Life Lessons in the Kitchen: How These Chefs’ Childhoods Shaped the Way They Are Today

Like Hatch, chef Joe Leong, who is a pastry chef with kitchen appliance company V-Zug’s Gourmet Academy, comes from a family of chefs. His father is renowned celebrity chef Sam Leong, a forerunner of modern Chinese cuisine, while his mother, Forest Leong, specialises in Thai cooking. Despite his storied background, Joe’s inkling to pursue a culinary career at 16 was met with anger from his father, who wanted to shield him from the harsh realities of working in kitchens.

A month later, his father relented and charted out Joe’s culinary career routes before narrowing it to pastry—which suited his then petite stature. Forgoing culinary school, he dived in as a cook at the famed 2am: dessertbar at 17, before working his way up in restaurants such as Tippling Club and V-Dining. “Going to culinary school is like visiting Disneyland, but working in restaurants is like scrubbing the tanks at Disneyland,” quips the 28-year-old.

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For Maxine Ngooi, the executive chef of Tigerlily patisserie and heritage confectionery Chin Mee Chin, cooking was bonding time with her Portuguese Eurasian mother, Gerardine Majella Pinto. Her mother whips up traditional dishes such as curry kapitan (Eurasian chicken curry) and corned beef cutlets, with a side of the stories behind the family recipes. She also bakes bread and threw themed food parties.

Ngooi says: “My mother is the first food critic I know—she taught me how to taste and savour food, and inculcated in me an appreciation for food. Her passion for food is infectious.” The avid home cook, who was intrigued by crepes during a holiday in France, also ran Creperie Ar-men at Duxton Road in the 2000s.

However, witnessing the “scary” amount of hard work her mother put into the restaurant deterred the 30-year-old from entering the trade. It was only during her commerce undergraduate years in Sydney that her passion for cooking was ignited. Helming her own kitchen, she started asking her mother for recipes such as lasagne, and pork and braised apples in cream sauce, and cooked up a storm. Upon graduation, Ngooi changed tracks and tested the waters with a training stint at Les Amis, which parlayed into a career in fine-dining establishments such as Joël Robuchon Restaurant.

Lessons, from kitchen etiquette to life philosophies were shared through cooking. Hatch is known for his precisely crafted sushi such as hand-shaved otoro dabbed with soya sauce based on an age-old family recipe, kamasu (barracuda) and ankimo (monkfish liver)—hardly surprising, given that he was trained by his sushi master father. Learning the intricately tactile art of sushi making from a man of few words was onerous. Much of the excruciating learning process boiled down to eagle-eyed observation and resilience. He spent a week moulding the rice for handrolls—if his father wasn’t satisfied with its size and volume, he simply “touched and threw it away”.

On top of expecting exacting standards, Hatch’s father emphasised being honest about one’s kitchen abilities, the young chef recalls. “If you don’t know something, don’t be afraid to own up and learn,” he says, recalling an incident when his father summoned him to a fishmonger to learn how to slice bonito properly.

Outside the kitchen, Hatch stands by his father’s advice on career longevity. “Have hobbies outside your job, so that you can treat it as another hobby and enjoy it for a longer time,” he shares. As a sushi chef, having a wide range of interests is important as “sushi restaurants are like pubs, where customers come to converse”. It’s no surprise then that Hatch, who is known for his quirky fashion sense outside of the kitchen and enjoys painting and photography, is known to strike up lively conversations with diners. He also spearheaded the interior design for Hashida Singapore, which reopened at Amoy Street last January.

For Joe, a valuable lesson he learned from his father is the importance of humility in the kitchen. He admits he had “a rough temper”—getting impatient and yelling at junior staff who were slower than him in tasks such as churning out mousse cakes. Heeding the advice of his father, who ran hot and fast-paced kitchens in Chinese restaurants, he muses: “A chef cannot run things on his own—be humble and show appreciation to the people who help make your job easier.”

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Besides shaping one’s character, cooking is a way of getting in touch with one’s roots. In 2020, Ngooi helped her mother run a home-based food business, cooking homespun Eurasian and Peranakan dishes. She says: “It was an eye-opening experience—I mastered cooking rempah (spice paste), learned new ingredients and realised that many of the dishes I grew up eating are Eurasian dishes. I discovered that my great-grandmother added rose water to make her sugee cake more fragrant.”

From baking sugee cakes with her mother, she learned the importance of respecting time-honoured recipes. Being professionally trained, she couldn’t help but reorganise the recipe in a time-efficient way. Although the cake was made more quickly, the studs of semolina in it were too crunchy. “It turned out that the time taken to meander through the recipe helps soften the semolina as it soaked in butter,” she reflects.

This was something she had to be mindful of when working with heritage cake recipes at Chin Mee Chin. “Every step in traditional recipes exists for a reason and it’s important to understand the recipe before translating it into a modern kitchen,” she says.

From working alongside her mother, Ngooi realised that she was particular about using specific ingredients seasonally, down to sourcing them from specific stalls in wet markets across Singapore. This inspired Ngooi to use seasonal ingredients—such as the cherry blossom during spring—for the modern European-inspired pastries she offers at Tigerlily patisserie.

Witnessing her mother’s love of food and strong work ethic drove her to become a chef. “Seeing how she dedicated herself to her restaurant inspires me to put my 110 per cent into my job,” she adds. These days, Ngooi taps on her mother’s wealth of cooking experience by bouncing ideas on flavour combinations for her pastries.

For Hatch, he is looking forward to extending his father’s legacy with the reopening of Hashida Tokyo in April after a five-year hiatus. The family’s restaurant has been rebuilt into a five-storey building at its current location. While new features such as an R&D test kitchen are added, the heirloom Aomori wood fixtures from the original restaurant have been preserved. On the most profound impact his father has left on him, he says: “He has shown me that with passion, something can last for 50 years, and I hope to continue to do the same.”

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