Ex-Dim Sum Head Chef At Shangri-La Hotel Becomes Chee Cheong Fun Hawker

Kerene (pictured above in 2014) has three decades of experience cooking in upmarket restaurants. She started out as a dim sum assistant at Hong Kong restaurant Lei Garden restaurant at the tender age of 18, eventually rising to the role of head dim sum chef after a fifteen-year stint. She moved on to Cantonese fine-diner Peach Blossoms in what was formerly known as the Marina Mandarin (it resides there till this day, even after the hotel’s rebranding exercise into Parkroyal Collection Marina Bay) before finding her spot in Shang Palace restaurant of Shangri-La Singapore, where she was the first woman ever to lead the dim sum kitchen there.

Photo: Shangri-La Singapore

“Everyone has their personal journey. For me, I felt like I’d spent enough time [in hotel kitchens] and wanted to do something new. So I decided to start my own business,” the Singaporean chef shares in Mandarin.

“But just because you’ve been cooking for a long time, doesn’t mean your own business will succeed,” she shares with a laugh. “I need to gain some experience so in future, I can grow [my business] from there.”

It was the “stability” from low rent and predictable foot traffic that led to Kerene’s choice of location at the industrial estate. “This place used to be full every day during lunch [before the no dine-in ban and WFH directive],” she says. The pair sank $30k into the biz for equipment, including fridges and an electric steamer.

Her launch was dampened by Phase 2 (HA)’s dine-in restrictions and work-from-home stipulations. Getting on a delivery platform like Grabfood didn’t help much, as the service fees – some $600 a month for islandwide delivery – and 33 percent commission rate eats into her earnings.

To supplement Cheong Fan Paradise’s income, she’s offering raw homemade siew mai along with her usual menu items – just Whatsapp her (number below) at least two days in advance. “Luckily, my business overall has only dipped about 10 per cent [thanks to online orders],” she says.

The stall’s signage makes no reference to her previous time spent in upmarket kitchens – she doesn’t don her chef’s whites here, and there’s nary a printout of any previous feature throughout her career. “That’s all in the past. When we started here, I was really focusing on getting the food right, adjusting to customer feedback and so on,” she says. “And to be honest, it was quite troublesome. I need to find the articles, then [print and] laminate it.”

She also hasn’t included any of her old signatures on the menu (like crab xiao long bao) – nor does she plan to, at least in the near future. “My signature dishes [at those hotel restaurants] were my signature dishes then. Now, we’re Cheong Fan Paradise. So we’re focusing on that,” she explains.

“Being a chef is about evolving and creating new things. You’ll never get bored – it all depends on if you’ve got the will to do it,” she says.

For the chef, it also meant a departure from the later stages of her career playing a managerial role in Chinese restaurant kitchens. “I used to spend more time planning menus or guiding the chefs [under my care]. Now that I’m cooking again, it’s like I’m learning everything all over again,” she says. That includes working within the confines of a single hawker stall instead of a gleaming, spacious stainless-steel clad hotel kitchen.

Another challenge she’s had to encounter after 28 years in the biz: customer service. “[Prior to this] I was always in the kitchen – I never had to talk to customers before,” she shares. “Manners are very important – even when customers ask very offbeat questions.”

Cheong Fan Paradise dishes up traditional, unfussy Cantonese fare. The highlight is Kerene’s chee cheong fun, made a la minute via an electric steamer.

She pools a paper-thin layer of rice-and-tapioca slurry on a wet cloth, before it goes into the steamer. Midway through, your ingredient of choice (there are five types) gets added so that it sticks. Thereafter, it’s gingerly peeled off the cloth onto an oiled, stainless-steel workspace and cut neatly into rolls before being doused in sauce.

However, after this story was published, a netizen who visited her stall mentioned that not all her chee cheong fun items are handmade. Upon further clarification with Kerene, she later reveals that only two of her chee cheong fun items on the menu are handmade from scratch: the prawn and char siew options. The others are factory-made from a supplier. “The texture [from thinner handmade chee cheong fun] isn't suitable for the cai poh topping. We're also selling the sesame and veg chee cheong fun at lower prices, so we bought [the rice flour rolls] from elsewhere," she explains.

Apart from chee cheong fun, there are a few breakfast-centric bites - like century egg congee ($2.80 a bowl) and cubes of fried carrot cake (see below).

We opt for prawns as our topping of choice (char siew, ordered from a supplier, is another option). The medium-sized prawns are satisfyingly plump – almost crunchy – with a pleasant bite. They’re fresh as well, which we think makes the dish quite a bargain for four bucks.

The rice rolls are silky smooth and just bouncy enough without being chewy. They’re thick enough to be picked up with a pair of chopsticks (no scooping your rolls into a spoon needed here), but enjoyably so. It comes with the usual yummy textural contrast from the crunchy fried shallots and spring onions sprinkled on top.

Though it’s already flavourful enough thanks to an aromatic soya-and-sesame oil drizzle, there’s also house-made belacan if you want to pump up the spice: a sweet-savoury mix of dried shrimp, shallots and garlic. Though it’s on the milder side, it packs an intense umami hit – very tasty, applied liberally on pretty much everything else we ate.

Kerene offers up a twist on the Singaporean-style chee cheong fun. Rice rolls, sans filling, are topped with salty cai poh (preserved radish) balanced against a piquant house blend of chilli oil, dark soya sauce and sweet sauce.

There’s a savouriness throughout that makes the dish a different beast altogether different than the typical sweeter local-style chee cheong fun. We enjoy it thoroughly, even though it comes without any protein accompaniment.

Minced pork belly, Chinese cabbage and chives are wrapped in wonton skins and boiled. It’s good enough on its own, but the sauce, another house blend, might be just a tad too vinegary. There’s nothing else aroma- or taste-wise to stave it off apart from a burst of spice from sliced chilli padi and minced raw garlic, which means it ends up dominating the palate.

Grated white radish is mixed into rice flour with dried shrimp and steamed before being deep-fried first, then pan-fried once more to order. It’s creamy and unctuous on the inside with a nicely crisp outside, but a bit too oily for our liking.

Lup cheong (waxed sausage), dried mushrooms and shallots make up the aromatic base of this relatively simple sticky rice dish. Enjoyable enough, but not show-stopping.

Don’t expect refined Shang Palace-style plates from this ex-dim sum hotel head chef’s hawker venture. It’s no-frills Cantonese nosh in an industrial canteen, but it’s good Cantonese food nonetheless. Zero in on the freshly-made chee cheong fun — that cai poh-topped version, which tastes as if chwee kueh and CCF had a love child — is pretty yummy.

Cheong Fan Paradise is at #01-87 Chop Hong Lik Restaurant, Blk 5023 Ang Mo Kio Industrial Park 2, S569526. Tel: 9278-7792. Open daily except Mon, 7am – 4pm. More info on Instagram. Available for delivery via Grabfood.

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Photos: Alvin Teo