If you have visitors or guests with you, where do you ensure you always go to give them a real taste of Singapore?

A couple of places, to be honest. For grilled items I would take them to Lau Pa Sat; at Newton I would go for the sambal stingray; and East Coast Food Centre for the experience. These are places I miss when I'm away, but that I take for granted when I'm there. 

Do you have any favourite Singaporean heritage dishes and where do you go for them?

Chicken rice, I would say. I grew up eating it as a staple. To get the flavour of the rice and chicken right takes a lot of skill—I think a lot of Singaporeans would agree with that. My favourite chicken rice restaurant is just 50 metres away from my place back in Singapore. It's at a coffee shop that my dad would buy for us when we were kids—the stall is still there. When you take away, they wrap it in a kind of paper that gives it a better flavour. It's a kind of nostalgia. When I was younger, my cousins and I would grow up together. My dad was the youngest of all his siblings, so whenever we had family outings, my dad would buy 35 packets of chicken rice from that same place, and it would be all wrapped up in the paper. We all enjoyed that and the flavour from that stall is totally different [to anywhere else].

Where do you like to meet up with old friends?

I would meet up with them at the kopitiam (traditional coffee shop). The group of friends that I hang out with, we all have motorbikes. So we would call each other up and say, "Let's go in five minutes". I've known them for 18 years already, so we would meet up at the coffee shop and then talk about everything while drinking teh tarik. When you go to a Singaporean restaurant, they will pour the tea to get the foam on top. It's usually made with condensed milk and sugar, but if you have that you won't be able to sleep.

My friends are a multicultural group—some of them are halal, so we have to choose a place that's Muslim-friendly when we hang out. One place is called Al-Salam in Tempanes; you can get good Malay comfort food there like roti prata and mee goreng. 

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Where do you go for Singaporean food in Hong Kong?

I like Cafe Malacca and Can Lah. I also like the cooking of my good friend chef Ng [Tzer Tzun] from The Langham—he came around the same time as me to Hong Kong. But at the end of the day I still try and cook at home. It's nice to be outside but it's also nice to be with yourself and practice once in a while and cook the dishes you miss. That's what most important for the chef, to always depend on yourself.

To be honest, I have a dish here: black pepper crab. When I came here and made it, after a few trials I ended up making it the way locals like it. I have a VIP guest who comes here every week for the crab, so I tweaked and tweaked. I serve it with fried mantou and make it wetter with more gravy, which the locals seem to love. So as a chef, what's most important is to try new things—you don't always have to follow the recipe while respecting the tastes of the people here.

Are there any differences between the preferences of Hongkongers and Singaporeans?

I think there's not much taste difference, but only the spiciness level is different. For example, the spiciness level of the people of Hong Kong, they can take Sichuan food, but sambal is too spicy for them. That is something that I have to get used to and try to tweak my recipes around that. That's the the adaptability of my job. At the end of the day, in Singapore we always look up to Hong Kong in terms of food, you know? And from what I know, my friends here also like to go to Singapore. So I think everyone now in the world, they know about each other. The knowledge is there.

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