In a city awash with Peranakan restaurants, the newly-opened Indigo Blue Kitchen is somewhat of an anomalous situation. Not only is the head chef, Chong Jun Xiang, himself not a baba (Peranakan man), the restaurant’s Peranakan owner, Desmond Lim, is not a cook but the co-founder and director of Singapore’s foremost French fine-dining restaurant Les Amis.
Unlike at Les Amis where the head chef has free rein to dictate the menu, Indigo Blue Kitchen is Lim’s passion project where he personally curates the menu and approves the dishes, leaving the chef to execute. Trained in European gastronomy and an alum of Gattopardo, Alma and 1880, Chong, 29, is the workhorse designate who is expected to bring to fruition the hearty flavours that Lim grew up with and scales it to a bigger audience at Indigo Blue Kitchen.
And how does Chong fare?
Ayam buah keluak
Ayam buah keluak ($24), the unofficial barometer for the greatness of Peranakan restaurants, arrives with three tender pieces of chicken alongside three pieces of plump Indonesian black nut, each brimming with dark and chocolaty kernel puree that has been dug out of its shell, wok-fried with rempah and then stuffed back in. The thick gravy that the chicken pieces wade in, itself rich with savouriness and aromatic spices – as well as traces of buah keluak – that the poultry and black nuts are braised in.
More at https://bibikgourmand.com/2019/08/23/indigo-blue-kitchen-singapore-by-the-les-amis-group/
