How one young chef is spotlighting Hakka food by combining it with Mexican and European elements

At the recently opened casual-dining restaurant Martin’s Kitchen on Zion Road, you’ll find an extensive menu of pizza, tacos, ribs and churros. That’s because chef Cheng Wei Liang previously worked at restaurants including Super Loco, Ce La Vi and the now-closed Salt Grill & Sky Bar and Brasserie Wolf, so he’s channelled his know-how in European and Mexican cuisines into his menu.

But there’s one more aspect of the menu that’s interesting, and that’s the dishes that are “Hakka-inspired”.

Lei cha or Hakka thunder tea rice, for example, has been reinterpreted into a chopped salad featuring greens like preserved radish, endive and haricot, to be mixed up with peanuts, tofu and spices and drizzled with a matcha vinaigrette dressing.

There’s also a barramundi dish, with the crispy fish served in a “thunder tea” broth.

The pride of the Hakkas, yam Abacus Seeds, is reimagined into a dish of yam gnocchi, which, instead of potato, features yam that gives the handmade gnocchi its toothsome bite. The gnocchi are served with leek, shimeji mushroom, dried shrimp, dried ceps and sakura ebi in a secret sauce.

And then there’s Hakka Noodles, featuring springy handmade noodles with pork marinated in fermented tofu. The dish is served with a tingling hot sauce made with habanero and chipotle peppers.

Cheng has poured his heart into these dishes. Although he is Hakka, “No one taught me to cook Hakka dishes,” the 34-year-old said. His fondest growing-up memories are of the Hakka dishes his aunt used to cook at home. It was only when she died a year ago that he began to dabble in Hakka cooking. “It’s all from memory and research,” he said. And his motivation is “to pay tribute” to his aunt.

It was an uphill battle. Firstly, “Hakka cuisine is limited in Singapore… Not many people know about Hakka food and culture as we are a minority dialect.” The most famous Hakka dishes are the yam abacus seeds, Hakka yong tau foo and thunder tea rice, but few are aware, for instance, that dishes like stewed pork belly with preserved vegetables, pen cai and duck with salted vegetable soup have Hakka origins, Cheng said.

Secondly, Hakkas are purists when it comes to their food. Even Cheng’s mother, “a very traditional lady”, did not approve of his fusion dishes at first. “She said, ‘What is this? You are embarrassing the Hakkas’,” Cheng recalled.

In their culture, “Men don’t go into the kitchen – only ladies do. The ladies ask you to stand aside,” he said. Even fermenting rice wine was something he had to do in secret.

Eventually, though, his mother “came down again, with a pure heart”, to give his cooking another try.

Cheng’s earnestness is evident in the fact that at Martin’s Kitchen, “we only buy raw products and make 99 per cent of our food in-house”, even down to sauces like mayonnaise, he told us.

The Hakka noodles, for example, are laboriously made by hand using a wooden chitarra, a traditional Italian pasta cutter. This lends more texture to the noodles and helps them absorb the sauce better.

Other interesting dishes include “kong bak bao” tacos where tortillas wrap the braised pork belly instead of steamed buns; a “Hokkien mee” squid ink tagliatelle; and a dessert of Hakka mochi “qiba”. There’s even a Thunder Tea Cocktail blending whisky with artisanal rice milk, matcha, black tea and a savoury garnish of crispy silverfish and crunchy peanuts.

For now, more traditional Hakka dishes are beyond Cheng, but he hopes to learn more skills, like how to make Hakka yong tau foo.

His goal at Martin’s Kitchen is “to make Hakka food more accessible to young people,” hoping that through exposure to elements of Hakka cooking in a nice sit-down environment, they’ll be more open to learning about and understanding a culture that could slip away in time without its dedicated champions.

Martin’s Kitchen is at 56 Zion Road.