Soya sauce represents me, says chef Lee Boon Seng of new Asian-inspired Imbue

“In the orchestra of a great kitchen, the sauce chef is a soloist,” Fernand Point is quoted in Larousse Gastronomique. If that’s true, then Lee Boon Seng, a chef who reckons himself a “saucier at heart”, appears to be not just a soloist but also a maestro, with not one but two restaurants under his name.

Imbue is the baby of the 38-year-old who’s also the executive chef at contemporary European restaurant The Spot. Newly opened at Keong Saik Road, Imbue is the culmination of Lee’s 21-year journey in the culinary arts and a celebration of his Asian heritage, with its inventive menu of dishes driven by contemporary European techniques, elevating humble ingredients and centred around Asian sauces. For this reason, the restaurant’s logo features grains of rice.

A standout main of squid sausage “claypot” rice, for instance, is Lee’s refined take on a classic homely dish: The rice, clean-tasting without char, is mixed with squid ink egg sauce, truffle, herbs and flowers, and topped with toasted puffed rice. It’s the house-made squid sausage that really stands out, with its deeply intense flavour and silky texture.

Another eye-widening point in the meal is the bread course, served in the middle instead of the beginning because Lee is well aware that filling up on bread right at the start is often too tempting to resist. He presents a “Malai” bread inspired by malai gou, the steamed brown sugar sponge cake commonly found at dim sum restaurants. The malt molasses bread, with its dark, nearly-black glaze, is served with salted ginseng honey butter, resulting in some seriously unexpected flavour that’s exciting, yet comfortingly familiar.

The snacks that open the meal are just as notable, especially the one-bite Drunken Chicken. A tender morsel of chicken, marinated for 24 hours in doubanjiang emulsion, pairs with shaoxing wine jelly, black sesame crisp and green Sichuan peppercorn oil in a spring roll cup.

“I looked back at the past 20 years of my experience, and wanted to do something that is more me,” said Lee of Imbue, which has been two years in the making. Since he’s spent most of his career training in and cooking with European techniques, “Maybe I can spend another 10 to 15 years cooking something that belongs to where I come from – my Asian heritage,” he told us. “I like the European kitchen setup – the positions, the accuracy. But, of course, I cannot lose the part of me that is Asian.”

SAUCE-MAKING TO DE-STRESS

Born in Kedah, Malaysia, Lee began his career in Singapore at the age of 17 at Equinox, going on to work at Osia and Curate at Resorts World Sentosa. Winner of the 2015 Global Chef Challenge, he was the youngest chef to be selected for the Singapore team. “I would call myself a Singapore chef because my career started in Singapore and I was trained in Singapore,” he said, adding that he’s spent more of his life here than in his native Malaysia.

He does recall, however, the excellent Peranakan cooking of his Hokkien grandma, who made very good laksa with her own hand-made rice noodles. “Unfortunately, she passed away without passing down the recipe.”

In his formative years, though, the thought of helming his own restaurant did not occur to him. Instead, he was focused on learning and perfecting the craft. Specifically, it was the alchemy of sauce making that fascinated him.

“When I started in training, 'saucier' was always a senior position,” he said. “I slowly worked my way up to it. I enjoy how diverse a sauce can be.” For instance, sauces can vary from ingredient to ingredient, and a combination of ingredients can “add up to be so tasty”.

The process is also therapeutic for him. “I enjoy making sauces because it takes time and makes me calm," he said. "Simmering it until it’s clear and shining; watching the bubbling; skimming it off. Service is always a rush, so during sauce-making, I enjoy the process. You cannot rush if you want a good sauce.”

And that “reflects my cooking DNA – my long journey as a cook has taken time, too.”

Allowing time to work its own magic is Lee’s core principle.

“Drunken chicken, for example, is a very humble dish, and chicken is always underrated, but through time – a 24-hour marinade – it can be very delicious,” he said. (He’s right, evidently.) “If you put thought and understanding in, you can produce something different.”

BUILDING A SAUCE LIBRARY

The French famously have their five foundational mother sauces; meanwhile, at Imbue, sauce-loving Lee is working on a collection of his own mother sauces, too, which can be built upon for different dishes.

One is an XO sauce, which is currently used as a base in a dish of grilled octopus with tamarind brown butter soya and cuttlefish XO sauce.

Another is his own take on a traditional Chinese “xian” stock “similar to dashi” that’s made from dried cuttlefish, dried scallops and kelp. “Xian”, he explained, is a flavour approximating to umami.

There’s also a demi-glace, which he uses, for example, in a dish of wagyu rump cap with daikon soubise and morel stuffed with macadamia tofu. The demi-glace serves as a foundation for 21-day aged fermented black bean, which lends a new dimension to the beef.

“At this moment, those are our sauce pillars, but we will never stop creating more. It's a journey,” Lee said.

There is, of course, a brigade of other sauces that give life to each dish and tie elements on a plate together.

In the squid sausage “claypot” rice, for example, the rice is cooked in a stock of chicken jus made in-house, with spices and seasoning.

A dish of horse mackerel served Peking-duck style, with a delicate onion potato pancake to wrap the fish up in together with vegetables, features a spiced jus made with tangerine aged for 30 years.

Some welcome news for diners without the time or energy to sit through a tasting menu is that dishes are available a la carte at dinner time, and even as snacks for those who want to grab a drink at the restaurant’s bar.

RICE TO RICHES

In spotlighting familiar Asian flavours and ingredients, Lee wants to see where he can take them. “Century egg, for example, is very humble and underrated,” he said, but he marries it with caviar in a beautifully presented snack of crab marinated in kelp paste, with creamy century egg emulsion and pickled ginger jelly.

The description of his cuisine could apply to Lee himself: Humble raw material refined through time, hard work – and a whole lot of sauce – to achieve something quite remarkable.

As a young cook, he would work twice the required hours, sometimes sleeping only two hours a day in the restaurant especially when training for international competitions as part of the Singapore National Culinary Team.

“It was really about gaining knowledge and just securing a job,” he said. “If I finished on time, I would have six hours to do nothing. I preferred to spend those six hours doing something meaningful.”

What’s more, back then, “We didn’t have smartphones, so we were very hungry when it came to seeking other chefs out, and even learning how to draw dishes, because we had to remember everything on the plate,” he recalled with a chuckle. If your chef showed you how to plate a dish and you couldn’t remember how to do it on your own, you’d get scolded, he recounted.

You’d get scolded for a bunch of other things, too. “Once, I was washing a hand blender, but I didn’t know how to do it, so I cut my hand and it was bleeding. I got scolded, and then my chef gave me an even bigger hand blender to wash.”

It was through enduring trials by fire, staying focused on learning and working his way from a modest starting point to a mastery of his craft that Lee became the chef he is today. That’s why, if he were a sauce, he mused, he’d be soya sauce.

Ubiquitous and foundational in Asian cooking, “I’ve loved soya sauce since I was young, and it is a very important sauce,” he said. “Soya sauce can also be made, for example, into a demi-glace, which is a very European sauce and creates a very distinct taste.”

You could even say that it’s the sauce of this chef's inspirations.

Imbue is at 32 Keong Saik Road.