For a chef who has been sending out streams of intricately plated Western cuisine over his 20-year culinary career, Douglas Tay doesn’t fancy having multi-course menus on his day off. Nor any Western food at all.
His venue of choice for our lunch meeting is Blanco Court Prawn Mee, a shorts-and-flip-flops type of eatery that occupies two crumbly looking shophouse units along Beach Road - a setting as unassuming as the man himself. “I’ve been eating here ever since I was in primary school,” shares the 37-year-old Singaporean, who heads recently one-Michelin-starred Osia Steak and Seafood Grill at Resorts World Sentosa as its chef de cuisine.
(Related: Read what our inspectors say about Osia Steak and Seafood Grill.)
“I was born in a shophouse near here, and I’ve come on my days off every week for as long as I remember, except when I’m travelling. I onced missed it so much that I took a cab down with my luggage the moment I landed at Changi Airport,” he laughs.
His meals when he’s not in the restaurant are alternatingly casual take-aways picked up on his drive home, return visits to his favourite hawker haunts, and the occasional midnight supper run to Johor Bahru with his “mates” (a term he enunciates with deliberate emphasis, in contrast to his distinctly Singaporean accent - joking later that it is among the influences he picked up from fronting Osia, a contemporary Australian restaurant).
“I've almost never used my kitchen at home, even though I built it like a professional kitchen, with a fire extinguisher, first aid kit and all. You’re so tired after work and it’s so late, you just want to shut off. It’s just like how most people think that if you’re with a chef, you’ll get good food every day. They are so wrong,” laughs the bachelor.
Fascinated by cooking ever since he started “disturbing his grandmother in the kitchen” as a young boy, Tay stopped going to school at the age of 14 - armed with little else than an unyielding conviction that he was meant to cook.
Says the self-confessed ah beng (Singaporean slang for street urchin) with a penchant for sports cars, recalling his early part-time jobs as an assistant in a curry puff factory and later, a cook at Pizza Hut: “My work hours grew longer than the time I spent in school. My family was not rich, and the income I got helped to lighten the load of my mum, who was then working three jobs to support my older sister and me. So I thought, why not do it full-time?”
Soon after quitting school, he got his foot into the doors of a Chinese restaurant through a relative's referral, where he did everything from bussing tables and dishwashing, to slicing up 400 pieces of fish per day. When his colleagues took a break between lunch and dinner service, his boss would drive the then-15-year-old to the former’s chemical factory, where Tay was assigned heavy lifting tasks. “I was young then and so desperately in need of a job and an income. I didn’t know I had any rights and I wanted to learn something - so I just did it,” he says, on why he didn’t protest.
Seven months later, he “still knew he wanted to cook, but just not Chinese food”, so he moved on to work in an American diner, before a friend offered him his first big break: a role as a trainee cook at the Westin Hotel, now rebranded as Swissôtel the Stamford. “I was warned that it will be very tough - and it was very tough,” Tay admits. “I was born in the Swissôtel kitchen.”
(Related: How Swissôtel's Jaan became a hotbed for Singapore's top chefs.)
It was at this career ground zero where he met the three chefs - Wilson Boey, Ivan Yeo and Otto Weibel - who he credits as key mentors. “Wilson was a very precise supervisor. If he asked you to cut a 1cm strip of something, he will give you a ruler and watch you do it all day until you get it right, because he wants you to do it properly. He is that patient, but also stern,” recalls Tay.
To this day, every ingredient of every recipe executed under Tay’s watch in Osia is weighed down to the gram, and all his measures are done with a ruler.
(Photo: Tay representing Singapore at a global cooking competition. Source: Facebook)
Obsessive compulsive much? “I am a little, I admit. Normally, I would not even accept this,” he states, deadpan, before adjusting the voice recorder casually - and diagonally - placed on the table between us so that it sits exactly perpendicular to the table's edge. So much for a little.
Even his own home, an executive maisonette in Bedok, is done up in a minimalist style, with just four tones - black, white, glass and stainless steel - and a scant collection of furniture, he reveals. “I only have a sofa, coffee table and dining table in my living room, that’s it. One time, my mum bought a piece of green-coloured furniture for my home, I threw it out and bought a grey version to replace it. I mean, it was green," he adds, searching your eyes for conspiratorial sympathy.
It was also under Boey that he found a renewed commitment to the cheffing profession - more precisely, from the moment Boey taught the young Tay how to make a consommé. “It was amazing - the food science behind the cooking process - watching something so cloudy achieve a clear watery consistency. At 16, I’d never seen anything like that before, and I knew right then that being a chef was what I wanted in life.”
The revelation was all the more pertinent given Boey’s generosity in imparting it, because hotel kitchens of yore were dominated by Hainanese chefs, “and if you were not Hainanese, they would not speak to you or teach you anything”, recounts Tay, who is of Hockchia origin.
Under the supervision of the hotel’s then-director of Kitchens, Otto Weibel, Tay was later transferred from the banquet team to the hotel’s Equinox restaurant, working his way up to the position of sous chef under mentor Ivan Yeo.
It was Weibel (pictured right) who would again gave him a leg-up in 2009, when the former asked Tay to join a restaurant he was consulting for with Australian chef Scott Webster. That restaurant turned out to be Osia - and it was just six months from opening.
“When he told me to go, I just said 'okay', because I respect him. He didn’t tell me the concept or the venue or the name of the restaurant, he just handed me a floor plan," he says.
"That was another breakthrough in my career. I learnt how to set up a restaurant, no one taught me how to do it. I had to figure it out for myself.”
Leap of faith straight into the deep end aside, Tay gleaned keen lessons in management and life philosophy through working with Weibel, he says. “If Otto he tells you to do something, he always makes sure it is something he can do. That’s a practice I still adopt today with my own staff. It’s very important; if you want your subordinates to respect you, that you cannot just talk. I believe that if you want to tell someone to do something, you must first be able to do it yourself.”
This means rolling up his sleeves to wash the plates and mop the floors at Osia on many occasions. He explains: “If you can do it, that means I can do it. Even if I’m in charge, it doesn’t mean I can’t do these simple tasks. In the kitchen, everyone is of equal importance, even the dishwasher, because without him, the restaurant can’t function.”
(Related: 8 Singaporean Chefs Fronting Singapore's Michelin-starred Restaurants)
Outside of the kitchen, everything is fair game for Tay’s drawing board, especially when it comes to menu creation. “My dishes reflect my lifestyle, what I see, what I eat. I can’t say they are the best but they tell my story, and it’s what I want my diners to know. I’ll never put any dish I am not 100 per cent sure about on my menu.”
Even a brief hospitalisation scare for an ongoing gastritis problem culminated in a new dish. Tay recalls: “As I was being wheeled into a room for my CT scan, I looked through a window into the laboratory next door and saw a test tube-shape centrifuge flask that I thought was very cute.”
Upon discharge, he went straight to sourcing for the flask supplier and even customised a holding rack for the flasks.
The resulting dish? The Seafood Ice Experience: a tray of seafood shooters dressed with six different flavoured granita, from quandong orange to sour apple and lychee martini. The latter two inspired by the cocktails from popular nightspot Velvet Underground, which he frequented in his younger years, grins Tay, adding that he no longer drinks as much for health reasons.
“Many chefs these days rely too much on cookbooks, but that rips away your creativity and you will become more and more lazy. That’s why I don’t want to become reliant on them," says Tay, confesses to having less than five books in his collection, mainly textbooks on cooking techniques rather than coffee table books bearing slick food photography. "I would rather have no ideas than to cut and paste someone else’s.”
But that is a lot of original ideas to have to generate, you quietly wonder, as he adds that he hopes to still be cooking in the kitchen ten years from now, ideally in a restaurant of his own.
Then, your doubt perishes as quickly as it surfaced, as he enthusiastically rattles off a list of new dishes from his latest menu change at Osia, entreating you to visit for dinner soon - even as you both get up to leave the table, just barely started on digesting lunch.
Quick bites:
Comfort food: “Blanco Court Prawn Mee. I like to have the dry version and drink the soup separately, because soaking the egg noodles in the soup adds an alkaline taste (from the lye water), and changes the taste of the soup. And pig's organ soup from Soon Huat at Serangoon Gardens Food Centre. My mum used to work in a kindergarten there and she would always buy it home for us. It has a very nostalgic flavour to me and it is very consistent. Now I eat it weekly, not always on the same day, and it is always good. It is my three-Michelin-starred meal.”
Guilty pleasure: “Butter. I love to eat butter by itself. Whenever I had to cut butter in the kitchen, I would eat knobs of butter while working, easily up to 200g of butter each time, on its own. I like the taste and the texture of butter, especially hand-churned French butter.”
Most memorable meal: “When I was in Primary Three, I had to go on a school excursion to the Singapore Science Centre. We had to pack our own lunch or buy from there, but we didn’t have money for that, so my mum, who knows nothing about cooking (she can’t even fry an egg properly, because she was so busy working to support us), woke up at 3am to prepare my lunch. It was a simple fried rice with cubes of luncheon meat and some egg, but until today, I remember every single detail of it, down to the brown container she packed it in. If you put your heart and soul into cooking, people will feel it.”
