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abundance of fragrant herbs. The chef had travelled from her home in London to stay with her family in Singapore in 2020. Somewhat bruised by the pandemic, which had seen her first solo pop-up cut short, she was left contemplating her next move with a deep-rooted feeling that she hadn’t yet found her culinary voice. But sitting with her family to eat the Nyonya


A


dishes of northern Malaysia, passed down from her grandmother, she found herself rejuvenated and with a mission to learn how to cook her ancestral cuisine and bring its punchy flavours to London. “I was back home, eating the food I’d grown


up with, but which I’d never really paid attention to,” she explains. “It really nourished me, and I realised I didn’t know how to cook any of it. I had never thought about how it was made – I’d just taken it for granted. After finding that comfort I went to my aunt and said, ‘can you teach me?’.” Two years on, she is relocating from a suc-


cessful residency at Market Peckham to open her first solo bricks and mortar site in Clapton, east London, serving the regional dishes that have been passed down through her family. When Lee asked her aunt to teach her to


cook Nyonya cuisine, she already had cheff- ing credentials. At the age of 23 she left Bristol University, where she had been studying eco- nomics, to enrol in Le Cordon Bleu London. On graduation, with the terms of her visa pre- venting her from taking a job in the UK, she returned to Singapore and began working in a Sicilian restaurant. The “romantic allure” of Italian cuisine saw her travel to Puglia, where she spent two years staging. She says: “The south of Italy resonated for


me. It was the seafood and those very sim- ple vegetable and chickpea-based dishes. It felt very romantic to have all this beautiful produce coming in every morning. I’d look around and the trees were brimming with the fruits and vegetables that we’d cook with each day. Everything was so simple, using olives from trees outside – it all made sense.” While embracing the ethos of those rural


Italian restaurants, Lee had a dawning reali- sation that there was only so much she could learn in kitchens that felt “about 10 years behind Copenhagen or London” and so she began planning her return to the UK.


www.thecaterer.com Lor bak


“We were cooking things London hadn’t seen before”


Back to Brit To gain a visa she needed to start her own busi- ness, so she secured a pop-up space and the first iteration of Mambow was born as a day- time café in east London serving the fresh


Sambal skate wing grilled in banana leaf Mambow


Chef patron Abby Lee Address 78 Lower Clapton Road, E50RN Opening Friday 24th November


From the menu z Otak Otak prawn toast, wild betel leaf, coconut cream – (red curry and kaffir lime


leaf spiced prawn paste) z Umai, tamarind granita, chive oil –


(Sarawak-style ceviche) z Kam Heong mussels, prawn floss, birds


eye chilli z Kerabu perut – (tripe and beansprout


salad, sambal belacan) z Gulai tumis – (Penang style tamarind skate wing curry)


salads and dishes she had learned to cook in Italy, with a south-east Asian twist. Two months later the pandemic hit and Lee


was forced to shut up shop, with a feeling that she hadn’t yet honed a style that was truly hers. She pivoted to meal kits, teaching recipients to prepare Malaysian dishes through online tutorials, before deciding to return to Singa- pore and take stock. While the kits had received rave reviews, Lee


describes a “low period”, cooking out of base- ment kitchens, interacting only with delivery drivers, unsure of where her career should go next. She explains: “I hadn’t really gone through any period of self-reflection, I was just jumping through different things to get


10 November 2023 | The Caterer | 31


bby Lee found her calling in a bowl of perut ikan, a Malaysian sour curry of preserved fish stomach containing an


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PHOTO: SARAH LUCY BROWN


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