Asu is Singaporean chef Ace Tan’s love letter to regional Asian cuisine

Rooted in Tan’s culinary values, Asu’s opening menu, aptly titled “Origins”, is reflective of his upbringing and precious personal memories—of home‐cooked meals, picking ingredients out of the soup pot, and following his mother to Tiong Bahru Market and Food Centre for the coveted shui jing bao, or crystal dumpling. The starter, in fact, is a reinvented shui jing bao. While the savoury version of this traditional Chinese snack with a delicate, translucent skin conventionally comes with a turnip or vegetable filling, Asu’s features a lobster ball. Of this surprising upgrade, Tan says: “We’re integrating har gow—a Cantonese shrimp dumpling [served] in many dim sum restaurants.”

In another example, one of the main‐course options is a tribute to Tan’s mother, who “used to cook duck soup for the family once a week”, he shares, adding that “instead of drinking the fluid, I’d fish out the ingredients used to make the stock and eat [them] instead”. Named Jessica’s Duck Soup, the deconstructed take on a domestic favourite features a cored tomato with a consommé jelly casing that comes stuffed with duck confit and topped with perilla leaves, served with soup that has been clarified and reduced into its essence, resulting in a clear, immensely flavourful broth.

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Other storied delights include a dessert that is a play on pulut hitam, a classic Southeast Asian dessert made with black glutinous rice and coconut milk, and koji, a Japanese base extracted through fermentation; as well as the Lu Shui An Chun, featuring quail meat served with a quail egg and yam rice. The meat, which was marinated, then poached in a temperature‐controlled environment, comes dressed in a house‐made tare sauce that had been aged for six months.

Meanwhile, the egg, reminiscent of the herbal tea eggs in Tan’s boyhood memories that were sold in Chinese medicinal stores, was braised overnight, dried and glossed with maltose solution before being smoked with lychee wood.

“As a child, growing up exposed to my extended family’s Chinese medicinal shop instilled a belief in consuming nutritious meals and clean eating, which I practise today,” says Tan. He further shares that his encounter with the four seasons and their variety of harvests during his two‐year stint at South Korea’s Michelin‐listed Flower Child—first as a consultant chef and later, as an executive sous chef—deeply inspired his culinary outlook. 

“In Chinese culture, seasons have a strong relevance to what you eat. In a particular season, one consumes certain produce in order to build up immunity for the next season,” he explains. “With Asu, we thought about how we can recreate the experience of seasonal changes, either through flavours or the fermentation and preservation of ingredients past their seasonal prime.” With an obsessive eye for detail, Tan often tweaks his recipes up until the very last second before the dishes are finalised on the menu. His most ambitious project to date is building a signature braising liquid through long cooking that will serve as the base for all of Asu’s dishes, akin to a mother sauce or a sourdough starter.

Tan’s road thus far has not been without setbacks. His first F&B venture, Restaurant Ards, closed just six months after it opened in 2017. His helm at the restaurant at 1‐Group’s 1‐V:U was also short‐lived, with him leaving the lifestyle destination when it rebranded to events space 1‐Altitude Coast.

With Asu though, which signifies his shift away from Western cuisine, he looks set to reclaim the narrative. His hope is that its Asian focus will nurture an appreciation for the region’s history and culture in the local fine‐dining scene. “By exploring the diverse cultures of Asia, I can find new cooking inspiration,” he adds. “[For instance,] China alone has eight cuisines. [So] we’ll explore parts of Asia to integrate different influences and for the rest of the team to express themselves through [the] food.”

For Tan, being a chef is a journey that has no end. “There should never be a time when I’ve mastered a cuisine,” he says. “Every day when I wake up, the first thing I think about is how I should build upon my efforts from yesterday; [what’s] lacking and how I can improve.” And on that note, we can expect the menus at Asu to keep evolving while retaining a spotlight on Asian flavours, presenting a unique brand of the region’s cuisines.

Asu
Address: 30 Labrador Villa Road, Labrador House, S(119189)

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