Spring Onion Shao Bing at Ibid

Restaurant Ibid has spent the better part of a decade arguing for a category most of its diners would rather it stopped arguing for.

The category is modern Chinese: Chinese cuisine reinterpreted through a tasting-menu format, with the kind of technical refinement and small-plating discipline that the modern French and Nordic restaurants have made their working language. Or, more accurately for what Ibid actually does, Nanyang-Chinese-rooted contemporary Asian. The kitchen's own framing on its materials is broader still, a blend of multiple Asian food cultures held together by traditional and modern technique, drawing from regional Chinese traditions, from Woo Wai Leong's Malaysian-Chinese heritage, from his mother's KL-style Hokkien Mee and Sarawak Laksa, from Xi'an and Xinjiang spice grammar, from French and Italian discipline.

That position is unloved by category in Singapore.

Chinese fine dining here, by long habit, means Cantonese banquet: large tables, shared plates, the cuisine's existing rules intact. A 16-seat tasting-menu counter that asks the diner to engage with Chinese cooking as a chef's argument rather than a family meal is, for a meaningful share of the audience, the wrong shape of restaurant. Modern Chinese tasting rooms exist in Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai. Singapore has, until recently, not had much appetite for one.

Ibid is one of the few rooms in the city that has tried to argue for the format anyway. The argument is harder than it sounds, because the diner most likely to pay a tasting-menu price for Chinese food is also the diner most likely to want the banquet.

Woo has persisted.

The chef

Woo Wai Leong is a Singaporean lawyer-turned-chef who won the inaugural, and only, season of MasterChef Asia in 2015. He opened Ibid in May 2018, at 18 North Canal Road, a traditional shophouse in the Boat Quay conservation area. The restaurant's name comes from the Latin ibidem, "in the same place, from the same source," a deliberate nod to roots and origins.

That naming choice tells the diner what the kitchen thinks the cuisine is. Not modern Chinese as a category transplanted from elsewhere, and not Chinese fine dining as a banquet polished. It is cuisine rooted in a specific person's specific heritage, executed at a level that asks to be evaluated as cooking rather than as cultural reference.

Woo has put the hospitality position on the record more than once. The room is run on the distinction between customers and guests, and Ibid treats its diners as the latter. That distinction sets the register of the room. The 16-seat counter at single seating per service is calibrated to keep the meal personal. The chef is visible across the night. The plates arrive from the kitchen to the counter without an intermediary, and the format manages to be intimate without being claustrophobic.

The restaurant had its first closure in June 2021. Woo cited personal and health reasons at the time, framing it as a break to rest and plan next steps after what he described as a difficult stretch. The restaurant later reopened, and the format has held since.

The room

The interior is modern but not aggressively so: dark wood furnishings, restrained lighting, the counter at the centre with the open kitchen behind it. The room is sized for tasting-menu service rather than for casual à la carte dining. The counter seats face the kitchen, and there is no other layout. Service is calibrated to the format, paced for the courses and attentive without being intrusive.

That setup is the right one for the cuisine. A Nanyang-Chinese tasting menu asks the diner to engage with the cooking as cooking rather than as banquet, and the visibility of the kitchen makes that engagement more direct.

The tasting menu has run between one hundred and twenty-eight and one hundred and eighty-eight dollars across the restaurant's iterations, depending on configuration.

The opening sequence

The tasting menu opens with a sequence of small bites that introduce the kitchen's vocabulary. They draw from across the cuisines Ibid claims as references: the Tea Quail Egg; the King Salmon Kueh Pie Tee that reframes the Peranakan canapé through the modern tasting-menu format; the house Ibid Sourdough; a Lamb Tartare with Xinjiang spices on toasted brioche; the Tea Egg Soubise built on a pu-erh broth with gingko nuts.

These opening bites are the chef's first argument. Before any larger course has arrived, the diner is being shown that the kitchen's references are recognisably Chinese and Southeast Asian, but the format is recognisably modern tasting menu. The combination is where the cuisine has staked its claim.

That claim is harder to defend than it sounds. A diner expecting traditional Chinese fine dining will find the format too small-plated, too modern, too removed from the family-style sharing that Chinese fine dining usually requires. A diner expecting modern tasting-menu cuisine will find the references too specifically rooted in Singapore's regional Chinese heritage to be evaluated against a generic modern category.

The Spring Onion Shao Bing came with yeasted butter and laksa leaves, and one bite told you what the kitchen was reaching for.

Woo has, mostly, accepted that this in-between position is the restaurant's reality. The cooking carries the argument, and the format is his deliberate choice.

The Spring Onion Shao Bing

The Spring Onion Shao Bing was the kitchen's clearest argument on the night.

The plate arrived as a small composition: a single shao bing, the spring onion visible in the pastry, plated alongside a small dab of yeasted butter and a few laksa leaves. The shao bing was clearly Chinese in form, with the layered, flaky pastry, the traditional spring onion filling, the savoury baked register that the Northern Chinese flatbread tradition produces.

But the dish was not a traditional shao bing.

The butter underneath was yeasted, fermented in-house, more savoury and complex than the dairy a Northern Chinese kitchen would have used. The laksa leaves on the side were not a Northern Chinese herb. They were a Singapore herb, a Nanyang reference, a quiet pull of the dish southward into the Peranakan and Malay aromatic palette. The plating was more deliberate than a shao bing service would normally allow.

The first bite was the test. The shao bing's pastry layers separated correctly. The spring onion was sweet from the bake and slightly sharp from the herb. The yeasted butter spread across the warm surface, the fermented depth doing more flavour work than ordinary butter could have produced. The laksa leaves carried the aroma of a hawker stall across town, but in proportions that did not turn the dish into a laksa-themed gesture.

At its base, the dish was a Northern Chinese flatbread at the centre of a Nanyang-Chinese plate. The integration was the kitchen's quiet move. Woo had not abandoned the Chinese reference. He had not surrendered to the modern format. He had combined them at a level that read as coherent rather than confused.

By the second bite the construction had dissolved into the dish.

This is what a properly built modern Chinese course should do. The Chinese reference should be recognisable, the modern presentation should frame the dish rather than become its content, and the two should work together rather than against each other.

The Shao Bing achieved that balance.

The cuisine across the menu

The rest of the tasting menu runs the same logic at the same standard, with the level of integration varying course by course.

The Sarawak Laksa with tiger prawns is the menu's most direct heritage statement, a dish from Woo's family's home cuisine, served at the tasting-menu level his MasterChef training equipped him for. The Chawanmushi runs the Japanese egg custard through the Chinese kitchen's seasoning grammar. The Amberjack, with creamed spinach, carrots vichy, and beets escabeche, is the most French-leaning plate on the menu, where the Chinese reference recedes and the European technique leads.

The A5 Omiyage Wagyu with Xi'an spices is the menu's clearest Northwestern-Chinese pivot. The Aged Duck Breast with cold-brew coffee glaze is its most creative cross-cultural gesture. The Black Truffle Dan Dan Mian rewrites the Sichuan noodle dish at fine-dining proportions, with European luxury ingredients folded in. The Lotus Rice with foie gras and preserved liver sausage takes the classical Chinese rice-and-cured-meat format and treats it with French luxury grammar.

The desserts hold the same integration discipline. Hawthorn Sorbet with peach gum and yoghurt ice. Hibiscus Tang Yuan with red bean jam. Kaya Foam. Black Rice Madeleines with cold-brewed milk oolong, the last a particularly clean Nanyang-meets-French gesture, the madeleine form filled with Singapore's most distinctive baking rice.

By the end of the meal I had the kitchen's full vocabulary in my system. The chef is cooking a personal version of Chinese cuisine that does not collapse into a single regional Chinese tradition. It is the working integration of Woo's heritage, his MasterChef training, his French and Italian technique, and his Singapore palate.

The wine programme

The wine list at Ibid leans on white wines with the right balance of acidity and aromatics, lighter reds with the right fruit profile, a small but real Champagne selection, and a sake and Chinese spirits programme for the courses that benefit from those drinks. The pairings have been considered. The pours have been correct. The descriptions have been short.

That programme is the right one for the cuisine. A modern Chinese tasting menu needs a wine programme built around the cuisine's specific flavour profiles rather than around generic fine-dining categories.

The friction

The friction with Ibid is the friction of the category itself. The modern Chinese tasting-menu format is unfamiliar enough in Singapore that some diners do not know how to read what they are eating. A diner expecting traditional Chinese fine dining will find the format too modern. A diner expecting modern fine dining will find the references too specifically Chinese.

The restaurant has, mostly, made peace with this. The format is the format. The diners who value it return. The diners who do not go elsewhere.

The other friction is the price. The tasting menu at Ibid is, by Singapore standards, on the higher side for what some diners read as Chinese food. The price reflects the labour-intensive cooking, the careful sourcing, and the small capacity of the room. Whether it is justified is a personal judgement that depends on whether the diner has internalised the modern Chinese tasting-menu category.

The bigger friction is the wider category's slow uptake. Modern Chinese tasting menus do not have the same press orbit as French or Japanese tasting menus do. The work has been less visible to international recognition than to local industry, a category problem rather than a standard one.

What the restaurant is for

Restaurant Ibid is one of the rare rooms in Singapore that has tried to make Nanyang-Chinese-rooted tasting-menu cuisine a serious operating category. The chef has not retreated to traditional Chinese fine dining. The kitchen has not abandoned the Chinese references. The format has remained a tasting menu, and the room has remained sixteen seats.

The Spring Onion Shao Bing, the opening sequence, and the integration of Chinese reference and modern presentation read as one continuous argument.

The restaurant has been holding that position, with one mid-tenure hiatus, since 2018. Woo has been in the kitchen for almost all of that time. The argument has been made, dinner after dinner, at the same counter.

That continuity, against a city that has been slow to accept the format, is what the restaurant has to show for the years it has put in.

A modern Chinese tasting-menu restaurant that has held its position over years is rare in Singapore. The chef has decided the format is worth defending, and the kitchen has been defending it, dinner after dinner, in the same room, with the cooking doing the work rather than the rhetoric around it.

The Spring Onion Shao Bing was the evidence: a single composition with Northern Chinese form at the centre, Nanyang reference at the edge, yeasted butter doing the structural fermentation work, the integration done at a level that read as cooking rather than as marketing. In a city that has been slow to expand its idea of what Chinese fine dining can be, that is more interesting than the easier traditional options. Restaurant Ibid has gone on making that case, dinner after dinner, at the same counter.