, a small kitchen and display space for the traditional cooking tools and crockery they have collected, and vintage cookbooks.

They work with schools and corporations to design experiences. Those for kids cost about $40 a person, those for corporations are priced at about $80 a person. Sessions can run from one to three hours.

Workshops for the public are priced between $20 and $120 a person. These have included ones teaching people to turn vegetables into achar or pickles, and using sustainable species of fish and locally grown vegetables to make yong tau foo.

They have also organised walking tours of Joo Chiat.

In 2025, they chalked up some 2,000 paid customers for their programmes. Now, with a proper space, they want to do more.

Plans include having monthly open house sessions, where they pick a food topic and have people come in to talk to participants, who will be encouraged to share their experiences too. Potential topics include school canteen food, wedding and funeral food, and Asian vegan and vegetarian food.

Ms Emily Yeo says: “There’s a huge, gaping hole that no one is filling. Okay, so I teach you to make Hokkien mee. To get the best taste, you buy this prawn, this and that ingredient, and let’s go.

“What we really want to do, and what we see no one doing, is bring the whole story of how our grandmas used the entire prawn, for example, from the head to the shell. Because back in the day, everyone was very thrifty. We draw the story of it, rather than just hand our students a recipe.”

Where: B3-09 (Unit 3) Thomson V Two, 11 Sin Ming Road
Open: 11am to 4pm (Wednesdays and Thursdays), 11am to 6pm (Fridays to Sundays); closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
Info: Go to www.ahmahslegacy.com and @ahmahslegacy on Instagram

Kueh-maker Shiny Phua grew up enjoying her grandmother’s from-scratch home-cooking.

“My grandma would always complain about us buying this or that,” the 28-year-old says. “Then three days later, the dish would appear in front of us. She had figured out a way to make it.”

Madam Goh Ngin Keng died at the age of 93 in 2019, but her recipes live on in her granddaughter’s business, Ah Ma’s Legacy. The 10-seat cafe in Sin Ming serves tortoise-shaped ang ku kueh, muah chee and steamed glutinous rice, made using Madam Goh’s recipes.

The idea for Ah Ma’s Legacy came when Ms Phua was working towards a bachelor’s degree in design communication in LaSalle College of the Arts. For her thesis, she looked at whether Generation Z had a connection to traditional food.

She says: “A big part of my research was on different types of kueh and whether the younger generation view them as part of their foodscape. We are so integrated with so many cultures that we lose our roots. And because this is happening so fast, a lot of kids don’t get to experience what is local.

“I had the privilege of living with my grandma, which allowed me to eat a lot of her type of food. And that made me understand what is traditional. A lot of my peers don’t have that connection.”

Ah Ma’s Legacy was a brand she came up with in the thesis, as a tool to educate people about traditional food.

“There’s a way of appreciating food,” she says. “It’s through the process of making it, knowing the backstory. Every food in the world has a heritage and origin. If you know that, you appreciate it more. And if you know the process, you will have a greater appreciation.”

She had wanted to host workshops, but the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The keen cook and baker decided to sell her grandmother’s Sweet Potato Gu Kueh, filled with peanut or coconut for $2.50 each, and Shallot Oil Muah Chee, made with glutinous rice flour, for $5 a portion instead.

At the time, she was working in sales and marketing, and this was a side hustle. She would sell about 160 ang ku kueh a week in boxes of four.

In 2022, she quit her job and started selling kueh made in a production kitchen. In 2023, she opened the cafe.

Her customers span the ages. Young families drop in with their children, seniors visit for snacks and drinks, and kids attending tuition centres in the building make their way down to have her food. Some come so regularly, she knows what type of ang ku kueh they want when they turn up.

Like her grandmother, she uses sweet potatoes to make ang ku kueh skin. But unlike her grandmother, she does not use food colouring to tint the kueh. Instead, she colours them with beetroot, pandan juice, purple sweet potato and other ingredients.

She says: “When I baked for my grandmother, whether it was pandan cake, cookies or bread, I would not use food colouring. Even when I make la mian, I use spinach juice to make it green. There’s no need for food colouring. If I serve my food to another person’s grandma, I don’t want to put food colouring in it.”

Prices for her Sweet Potato Gu Kueh range from $3.80 for one filled with Sweet Mung Bean to $6 for Pure Pistachio, filled with roasted pistachios and pumpkin seed butter. The fillings are designed to appeal to young and old – flavours include Peanut & White Sesame, Salted Mung Bean, Taro Milk and Milo Gao.

Shallot Oil Muah Chee is priced from $5.50 for Peanut & White Sesame to $9.50 for Salty Pistachio. She also has Ah Ma’s Teochew Glutinous Rice ($8.50) and, for vegetarians, Shroomy Black Glutinous Rice ($5).

She says: “People making traditional food have a hard time finding successors. I feel that my role in this is to encourage a new generation to see that this is viable.

“As a kid, I wanted to open a bakery. I saw that it could be a success because there were a lot of role models out there who were able to do it.”

Where: 02-139, Block 4 Queen’s Road  
Open: 11am to 2pm, 5 to 9pm daily
Info: Call 6474-7283 or go to westlake.com.sg

On a trip to Lake Toya in Hokkaido in 2025, Mr Matthew Lim had, for the first time, venison that was not cooked in his family’s zi char restaurant, Westlake. The taste left an impression on him.

The 34-year-old says: “We tenderise our venison quite well so that when you eat it, it’s not too tough. I told my father that this type of tenderness appeals to people of my generation, as we tend to like tender meat more – like wagyu, for example. But at the same time, the flavour profile of the meat is kind of lost.

“It was only when I was in Japan and had spring onion venison in this family-run restaurant that I realised this is how venison tastes. It was then that I understood my father’s perspective. He saw that younger diners might not take to it.”

Westlake, which marks its 52nd anniversary in 2026, has tweaked its Venison With Dry Chilli and Venison With Spring Onion & Ginger (from $26). The meat is tenderised less, allowing its flavour to come through.

These are among the changes Mr Lim has made since entering the family business in 2022. He took it over from his father, Mr Robert Lim, 77.

The younger Mr Lim, who has two older sisters and a younger brother, quit his bank job and took a 50 per cent pay cut. He started at what he says was a “low four-figure” salary and is now making “closer to five figures”.

“All my staff here, they have more experience than me,” he says. “They were doing more, so it didn’t make sense for me to take the same pay.”

His grandfather, the late Lim Tong Law, started the restaurant in 1974. He had come from Fujian and was a physical education teacher at what was then The Chinese High School (now Hwa Chong Institution).

In his spare time, he enjoyed cooking. That hobby became his second career in his 50s. He served his homespun dishes at Fook Hai Building before opening Westlake in 1974 in Queen’s Road, off Farrer Road.

The restaurant, which has 180 seats indoors and out, is famous for its Braised Pork With Pau or kong bak pau (from $20). Since 2018, Westlake has also served Braised Spanish Iberico Pork With Pau (from $33), after the family visited a farm in Puerto Gil in Spain and tasted the pork.

Other signatures include Hot & Sour Soup (from $16), Westlake Roast Chicken (from $25), Claypot Hokkien Mee (from $10) and Tau Sah Pancake ($11), among others.

Mr Lim and his father have made changes to other offerings, fine-tuning tradition to appeal to diners. For example, the Yam Basket (from $22) used to be a smooth ring of deep-fried mashed yam. After they tried the dish at other zi char restaurants, it is now more like tempura, with a crisp veil of batter adding more crunch.

New additions to the menu to mark the anniversary include Claypot Chilli Frog Leg (from $25) and Stir Fried Beancurd With Green Chilli (from $15). Mr Lim says they were added with a view to appealing to younger diners.

He says: “I have my own ideas of how I want things to be. And I also think about what is appropriate for our customers.

“With the chilli frog leg, the chef’s first version had deep-fried frog legs. He felt that the frog, being fried, would better absorb the sauce. But when I tried it, I felt you couldn’t really tell it was frog. The flavour of the meat is lost. We had a discussion and we now braise it.”

Until May 29, diners get 52 per cent off four dishes: the Claypot Chilli Frog Leg, Stir Fried Beancurd With Green Chilli, Minced Pork With Bean Sauce Noodle (from $10) and Butter King Prawn (from $38). The offer applies for lunch and dinner from Mondays to Wednesdays, and lunch only on Thursdays and Fridays.

The family dines in the restaurant at least once a week, to make sure that the food is up to scratch.

Asked why he gave up a five-day week to join the family business, which has about 30 staff, Mr Lim says: “My father needed help with the technology stuff; getting on delivery platforms, getting new software for the business. So, he approached me and asked me whether I wanted to do it. I felt that I had to help him.

“Before I joined the business, he was not really ready to retire and let go. A lot of people’s livelihoods depend on this business. Another big reason is that we don’t want to let down all these residents who have been supporting us for years. If we just stop, what will they eat?”