Chef Ian Tan, a former part-time waiter, becomes the first Asian chef to win the World Young Chef Young Waiter competition with all-Asian dishes.
SINGAPORE – Chef Ian Tan owes a debt to disaster. The kitchen was in a roil: two cooks had called in sick, a thousand diners had to be fed, the waiter was to step up.
The pleasantly confounding starter sampled by this reporter was the first dish of his three-course Peranakan menu that scored full marks at the awards, prompting one judge – celebrity chef-owner Adam Handling, of London establishment Frog – to declare it fit to eat every day, Tan told The Straits Times.
At 16, not terribly concerned with his O levels and under the influence of popular boys’ anime Naruto, he joined a ramen joint as a waiter, determined to exploit his staff meals to the fullest. An eight-month stint at one Michelin star fine dining restaurant Seroja would help him over that hill. He said: “When I joined, they were new. I was part of the founding team that earned the first Michelin star.”There, cooking the cuisine of the Malay Archipelago, he was “transformed”. He is indebted to the team who taught him the limits of recipes, the cornerstone of lauded Italian and French cuisine, and turned his gaze to the cardinal points of Asian cooking – technique and produce.
Magdalene Tang, chef owner of Mag’s Wine Kitchen on Keong Saik Road and a judge of the local round of the World Young Chef contest, said of their first meeting in the competition: “Ian was odd. He was just weird.”
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