Ex-Artichoke Chef Serves Handmade Pasta Like An Italian Nonna From His Parents' House

The lush setting for Yum Hwa's private diner, which kinda looks like the Italian countryside if you discount the tropical foliage and humidity.

Yum Hwa introduces us to his crew for the evening — his wife Xue Ting and a couple of close friends, one a rather senior member of the medical profession. They will help serve the evening’s dishes and keep him company in the kitchen while he cooks our meal.

It’s an evening we’ve been looking forward to for weeks. In the month or so since we first got in touch with Yum Hwa, we’ve gone back and forth many times, discussing what started out as a three-course menu, which he serves as part of his two-month-old private dining experience called Ben Fatto 95.

The former tax consultant-turned-chef had suggested a Chianti-style beef tartare as an appetiser, a pasta course of meat-filled tortellini in brodo (a rich broth), and either a grilled hanging tender of beef or braised chicken with vegetables as the main. Accustomed to overeating, we figured three meagre courses would barely warm our ample bellies. So, we asked for an extra pasta course since we’d spent the last couple of months stalking his Instagram feed, where images of his handmade pastas made us imagine he’d learnt the craft at the hands of an exacting nonna in the Italian countryside.

The real story is that the 36-year-old fell in love with pasta on a solo trip to Italy in 2016. Eating his way through Milan, Bologna and Tuscany, he was struck by how different the Italian dining experience was in the motherland compared to Singapore. “I visited little trattorias where I sat by myself and savoured each course slowly. The textures and flavours of the pastas were so different from what we get here,” he recalls. “When I came back to Singapore, I just couldn’t get the same thing, so I had to try to replicate it.”

Thus began his quest to make Italian food like he’d tasted in Italy. An avid cook, Yum Hwa immersed himself in online research, reading and watching YouTube videos about pasta making. A year later, he returned to Italy with his wife for their honeymoon, eating their way through Lombardy, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Sicily, and picking up pasta tools like a chitarra (a wired pasta cutter), brass crimpers, and a mattarello (a metre-long wooden rolling pin).

At about the same time, Yum Hwa began mulling a career change. Having worked for eight years as a tax consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he was contemplating a more meaningful career in cooking, which he’d always loved. A chance meeting with Bjorn Shen, Masterchef Singapore judge and chef-owner of Middle-Eastern-inspired restaurant Artichoke, helped sway that decision. “I’ve known Bjorn since primary school at ACS and I bumped into him at an event. When I told him what I was thinking, he said that if I really wanted to pursue cooking as a second career, I would have to do it full-time — otherwise, I would never know [for sure],” explains Yum Hwa. “So, I asked him for a job and he said yes.”


Photo: Bjorn Shen/Artichoke

A year after working at Artichoke as a line cook, where he learnt the ins and outs of a professional kitchen, Yum Hwa decided to start Ben Fatto 95 (the word loosely translates to “well-made” in Italian, while the number refers to the address). The dinners are held at his parents home (he lives in an EC in Punggol though), on a lovely wooden outdoor terrace flanked by a verdant hedge. His menus are priced at $60 and $80 for four courses ($80 will get you more premium dishes like steaks) with a minimum seating of four and a maximum of 10.

Yum Hwa hopes Benfatto will be an effective launching pad for a larger business. “I think this is a good way to gain traction in terms of getting people to know what I’m doing. The plan is to do this for about six months to a year, and then maybe open a restaurant or become a wholesaler and retailer of fresh pasta,” he says.

These supple navel-shaped pasta dumplings are gently stuffed with a filling of pork, mortadella (an Italian pork sausage studded with lard), prosciutto and cheese, before they are simmered in a tasty chicken broth. The cured meats gave the filling a nice saltiness, which one of our dining companions described as “like good pasta with a bit of Spam”. We love the full-flavoured chicken broth, which felt nourishing and comforting in equal measure.

This course comes with some show-and-tell, as Yum Hwa demonstrates how the pasta is cut on the chittara, a wooden frame strung with music wire (chittara means guitar in Italian).

Naturally, he makes pasta entirely by hand, kneading and resting the dough before rolling it out on a wooden bench with a mattarello, a metre-long wooden rolling pin he picked up in Bologna.

The result is pasta with a rustic chewiness and a fine, gravelly texture that helps the sauce cling to them. With the first few bites, we thought the pasta seemed under-salted compared to the robustly seasoned seafood. As we ate, however, the flavours came together to yield a lovely briny, garlic-heavy dish strewn with sweet, crunchy prawns and succulent clams.

Once known as the “butcher’s steak”, the hanging tender is a lean cut from the diaphragm of the cow that’s prized for its flavour.

Yum Hwa slow-grills the steak over charcoal, then brushes it with garlic butter and gives it a good sear over the hot coals before serving.

The steak turned out to be the highlight of our meal — the meat was so deftly grilled that it was a rosy pink within, with a beautiful caramelised, charred crust. The meat’s velvety texture and sweet char reminded us of char siew.

We loved the heady tomato-based broth rich with the brininess of fresh seafood like prawns, clams and snapper. The slab of grilled homemade ciabatta, generously brushed with garlic butter, helped mop it all up deliciously.

Three or four courses might sound Spartan compared to the multi-coursed Peranakan-style meals at most private kitchens in Singapore, but by the time we rolled out of Yum Hwa’s terrace, we were more than amply sated. The food is filled with heart and lots of good ingredients, and though it isn’t grub you can’t get at a good Italian restaurant, it’s the bucolic setting that makes the dining experience here special (and the fact that you can bring as much wine as you want without corkage). Yes, you’ll be seated outdoors, but three industrial fans keep guests cool even on the warmest of nights.

Photos: Ealbert Ho

Prices range from $60 to $80 for four courses, with a minimum of four pax and maximum of 10. To book, visit benfatto95.com.

Photos: Ealbert Ho

Part of the Wolfgang Lunch Experience — get this over the middling salad. It's silky, brimming with the essence of spuds and very comforting.

Ask for a table near the window overlooking the river at Robertson Quay. Meanwhile, sit back and relax while the warm servers in bow ties and apron skirts wait on you. This makes a great lunch date venue for epicureans on a budget.

Wolfgang's may not serve the #1 burger in town (mainly because the chef has a slight tendency to overcook the patties), but its version probably sits among the top five. Also, $18 for a prime beef burger with a superb brioche bun and house-made fries, served by attentive wait staff in a sleek setting? We'll take that over an inevitably disappointing one of the same price in a generic hipster cafe any day.

Burgers available for lunch only; or all day at the bar area.

#02-01 Intercontinental Singapore Robertson Quay, 1 Nanson Rd, S238909. Tel: 6887-5885. Open daily 11.30am-11.30pm. Last orders at 11.30pm. www.wolfgangsteakhouse.sg

If you don't want to burn close to $100, get the a la carte Rib-Eye Steak. We've only tried the regular rib-eye and not the cajun version, but judging from what we had — approximately 400g of bone-in meat that's deeply beefy, succulent and smoky, it's going to be quite the treat. This comes with tasty creamy mashed potatoes and creamed spinach (this was meh). Only available for lunch at this price — it's $128 for a larger steak at dinnertime. The lunchtime one is already pretty generously sized and feeds one hungry dude or perhaps two ladies with modest appetites, especially if they order a burger to share.

However, if you need something more substantial than a burger — you won't be disappointed by the dry-aged steaks here. There's a lunch promotion called the Wolfgang Experience Lunch Course, where you choose a main course and it comes with a seafood taster (this is so-so), a soup or a salad, two side dishes, a dessert and coffee or tea. This petit filet mignon costs $80 with all those add-ons. It's cooked medium-rare of course, and pretty yummy: clean-tasting meat that's slightly minerally and lean but soft.

The only difference between this and the Wolfgang burger is that the patty here contains chopped onions. For some reason, we prefer this — the onion adds a mellow sweetness and juiciness to the meat. All burgers come with chunky fries, made in house with Idaho potatoes, and onion rings. Generous, and both are pleasant to nibble on but are mere sidekicks to the burger.