Ex-Candlenut Restaurant Chef Who’s Cooked For PM Lee Now Serves Awesome $85 Omakase Meals In Potong Pasir Flat

While private diners in Singapore featuring meals prepared by enthusiastic home cooks aren’t new, none boast a resume like Ming’s. Two years under the tutelage of chef Malcolm Lee at the stellar one-Michelin-starred modern Peranakan diner, Candlenut (Malcolm has dined at Mustard Seed, too) and three years at the now-defunct Goto, a posh Japanese kaiseki restaurant.

“I had to do prep work like cut leeks for a year before I was even allowed to cook at Goto. Initially, the Japanese chef [in charge] told me I cut veggies ‘like a housewife’,” laughs Ming.

The young man then spent a year as resident chef at the Singapore High Commission in Australia, cooking for dignitaries like PM Lee and Ho Ching. All that experience has given the At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy grad a quiet confidence — both in the kitchen and while introducing his dishes to his guests at the table.

His mise en place is obsessively neat and the pacing of dishes seamless. He's assisted by his equally calm, cute-as-a-button girlfriend/chef Wu Shin Yin, who was his colleague at Candlenut restaurant.

At $85 nett a head, you get eight to nine courses of refined, omakase-style modern Japanese-Singaporean food worthy of a fine-dining restaurant’s. The menu evolves each month, and there’s no corkage fee if you bring your own booze (white wines and sake pair best with the food here).

Ming hosts dinners for a maximum of eight people from Thursdays to Saturdays. A seat at his table is hot stuff — bookings are full till this November. “I’m doing this to hone my cooking skills while looking for a location to open my own restaurant. I want to set up an intimate 12-seater serving modern Japanese-Singaporean cuisine,” says the earnest chef.

“I chose this name because the mustard seed is a small seed that has the potential to grow into a large, sturdy plant”.

After three meals at his pop-up diner, each more satisfying than the last, we can safely say that chef Ming’s culinary skill is far past the seedling stage.

You know your meal at Mustard Seed is off to a fab start when you see the chef prepping these rotund beauties. Here, he applies egg wash to the plush dough.

The scent of these being baked is maddening. Almost every component in chef Ming's omakase set is fastidiously home-made — from these buns, to the noodles, condiments and even the fish cake in his Japanese-inflected yong tau foo.

Angmoh crab cake-meets-Singaporean-chilli-crab gravy and Japanese-style milk bun. A fistful of sweet Sri Lankan crabmeat bound by crusty panko crumbs sits in a pool of voluptuous gravy brimming with tangy roma tomatoes. So good, but the glossy home-baked buns are even better: buttery and feathery with a moist, creamy crumb. Swipe them in that spicy sauce and swoon.

A signature dish. These are like Lilliputian versions of plump, incredibly juicy fried chicken drumsticks, but swathed in a fragile, crackly coat of finely crushed Japanese rice crackers seasoned with an impossibly fragrant mix of turmeric powder, laksa leaves, and curry leaves. We’ll take this over fried chook any day.

Steak tartare given the Peranakan treatment. Cool, minerally chopped beef tossed with refreshing laksa leaf pesto, and served with crunchy, tiny home-made kueh pie tee shells.

Firm yellow noodles with the delightful spring of superb ramen. Paired with exceedingly umami, coconut milk-spiked curry. This is chef’s version of the northern Thai Khao Soi noodles, but lord is it so much better.

Warning: slurping this fish soup will ruin all other fish soups for you. A heap of grouper bones is oven-roasted, then barely covered in water and simmered with salted plum and veg to extract an intense elixir of naturally creamy fish stock grazed with toasted notes. In it sits a wodge of silky, pan-fried grouper and tender fish cake made by chef Ming himself.

A fun riff on the flavour-packed gravy in Michelin Bib Gourmand zi char joint Kok Sen’s famous chilli prawn hor fun. And it is on point: the robust rempah base is almost identical, except more refined and less greasy. In place of flat rice noodles, there’s al dente Koshihikari rice studded with briny toasted sakura ebi and an herbaceous lilt of chopped laksa leaves.

Ming's kaiseki training is imprinted in this oden and yong tau foo mash-up. The daikon and carrot are flawlessly carved and braised in a light ikan bilis dashi. There's also home-made tofu dumpling, ngoh hiang and pork-stuffed eggplant. Clean and comforting, though this isn't our favourite dish here.

Tender soy-soaked pork, which you roll up with condiments like cincalok, dried scallop sambal, and home-made achar with lettuce leaves and local herbs a la a mod Sin version of Korean ssäm. Pleasant, but it doesn't get our hearts racing as rapidly as the frog legs, fish soup or noodles.

During our meal here last week, the most delicious milk bun in all of Singapore was served with this delectable white curry and crispy seared snapper.

We don't really fancy doughnuts, but can’t resist these pillowy orbs. They’re airily light yet possess a satisfying crunch as you bite into them. Divine glazed generously with Ming's satiny kaya, the latter’s coconut richness cut with an intriguing malt-like hint from the Okinawan brown sugar it’s cooked with.

We'd happily buy truckloads of these doughnuts (and those gorgeous milk buns) if chef Ming ever opened a bakery.

A well-composed contemporary Japanese dessert of kumiage yuba (juicy, smooth soy milk skin — think an Asian version of burrata cheese), home-made soy milk ice cream, roasted soy bean powder, tempeh chips, rice puffs and a soy sauce caramel. "It's basically different products made from the humble soy bean," explains chef Ming.

Chef Gan's 'sous chef' at his private home diner is his equally pro, adorable girlfriend Wu Shin Yin, who was his colleague at Candlenut's kitchen.

Ming (in white, beside chef Malcolm Lee in the middle) worked for two years at the excellent one-Michelin-star Candlenut, where he mastered the art of making rempahs and curries which were "incredibly laborious" to cook.

Ming at the now-defunct Japanese fine-diner Goto (with chef-owner Goto-san) where he worked for three years. There, the 29-year-old made "dashi with water purified with rocks specially imported from Ishikawa", and "turned vegetables into continuous, paper-thin sheets using a technique called katsuramuki". Yep, he basically learned how to cook like a perfectionist Japanese chef.

Chef Ming’s unique experience working in both an upmarket Japanese and Peranakan restaurant is evident in his painstaking attention to detail required for the two cuisines. While not every dish is perfect yet, most marry sophisticated kaiseki techniques with robust nonya flavours in ways that are not just clever, but comforting and utterly delicious. The stylish setting in a sleepy HDB estate makes the private dining experience even more special.

And $85 for this calibre of cooking — which we daresay is better than at many overrated restaurants — is a steal. Savour it while you can, before this young man goes on to do greater (and inevitably more expensive) things.

For reservations at The Mustard Seed Pop-Up diner, visit https://mustardseedpopup.wordpress.com.