Michelin star restaurants immediately conjure up the image of opulent restaurants with fine dining and highly trained chefs. But in 2016, when Hawker Chan Hon Meng received a star for his stall at Chinatown Complex Food Centre in Singapore, it changed his fate and encouraged hawkers like him across the world to aim high.
“When I was informed that my stall was a part of the Michelin guide, I didn’t understand what it meant. The next day, the line by the stall was very long and I knew immediately I had to change the way we functioned to cater to all the customers,” says Chef Chan, who was recently in Chennai at The Leela Palace for a Singaporean street food festival.
At the Liao Fan Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle stall, Soya Sauce Chicken rice is the signature. Chef Chan got the original recipe to thesticky soya sauce when he trained under a chef from Hong Kong. “As a child I lived on a farm in Malaysia and the way we used the vegetables, rice and chicken we had always inspired me. I also loved to eat different flavours. At 15 years, I realised that my future was in cooking, moved to Singapore and trained under a chef from Hong Kong. He had the recipe for the soya sauce chicken and I made it my own,” he adds.
