The Buah Keluak Beef Cheek

Candlenut is one of the more politically loaded restaurants in Singapore.

That sounds dramatic. It is, in fact, an accurate description of the room's daily working pressure. Peranakan cuisine, the restaurant's central commitment, is a heritage cuisine with strong cultural memory and a very particular community of opinion-holders. Every Peranakan dish at the restaurant is being measured, by some part of the room, against the way that dish was cooked in a particular grandmother's kitchen, in a particular family's recipe collection, or in a particular regional tradition. The standard is not abstract. People hold it in memory.

A Peranakan restaurant that decides to operate at a modern-restaurant level, with the plating discipline, the seasonal sourcing, the wine programme, the tasting-menu format, the chef-driven approach, is doing more than running a kitchen. It is making an editorial claim about the cuisine: that Peranakan food can be served at the same register as any other serious cuisine, with the same techniques, the same presentation, the same expectations of the kitchen and the room. That claim is contested. Candlenut has been making it, in the same building, for years.

I went on a Wednesday for the ah-ma-kase, the chef's grandmother-style tasting menu that has, since Malcolm Lee's earliest days, been the room's working format. The pun in the name is the menu's editorial position: Japanese omakase grammar, Peranakan grandmother source material.

The room

Candlenut opened in 2010 as Candlenut Kitchen, in a small Neil Road shophouse, before closing and reopening as Candlenut, and moving to its current Block 17A Dempsey Road address in 2017 under the COMO Dempsey precinct. Chef-owner Malcolm Lee has now also opened Pangium (2022) at the Botanic Gardens Gallop Extension, a broader Straits cuisine sibling, which means his attention is now split across two kitchens. The interior at Dempsey is modern but not aggressively so: dark wood tables, white walls, plates and serveware chosen to flatter the food rather than compete with it, restrained lighting that slows the pace of the meal.

There are small Peranakan-cultural visual cues, patterned tiles, the occasional table runner, a few Peranakan ceramics on a side wall, but the room does not perform the heritage. The Peranakan identity lives in the food. The room provides the modern frame around it. That ratio is the restaurant's first editorial decision. A more heritage-leaning room would have leaned harder into Peranakan visual elements, patterned tiles everywhere, brass lamps, a more decoratively traditional interior. Candlenut has instead kept the room contemporary and let the food do the cultural work. A Peranakan-themed interior would have turned the restaurant into a cultural exhibit. The current interior lets the food make the argument without the room overstating it.

The ah-ma-kase format is the menu's other editorial decision. It runs four courses, served communally, bites, soup, mains, dessert, at $108 lunch / $138 dinner. The communal serving matters. Peranakan food is family food in its native form, eaten around a table from shared dishes. A plated single-portion tasting menu would have stripped away that social grammar. The ah-ma-kase keeps the family-table format while imposing the discipline of a structured sequence.

The buah keluak beef cheek

I ordered the ah-ma-kase because the menu's centre of gravity is the buah keluak beef cheek, Lee's most distinctive dish and the kitchen's clearest test.

Buah keluak is the cuisine's most distinctive ingredient: a hard black nut that has to be soaked for days, cracked open, the dark fermented paste extracted from inside, and cooked into a complex sauce with a flavour that is sometimes described as earthy, sometimes as smoky, sometimes as faintly chocolate-bitter. The nut is, technically, toxic if not properly prepared. The preparation is a multi-day process. A Peranakan restaurant that gets buah keluak wrong is not a serious Peranakan restaurant. The dish is the entry test.

The Candlenut version replaces the traditional buah keluak chicken with Margaret River beef cheek braised long enough that a spoon will go through it, served in a dark sauce built around buah keluak paste, with chitose shishito on the plate and a small mound of rice on the side. The first taste was the sauce. The buah keluak was present at the right concentration, earthy, slightly bitter, with a depth that the nut's long preparation produces. The paste, on its own, sat closer to mole than to gravy: dark, almost metallic, with a small back-of-the-palate sweetness that the long cook had pulled out. The aromatics, galangal, lemongrass, candlenut, the chillies, were layered so that the sauce built across the bite rather than presenting itself all at once.

The beef cheek was correctly cooked. The meat had been braised long enough that the muscle fibres separated under the fork without falling into shreds. The cheek absorbed the sauce without losing its own beefy character. The chitose shishito on the plate added a small green grassy note that lifted the dish off its dark sauce-base. The rice was the supporting component, fragrant, long-grain, picking up the sauce without becoming mush.

This is the kitchen's hardest argument. The dish has to be recognisable to a guest who has eaten buah keluak at home for years. It also has to work as a modern restaurant course. The two requirements pull against each other. A modern presentation can lose the homely depth of the family version; a homely presentation can fail to justify the restaurant's modern positioning. The version on the plate, on the night I ate, navigated the tension carefully. The depth was there. The plating was clean. The Margaret River beef substitution made the dish slightly richer than a traditional buah keluak chicken would have been, which is the recognisable Candlenut shift: Lee almost always works in protein upgrades that move the cuisine's familiar dishes toward a modern restaurant register without erasing the source.

What surprised me, halfway through the course, was the small piece of preserved lime in the sauce that the kitchen had used to cut the buah keluak's weight. Buah keluak left to itself can crawl toward heaviness on the palate by the third bite. The small lime element kept the sauce moving. That kind of small calibration, invisible if you weren't looking for it, load-bearing if you were, is what separates the kitchen from a Peranakan restaurant that has decided modern means polished.

The friction the cuisine creates

The wine list is, by the restaurant's standards, well-considered. The pairings with Peranakan food are unusual, since the wine has to work against rich, spice-heavy, coconut-led sauces, and the sommelier team has built a list that includes the kinds of wines that can hold their own. Riesling with the right balance of sweetness and acidity, lighter reds with enough fruit to match the spices, the occasional unexpected pairing that works because the kitchen and the sommelier have thought about it. That programme is the kind of supporting infrastructure a modern Peranakan restaurant needs. The cuisine is not naturally a wine cuisine. The restaurant has had to build the pairing logic from scratch, against a cuisine that does not have a centuries-old wine tradition to lean on.

The friction with Candlenut is the friction of the cuisine itself. Some Peranakan guests will find the modern plating reductive: too pretty, not enough of it, the gravy should pool. Some non-Peranakan guests will find the cuisine richer or spicier than they expected. The community of opinion is fragmented along family tradition, regional preference, generational shift, expat versus local palate. The restaurant has to absorb all of these without compromising its central argument. The kitchen has, mostly, succeeded by holding to a consistent middle position, recognisable to traditional Peranakan palates while readable as a modern restaurant by non-Peranakan diners. That middle position is the restaurant's editorial discipline. A more traditional Peranakan kitchen would have alienated the modern dining audience. A more modernist kitchen would have alienated the heritage community. The middle keeps both audiences in the room.

The friction now is internal. Lee's bandwidth has been split since Pangium opened. A second restaurant absorbing the chef's newer ideas necessarily leaves Candlenut with the older spine. That can be a strength, since the menu has settled and the discipline is in place, or a slow risk, if the kitchen drifts into running the established dishes on autopilot while the new energy goes elsewhere. So far, on the visit I ate, the discipline was intact. The buah keluak was where it needed to be.

Candlenut is one of the few restaurants in Singapore where a heritage cuisine has been argued, sustained, and modernised at a serious operational level over years. The chef has not abandoned the cuisine. The kitchen has not lost the technique. The dining room has not collapsed into either cultural exhibit or generic modern restaurant. The buah keluak beef cheek, with its preserved-lime cut through the sauce, served in the communal ah-ma-kase format, carries the kitchen's argument.