Choon Hoy Parlor: Where nostalgic Singapore soul food is served up in spades

Choon Hoy Parlor is Chef Dylan Ong’s brash, sentimental ode to his mother and to the Singapore of the ’80s and ’90s, where nostalgia is served loud, proud, and utterly delicious.

There are restaurants that whisper nostalgia. Choon Hoy Parlor doesn’t whisper. It barges in, slaps you on the back, and starts belting karaoke at a family wedding while couple is still trundling down the aisle.

Recently uprooted from Beach Road and replanted in The Capitol Kempinski’s polished arcade, the eatery is a riot of mosaic tiles, red velvet banquettes, and floral exuberance — half old-school kopitiam, half flashy cabaret lounge.

And like its chef-owner Dylan Ong, it’s loud, brash, and unapologetically sentimental.

That sentiment is wrapped around his mother, Madam Ong Choon Hoy, the restaurant’s namesake and muse. The cooking here is pitched as ‘Singapore soul food’ — a phrase that risks sounding like marketing fluff until the dishes land on the table, redolent of hawker suppers, Saturday morning kopi breakfasts, and the kind of thrifty, ingenious home cooking born of necessity.

Take the Singapore Local Breakfast. This is bread from a Whampoa bakery toasted and then slathered with salted egg kaya and coffee butter that just happens to be topped with tea-smoked caviar. Reverential, evocative, yet playful.

Then there’s Same Same But Different Pork Satay, which disassembles the hawker favourite into a popiah meets peking duck hands-on affair with perfectly grilled fat-laced well marinated porcine chunks that makes you smile at its cheek and ingenuity.

Or the Oriental Charcuterie Board, which swops out your usual salami, Gouda and pickled olives for an Asian spin: think Chinese cured pork sausage, duck liver sausage, slices of waxed duck with preserved apricot, crispy tempeh, and even crispier house-made fried dough fritters.

But its when Chef Dylan drops the modern flourishes and reaches into the past that Choon Hoy Parlor sings. The Chye Ber, for example, is a ragtag stew made with vegetable and meat offcuts (here they use pig trotter) that is resourceful home economics elevated into restaurant comfort. The warming comforting bowl of Morel Silkie Chicken Consomme,  which is essentially a Cantonese-style double-boiled soup. Or the zichar favourite that’s coffee pork ribs reborn into the Mocha Prime Pork Rib that comes all sticky, dark, and indecently finger-licking good.

And the signature Claypot Dry Laksa, tangled noodles caught in a web of fragrant spice and seafood, is so heady you’ll scrape the pot clean with shameless determination.

The one dish that tugged most at the heartstrings — the Triple L Rice — A Lil Lard, A Lil Soy, A Lil Love. Just soy sauce, fried pork lard, and hot white rice, this is nostalgia in a bowl. It’s also the most affecting, a bowl that throws you back to the days when the family couldn’t afford better, but provided comfort and sustenance like a warm bear hug.

It is, of course, the cheapest thing here, but also the one that made me weep.

That emotional tug jars nicely against the restaurant’s bar, which boasts one of the largest baijiu collections outside China. It’s the sort of spirit usually reserved for terrifying toasts at terrifying banquets, but here it’s been domesticated into cocktails like the Jing & Tonic, which might just trick you into thinking baijiu is your new best friend.

Choon Hoy Parlor is not subtle, nor does it intend to be. This is Chef Dylan Ong cooking for his mother, for himself, and for anyone who grew up in Singapore in the ’80s and ’90s. You’ll leave here at least a little moved, or at the very least, extremely well fed.

Choon Hoy Parlor

Address 15 Stamford Rd, Capitol Singapore, #01-84A, Singapore 178906 (Google Maps link)
Opening Hours 11.30am to 3.00pm and 5.30pm to 9.30pm daily
Web www.choonhoyparlor.sg
Instagram @choonhoyparlorsg
Reservations book here