When chef Leow Shi Chao had his first taste of Hakka cuisine at the age of 26, he wasn’t impressed.
At the same time, he instantly knew that the dishes he had tasted had the potential to be much, much better, if made with more care, skilled techniques and better ingredients.
Was it the Hakka blood in him instinctively recognising the cuisine of his ancestors? Perhaps.
But, why did it take this Hakka 26 years to taste his own dialect group’s food for the first time?
Leow, now 29, was raised in the home of family friends and grew up eating their Hinghwa food.
When he decided to become a chef, he trained at now-defunct fine dining restaurant Pollen, where he also got to work with international names like Gianni D’Amato and Joris Bijdendijk when they came to do collaborations.
It was an eye-opening experience. At 19, he even did a stage with D’Amato in Reggio Emilia, Italy. “It widened my perspective of what food was. In Singapore, you don’t see anything fresh – everything is in plastic bags, vacuum-packed. There, I saw eggplants (that were still) on the plant and insects on the vegetables. That gave me the idea that this industry is more than just cooking; there’s a lot to explore.”
But, even as he cooked and plated up European dishes, he began to realise that he would never become his own chef until he developed a sense of his own identity.
Hakka Abacus Seeds, a dish of stir-fried discs made of yam and tapioca flour, by Leow Shi Chao. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
And so, about three years ago, The Lost Hakka was born: A personal project to reclaim his ancestral, cultural and culinary identity, and use that as a foundation to build a new, more sharply defined sense of self.
It started when Leow, also known as Charles within the industry, took up a summer job in the UK helping a friend open a hotel in Guernsey. He was in charge of creating the menu for the restaurant when “something hit me hard”.
The dishes he was making were “very random”, like Korean fried chicken alongside a cereal prawn salad. When guests asked him what the inspiration for the menu was, “I struggled to connect the dots for them. It was what I’d seen and thought was nice, rather than a story. I thought, ‘This doesn’t make sense. Every chef has a direction. What do I have?’”
After returning to Singapore, he was having a meal of takeaway Hakka food with his relatives when the revelation came. “I thought it tasted horrible and I asked them why they’d ordered it. They said it was because we were Hakka people. I was disappointed by the level of the food, so I thought, ‘Maybe I should figure out what Hakka food is’.”
So, he went to dine at heritage Hakka restaurant, Plum Village. “I thought the food was not bad. So, I asked if I could work there for free.”
Leow Shi Chao with Plum Village's Lai Fak Nian (left) at a public event. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
Over the last three years, Leow has been single-minded in his mission. Besides learning from Plum Village’s veteran chef Lai Fak Nian, picking up skills handed down through the generations and insights into long-lost dishes, he’s also made connections with clan associations and community guilds across Singapore, Malaysia and the rest of Asia, visiting Hakka hotspots, conducting research and attending cultural events in places like Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Kuching, Taiwan and Thailand.
He also attended conventions such as the Taiwan Hakka Expo in 2023 and the Hakka World Conference in China last year.
And, next year, he plans to make a month-long trip to Dabu in Guangdong, China, to whence he has traced his family’s lineage.
In between all that, he offers occasional meals for weekend takeaways from his home kitchen, which is more an excuse to experiment and improve on dishes than a money-making enterprise.
Hakka Yellow Wine Chicken was one of the dishes that customers got to taste during one of Leow's ad-hoc offers to accept takeaway orders (follow The Lost Hakka on Instagram to be notified when dishes are available). (Photo: CNA/May Seah)
He’s also part of a “get-together community” called Hakka Cooking Group, where about 10 to 12 young people gather to cook a Hakka dish together.
“It’s a very friendly community that I think has surpassed my expectations. Someone does the finances and splits the costs, someone goes to buy ingredients, someone opens their home. I help them move in the correct direction, where we learn and cook together. Some bring their parents along; some say they’re happy for us to go and learn from their family. We have a trip planned to Malaysia to learn from an auntie and uncle there.”
On Friday (Jul 18), he’ll be doing a collaboration dinner at Mag’s Wine Kitchen with chef Ian Tan, with a menu that includes dishes like elevated takes on Hakka Salt-cooked Chicken, Hakka Yellow Wine Pigeon, Thunder Tea Rice and Hakka Fried Pork.
“I’m someone who likes to do new things constantly,” Leow said. “Hakka research is never-ending. The things we know are so basic. There’s so much to uncover.”
Thanks to his mission, he’s also picked up new social skills. “I attend random dinners and sit with the old people,” he laughed. “To gain their trust and respect, you have to go the traditional route”, such as having a drink with them.
“I couldn’t have imagined myself doing this three years ago,” he said.
He now finds himself “more willing to start a conversation”. In every city he visits, he looks for traditional Chinese establishments such as restaurants or herbal medicine shops, in the hope of finding Hakkas there. He is often successful. For example, he encountered someone in Isaan, Thailand, making tofu the traditional way, who turned out to be Hakka; and discovered a Chinese tea shop in Yokohama, Japan, owned by a Hakka gentleman.
His food discovery journey has yielded a new side quest: Documenting the similarities and differences in the Hakka people around the world.
“Everything you study or read about Hakka culture eventually makes more sense when you talk to all these people, and they all support the data,” Leow said. “They don’t have a script but they all tell me the same thing: Their forefathers moved out of China because their families were very poor and had nothing to eat, so it was better to leave.”
A version of ang ku kueh by Leow Shi Chao. The Hakka version is known as hee pan. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
At last year’s Hakka World Conference in Luoyang, Henan, he learned that Hakkas around the world could trace their origin to that very city: Being well located, the ancient town was highly contested, so people fled from the wars there. “If they had not left, they would never have been called ‘Hakka’,” Leow explained, as the word means “guest people”.
He elaborated: “The reason we are called ‘Hakka’ is because we are always guests to others. Every dialect group has a different name for us meaning ‘guest’ in their own language – for example, ‘Khek’ is what the Hokkiens call us.”
Because the Hakka were constantly displaced throughout history, their identifying factor is their language, Leow shared. At the conference, “They said that the Hakka language is derived from the ancient Chinese spoken by the northerners.”
Leow Shi Chao at Mag's Wine Kitchen, with which he will be collaborating on Jul 18. (Photo: CNA/Dillon Tan)
How do you explore an identity that is imposed on you by others instead of from within – an appellation like “guest”, with its forever transitory and liminal associations?
Well, food isn’t a bad place to start. Mention “Hakka” and likely, the first thing that comes to mind is fried abacus seeds, chicken in yellow wine or Hakka noodles. One thing the Hakkas did was cook and eat well – although some of the fundamentals have been lost today.
Take a representative Hakka dish like Abacus Seeds: “Only our parents would know where to buy it, and there are very limited stalls that sell the dish. Everyone does it differently.” With this dish, “the challenge is the ratio of ingredients to abacus seeds. That creates differences”.
Leow was determined to uncover the original flavours of each Hakka dish. “Using a Hakka cookbook that Plum Village Uncle has, I cooked every single page from the book, just to have a glimpse of what Hakka food is,” he said.
Experimenting with Hakka Abacus Seeds (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
With his experience as a chef, “I see that using quality ingredients really improves the whole dish”. For example, using 100 per cent oyster sauce from China yields much more flavour, as does using fish sauce from his favourite brand.
For a dish like yellow wine chicken, “I use a good quality yellow wine sourced from a local maker called Imperial Kitchen – they have their own brewery in Singapore. I use good quality chicken and good quality Bentong ginger. The dish is so simple – it only has three main components. You cannot use cheap chicken and expect it to turn out well.”
With all the knowledge he’s accumulating, Leow hopes to someday write a book combining food, history and culture, as well as to eventually go into teaching.
"I think it’s all about identity,” he said. “If I’m here for the money, I shouldn’t be working in F&B. We have to find a different purpose. I enjoy completing tasks, so I see this as a quest. The satisfaction comes from understanding more about my own culture.”
Even if nothing comes from it, “I won’t say I’ve wasted my time because I enjoy the process. It has made me more curious about many things, and that motivates me to continue.”
Continue reading...
At the same time, he instantly knew that the dishes he had tasted had the potential to be much, much better, if made with more care, skilled techniques and better ingredients.
Was it the Hakka blood in him instinctively recognising the cuisine of his ancestors? Perhaps.
But, why did it take this Hakka 26 years to taste his own dialect group’s food for the first time?
Leow, now 29, was raised in the home of family friends and grew up eating their Hinghwa food.
When he decided to become a chef, he trained at now-defunct fine dining restaurant Pollen, where he also got to work with international names like Gianni D’Amato and Joris Bijdendijk when they came to do collaborations.
It was an eye-opening experience. At 19, he even did a stage with D’Amato in Reggio Emilia, Italy. “It widened my perspective of what food was. In Singapore, you don’t see anything fresh – everything is in plastic bags, vacuum-packed. There, I saw eggplants (that were still) on the plant and insects on the vegetables. That gave me the idea that this industry is more than just cooking; there’s a lot to explore.”
But, even as he cooked and plated up European dishes, he began to realise that he would never become his own chef until he developed a sense of his own identity.
Hakka Abacus Seeds, a dish of stir-fried discs made of yam and tapioca flour, by Leow Shi Chao. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
And so, about three years ago, The Lost Hakka was born: A personal project to reclaim his ancestral, cultural and culinary identity, and use that as a foundation to build a new, more sharply defined sense of self.
DEEP DIVE
It started when Leow, also known as Charles within the industry, took up a summer job in the UK helping a friend open a hotel in Guernsey. He was in charge of creating the menu for the restaurant when “something hit me hard”.
The dishes he was making were “very random”, like Korean fried chicken alongside a cereal prawn salad. When guests asked him what the inspiration for the menu was, “I struggled to connect the dots for them. It was what I’d seen and thought was nice, rather than a story. I thought, ‘This doesn’t make sense. Every chef has a direction. What do I have?’”
After returning to Singapore, he was having a meal of takeaway Hakka food with his relatives when the revelation came. “I thought it tasted horrible and I asked them why they’d ordered it. They said it was because we were Hakka people. I was disappointed by the level of the food, so I thought, ‘Maybe I should figure out what Hakka food is’.”
So, he went to dine at heritage Hakka restaurant, Plum Village. “I thought the food was not bad. So, I asked if I could work there for free.”
Leow Shi Chao with Plum Village's Lai Fak Nian (left) at a public event. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
Over the last three years, Leow has been single-minded in his mission. Besides learning from Plum Village’s veteran chef Lai Fak Nian, picking up skills handed down through the generations and insights into long-lost dishes, he’s also made connections with clan associations and community guilds across Singapore, Malaysia and the rest of Asia, visiting Hakka hotspots, conducting research and attending cultural events in places like Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Kuching, Taiwan and Thailand.
He also attended conventions such as the Taiwan Hakka Expo in 2023 and the Hakka World Conference in China last year.
And, next year, he plans to make a month-long trip to Dabu in Guangdong, China, to whence he has traced his family’s lineage.
In between all that, he offers occasional meals for weekend takeaways from his home kitchen, which is more an excuse to experiment and improve on dishes than a money-making enterprise.
Hakka Yellow Wine Chicken was one of the dishes that customers got to taste during one of Leow's ad-hoc offers to accept takeaway orders (follow The Lost Hakka on Instagram to be notified when dishes are available). (Photo: CNA/May Seah)
He’s also part of a “get-together community” called Hakka Cooking Group, where about 10 to 12 young people gather to cook a Hakka dish together.
“It’s a very friendly community that I think has surpassed my expectations. Someone does the finances and splits the costs, someone goes to buy ingredients, someone opens their home. I help them move in the correct direction, where we learn and cook together. Some bring their parents along; some say they’re happy for us to go and learn from their family. We have a trip planned to Malaysia to learn from an auntie and uncle there.”
On Friday (Jul 18), he’ll be doing a collaboration dinner at Mag’s Wine Kitchen with chef Ian Tan, with a menu that includes dishes like elevated takes on Hakka Salt-cooked Chicken, Hakka Yellow Wine Pigeon, Thunder Tea Rice and Hakka Fried Pork.
“I’m someone who likes to do new things constantly,” Leow said. “Hakka research is never-ending. The things we know are so basic. There’s so much to uncover.”
Thanks to his mission, he’s also picked up new social skills. “I attend random dinners and sit with the old people,” he laughed. “To gain their trust and respect, you have to go the traditional route”, such as having a drink with them.
“I couldn’t have imagined myself doing this three years ago,” he said.
He now finds himself “more willing to start a conversation”. In every city he visits, he looks for traditional Chinese establishments such as restaurants or herbal medicine shops, in the hope of finding Hakkas there. He is often successful. For example, he encountered someone in Isaan, Thailand, making tofu the traditional way, who turned out to be Hakka; and discovered a Chinese tea shop in Yokohama, Japan, owned by a Hakka gentleman.
His food discovery journey has yielded a new side quest: Documenting the similarities and differences in the Hakka people around the world.
“Everything you study or read about Hakka culture eventually makes more sense when you talk to all these people, and they all support the data,” Leow said. “They don’t have a script but they all tell me the same thing: Their forefathers moved out of China because their families were very poor and had nothing to eat, so it was better to leave.”
A version of ang ku kueh by Leow Shi Chao. The Hakka version is known as hee pan. (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
At last year’s Hakka World Conference in Luoyang, Henan, he learned that Hakkas around the world could trace their origin to that very city: Being well located, the ancient town was highly contested, so people fled from the wars there. “If they had not left, they would never have been called ‘Hakka’,” Leow explained, as the word means “guest people”.
He elaborated: “The reason we are called ‘Hakka’ is because we are always guests to others. Every dialect group has a different name for us meaning ‘guest’ in their own language – for example, ‘Khek’ is what the Hokkiens call us.”
Because the Hakka were constantly displaced throughout history, their identifying factor is their language, Leow shared. At the conference, “They said that the Hakka language is derived from the ancient Chinese spoken by the northerners.”
IDENTITY ON A PLATE
Leow Shi Chao at Mag's Wine Kitchen, with which he will be collaborating on Jul 18. (Photo: CNA/Dillon Tan)
How do you explore an identity that is imposed on you by others instead of from within – an appellation like “guest”, with its forever transitory and liminal associations?
Well, food isn’t a bad place to start. Mention “Hakka” and likely, the first thing that comes to mind is fried abacus seeds, chicken in yellow wine or Hakka noodles. One thing the Hakkas did was cook and eat well – although some of the fundamentals have been lost today.
Take a representative Hakka dish like Abacus Seeds: “Only our parents would know where to buy it, and there are very limited stalls that sell the dish. Everyone does it differently.” With this dish, “the challenge is the ratio of ingredients to abacus seeds. That creates differences”.
Leow was determined to uncover the original flavours of each Hakka dish. “Using a Hakka cookbook that Plum Village Uncle has, I cooked every single page from the book, just to have a glimpse of what Hakka food is,” he said.
Experimenting with Hakka Abacus Seeds (Photo: Leow Shi Chao)
With his experience as a chef, “I see that using quality ingredients really improves the whole dish”. For example, using 100 per cent oyster sauce from China yields much more flavour, as does using fish sauce from his favourite brand.
For a dish like yellow wine chicken, “I use a good quality yellow wine sourced from a local maker called Imperial Kitchen – they have their own brewery in Singapore. I use good quality chicken and good quality Bentong ginger. The dish is so simple – it only has three main components. You cannot use cheap chicken and expect it to turn out well.”
With all the knowledge he’s accumulating, Leow hopes to someday write a book combining food, history and culture, as well as to eventually go into teaching.
"I think it’s all about identity,” he said. “If I’m here for the money, I shouldn’t be working in F&B. We have to find a different purpose. I enjoy completing tasks, so I see this as a quest. The satisfaction comes from understanding more about my own culture.”
Even if nothing comes from it, “I won’t say I’ve wasted my time because I enjoy the process. It has made me more curious about many things, and that motivates me to continue.”
Continue reading...