A Conversation About Singapore's Culinary Scene With The Duo Behind Senang Supper Club
One of the most refreshing and sophisticated dining concepts to have emerged in Singapore this year is Senang Supper Club, a regionally focused dining series that involves two outliers of the F&B scene. The main architect is the botanical design studio This Humid House while its first guest chef has been the baker, cookbook author and Southeast Asian food researcher Bryan Koh. Just what do these cultural mavericks think would give this glorious food city of ours even more bite?
Step inside a Senang Supper Club session and the first thing that gets you is likely the decor. On the far end of the room is a floor-to-ceiling oil painting of a lush forested landscape that we’re told used to hang at the Waterfall Cafe in the Grand Hyatt – now undergoing a massive renovation – here. There are display cabinets filled with vessels, objects and other curios with a distinctively East Asian or Southeast Asian touch. The main event however is without doubt the long central table that’s festooned with equally exotic, thoroughly mesmerising botanical arrangements composed mostly of flora also native to the region.
The venue is the headquarters of This Humid House (or THHHQ as displayed on the sign on the door) – the luxury botanical design studio founded by the architecture-trained John Lim five years ago that’s known for its artful, unorthodox arrangements that spotlight plants from this part of the world. What guests have also gathered here for though is the food.
John Lim (left), founder of the botanical design studio This Humid House, is bringing his bold yet refined taste to the dining scene with Senang Supper Club – a dinner series focusing on regional cooking. Started in August, the project is meant to surprise and excite both the palate and eye of those who visit while providing a platform “to let the work of chefs and even ambitious home cooks shine”. Its first guest collaborator is the cookbook author and Southeast Asian food researcher Bryan Koh (right), known for his intrepid exploration of underrated or misunderstood cuisines from the region.
Started four months ago and held ad hoc (keep track via its namesake Instagram account), Senang Supper Club – or SSC for short – is This Humid House’s foray into dining. It gets its name from Jalan Senang in Kembangan – the road THHHQ is located on – and was born more out of happenstance than anything, says Lim. “We moved into this new office space this January and have this big table. I’ve always loved food and we had a few weekends open in August because it was the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival, and I’ve also always wanted to work with Bryan in a meaningful way so I called him up and luckily, he said yes!”
The aforementioned Bryan is Bryan Koh, co-owner of the homegrown bakery Chalk Farm – beloved for its elegantly luscious renditions of Nonya kuehs and pastries – and the author of five critically acclaimed cookbooks that delve deep into often underrated and misunderstood cuisines close to home. His latest published this April, for example, is Among Ixoras: A Collection of Recipes From My Kitchen in Singapore, while previous releases cover the fare of Borneo, East Malaysia, Philippines and Myanmar.
Senang Supper Club's 'Among Ixoras' dinner in September drew inspiration from the visual language of markets and food stalls in Southeast Asia.
The 16 dinners SSC has hosted so far – including private bookings – draw from all of them. The menu for the first few dinners, for example, included the likes of ultra-smooth pig trotter jelly paired with melt-in-your-mouth peanut tofu – a dish from the town of Kengtung in Shan State, Myanmar; and laing – a delicate yet comforting Filipino stew of dried taro leaves braised in coconut milk with shrimp and green chillies. True to the THH spirit, everything is plated and served on vintage glassware (they’re sourced from eBay) to “bring on the feeling of old-world hospitality” and complete the visual feast.
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Says Lim: “I knew if we were to do dinners, they should be an extension of THH’s exploration with regional flora and hence the focus on regional cooking. Bryan is our first guest collaborator whose stint has ended up turning into an extended residency. There are these parallels with what he does as an observer of food and culture, and what we do at This Humid House with flora and culture.”
Here, Lim and Koh chat about their partnership; our burgeoning private dining scene; and the state of F&B in Singapore and its relationship with the region.
Tableware and earthen vessels now take pride of place at the headquarters of This Humid House, which also serves as the venue for the intimate dinners of Senang Supper Club.
Senang Supper Club (or SSC) is described on its website as “a dinner series devoted to regional cooking”, which some might find modest considering how each of your own body of work is so sophisticated to the point of sometimes being cerebral.
John Lim (JL): “I always think it’s best to keep things matter of fact. There’s a lot of thought and heart that go into making this supper club experience meaningful through the ambience, food and hospitality, but I don’t assume that everyone will find it meaningful. For me, whether something is pleasurable or enjoyable is clear-cut – either it is or it isn’t – and the main point of SSC is to have people enjoy themselves. At the same time, I don’t want people to come with any expectations.”
Bryan Koh (BK): “Yeah, because then you’ll box yourself in. This is supposed to be very fluid.”
JL: “Yes, another reason why I keep the description of SSC bare bones is because perhaps there’ll be another collaborator after Bryan who might have a very different point of view from him. I’d like for it to allow for exploration at its broadest. You’d be right to say that this is a cultural project. It’s important to me that we keep SSC special and fun by doing it when we can with whom we want to collaborate with and just let it be the best it can be. We’ve been careful not to put pressure on it.”
The grand botanical installations, for which This Humid House is renowned, are incorporated into the experience at Senang Supper Club.
John, tell us more about what made you reach out to Bryan of all people to help you kick off SSC.
JL: “I had no other people in mind. He’s such a perfect fit (with his focus on food and ingredients from the region) and has this interest in food and culture that is very rare – he’s exploratory almost in a documentarian way, very intrepid and possesses no judgement. I think for most people, our range of flavour profiles – what we deem as delicious – is actually very narrow, but I think that if Bryan was to take a personality test, he would fall within that zone of people who are extremely open. I think it also comes with the path that he’s carved out for himself. If you run your own food business or are a chef, your concerns would be a lot different – does this taste good? Does this suit my audience? That’s not the case with Bryan and I appreciate this about his food and work.”
BK: “I think there’s a great synergy between the both of us. The atmosphere that This Humid House has created for SSC does suit the kind of food that I wish to provide. It adds a lovely texture and just makes the experience more immersive with people feeling like they have entered another realm for just a few hours. I like that.”
To date, there have been 16 Senang Supper Club sessions with each a logistics-heavy operation to ensure each service measures up to This Humid House’s famously exacting eye. Helping to run the show are (from left) This Humid House (THH) floral designers Andra Chua and Franklin Dumaoal; THH founder John Lim; chef Bryan Koh – SSC’s first collaborator whose stint has turned into an extended residence; THH’s Sook Tan, who oversees service and admin; and THH photographer and archivist Isabelle Hansen. The humorous group chose to be photographed for this story with a table full of bean sprouts to represent how “a lot of prep goes into Southeast Asian cuisine”. (And, no, no produce was wasted as it was split up for individual consumption or, in the case of Koh, R&D.)
So John’s team takes care of the decor and Bryan’s the cooking?
BK: “It is John’s space so before the menu was launched, we had a tasting here to make sure that everything would be alright. Things such as the layout and the planning are all him. I brought the dishes in, but how they would be plated was a huge consideration because that would ultimately affect the flow of operations. For every course, two people share a riser of dishes so everything we produce in the kitchen has to be agreeable to this format.”
JL: “With a lot of Asian cooking, dining is very much family style. At the same time, there’s a kind of focus that comes with things that are plated individually that you don’t get with family-style dining. We eventually figured out that functionally, if we were to break everything down into servings for two, we could get the effect of both: a sense of communal dining because everyone can see each other and the exclusivity of having one’s own portion. Presenting the food on a plate riser also creates a bit of a ceremonial effect.”
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Which comes first at Senang Supper Club: food or the flowers?
BK: “For me, it’s obviously the food. The flowers are important, but we get the food down first. When we talk, the menu is what comes up first and discussion about the decorations comes after.”
JL: “For Singaporeans, it’s always the food. If the food is not good, no matter how nice the flower arrangements, they won’t come back. Botanical design is not always necessary to a dining experience. I tell my clients that plants and flowers are not the solution to everything.”
Not your average themed dinner, a Senang Supper Club experience sees This Humid House (THH) creating some of its most colourful, regionally inspired botanical arrangements to complement the food. The tablescape for its Halloween edition, for example, featured bunches of red bananas (get the local supernatural reference?) while parts of the banana plant – flower intact – hung like a snaking vine overhead. On the menu: fare not always for the fainthearted, but always exquisitely executed, including a raw Lao beef salad that contains extract from beef organs and “witches’ brew” or kullia – a burnt coconut seafood stew that comes black. Says THH founder John Lim: “It’s always about the food first.”
These botanical arrangements do make up a key element at your dinners. Tell me more about how you come up with them.
JL: “This is the fun part. There are things in the Southeast Asian playbook that we are dying to do, but don’t have the opportunity to, so with Senang Supper Club, we (This Humid House) are like our own client. For example, we’ve always wanted to incorporate bamboo shoots onto table displays, which might seem kind of nuts. Many people don’t seem to realise what they look like whole: They look like witch hats! But then with them being a popular ingredient in Myanmarese food (which Koh includes in the SSC menu), it makes sense… Also, many people seem to think flower arrangements are a Western thing, but here we borrow from the visual language of the local market and other signifiers that might be familiar to people here. See, for example, how we sometimes stack bowls not unlike at a nasi padang store for the tablescape. The hope is that people who come will discover these little touches for themselves and feel seen, and that the experience will be meaningful to them.”
What are your opinions on private dining, which has gotten extremely popular since the pandemic and a category that I suspect many people might file SSC under?
BK: “The concept of private dining has become so broad. If I ever tell people SSC is a private dining experience, I’m always asked in response to elaborate: Is this at someone’s home? Is it a collab with a restaurant? That certainly means that people don’t actually know what private dining is and this is possibly because it’s come to represent so many different ideas now. I much prefer using the term ‘dinner series’ to describe SSC because it gives the sense of the ephemeral – like this is an installation. Sadly I am guilty of not eating out as often as I should (so I can’t say I’ve had many private dining experiences), but I know of friends who do an exceptional job of hosting them. One of them is Vasunthara Ramasamy who runs Cutlery Optional that specialises in South Indian food and it’s phenomenal.”
JL: “I find private dining a very fascinating experience, especially if the venue is where the business owner actually lives because, as a diner, you see everything.”
BK: “Yeah, sometimes you don’t really know where to look… I don’t know about you, but when you enter someone’s private domain and you’re going there for food, you kind of tend to look around and wonder if any of this is going to inform the dining experience for better or for worse. Few would admit it, but we all talk about this after.”
Southeast Asian flavours take center stage at Senang Supper Club.
What do you think private dining has done for the Singapore F&B scene though?
JL: “You know, I am so grateful for all these experiences because they’ve added so much rhythm and contrast to our scene. For this foodie city and people in this business, it’s refreshing – and home cooked food is just different... You know how when you go to your aunt’s house to eat for Chinese New Year and everyone says the food is better than that in a restaurant? For sure it is because no restaurant can spend as much time on it. Private dining is giving people food that they cannot get outside.”
BK: “One thing I really appreciate about Senang Supper Club is that while a lot of planning is required for an event to go smoothly and there are certain physical constraints – the kitchen is not my kitchen, but This Humid House’s pantry and I’ve to respect these boundaries (Koh does most of the food prep for SSC off-site) – there are no politics and power structures to navigate. I’ve learnt from my experiences working on pop-ups that in a restaurant setting, these can exist even though you’re a guest chef who’s been invited to work on site… In such situations, you’ve to find a way to insert yourself into the environment and this can make it very challenging for a chef to operate and run a successful meal service.”
What are your thoughts on the general state of F&B in Singapore today?
BK: “I’ve got deep admiration for people in the business because I’ve been made increasingly aware of the kind of parameters within which they must operate. Running F&B in Singapore is incredibly expensive not just because of the licences that need to be secured, but also manpower – human resources is a big issue – and the cost of ingredients keeps going up. Given the current economic uncertainty, it’s very hard to run those ships and I don’t know how they do it. You need nerves of steel to be able to navigate these waters. I’m a huge fan of Marcus Leow of Naked Finn who also now does (the pop-up restaurant) Focal as well as Desmond Shen who’s behind Alter Native. There are also places that I’ve not been to myself, but that I know are doing a wonderful job – for instance Mustard Seed and Seroja – because I know people who have visited as well as people who have worked for them and say they are remarkable.”
JL: “And Bryan knows very serious food people.”
BK: “Another place is Le Bon Funk, which doesn’t do local stuff, but it’s a regular of mine: simple food done very well. I think they’re great.”
Part of Senang Supper Club’s charm is its old-world brand of hospitality that’s enhanced by the setting: The serving ware is vintage and sumptuous while the main backdrop is a floor-to-ceiling oil painting of a forested landscape that used to hang at the Waterfall Cafe in the Grand Hyatt here.
John, what do you think about our F&B scene?
JL: “I’m crazy about Thien Loong Vietnamese Food, this hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Jalan Besar that looks so bad, but is so good. They have the best summer rolls and crab noodles. My dad likes to try new places so I eat out quite a bit, but I single out Thien Loong because it’s so authentic and not trying.”
BK: “I know what you mean. I went to a Chinese restaurant in Geylang that had disastrous ratings, but the food was so good that it expanded to the unit next door. It had a very funny name, Good Come Again, but it’s no joke. It was really very good.”
JL: “You know what it is? For one restaurant to stand out so remarkably in a sea of so many, it has to be the food. I discovered Thien Loong through Grab – the first time I ordered from it and found it good, I thought it was a fluke, but when it was still good the second time, I realised, sh*t, this is really good. The stuff is simple, but it’s perfectly balanced and you don’t get a MSG hangover. As a food city, Singapore is so sophisticated because Singaporeans are so well travelled and have very exposed palates. This makes it very hard to impress. To be able to do so, you either make things even more sophisticated, which I think can be an end in itself, or you pare things back to their most authentic form.”
BK: “I’ll add that we’re sophisticated as a food city also because we are diverse. When you go to Shanghai, for example, you get wonderful Chinese restaurants of course, but I don’t think you’d get very good Indian, Malay or Thai food easily. Here, we’ve got a nice balance of everything.”
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Is there anything you’d like to see change in the local F&B scene?
JL: “That’s a very tough question, but I don’t think it’s a lack of talent. Instead, it’s high rents and manpower shortages that make experimentation prohibitive… And I think there is room for authentic perspectives on food that don’t borrow from tropes such as, say, farm-to-table dining, which isn’t our reality here in Singapore.”
BK: “I agree… I also think it would be nice to see more restaurants focusing on the regional cuisines of Southeast Asia. Our knowledge of Southeast Asian food is actually quite limited, seldom extending beyond certain areas in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. That always baffles me because the region is incredibly rich and diverse, culturally and gastronomically. My first two books were on Philippine and Myanmar food, and I only realised while researching them how unpopular these foods are here. It seems that for many, Philippine food equates to vinegar and Myanmarese food equates to oil, but there is so much more to either than one can possibly imagine. I have been researching both cuisines for over a decade and there is still so much to learn”
Photography Lawrence Teo Art Direction Jonathan Chia Hair Tan Eng Chong/Kizuki+Lim Makeup Keith Bryant Lee and Wee Ming, using Dior Beauty
An adaption of this article first appeared in the Dec 2023 This Great City Edition of FEMALE