TEDxSingapore Salon: From Grandma’s Kitchen
Where Memory, Identity, and Flavour Meet
At the TEDxSingapore Salon: From Grandma’s Kitchen, we discovered how food, memory, and art weave together to shape our identities and roots. This mirrors perfectly with Esplanade's The Studios 2025: Sustenance, which explores nourishment beyond the physical.Esplanade has been our partner this season as its Studios series serves as a fertile platform for arts-based social discourse. Studios' curatorial cycle has traced a thoughtful arc under the umbrella of LAND, with seasons titled Landings (2023), Fault Lines (2024), and now, the culminating theme: Sustenance. This has been a deep reflection on how land supports and nurtures all life and culture, and resonated deeply with TEDxSingapore. The Studios 2025 season features five productions that turn theatre into a sensory and intellectual inquiry into food, dislocation, climate, cultural memory, and resilience.By partnering with Esplanade and aligning with the Sustenance theme, our salon’s focus on food, memory, heritage, and social dialogue finds a perfect home. Esplanade’s Studio productions model how arts can spark meaningful conversation and engage communities. More crucially, it helps us reflect on urgent global issues, all while presenting compelling, experiential storytelling.A heartfelt thank you to Esplanade for hosting us in such a thoughtful space. Don’t miss their Studios events, the upcoming show Pickle Party—an immersive, participatory performance and workshop by The Theatre Practice where audience members become picklers, exploring food security, microbes, and urban development.These programmes are designed to nourish our cultural imagination, invite community reflection, and deepen our understanding of arts, identity, and sustainability.
On 19th July 2025, a crowd gathered for an intimate Salon in the Esplanade’s Black Room. Set against the stunning evening skyline, the Salon was a stirring celebration of heritage, imagination, and identity that crosses generations, shown through our food.
We had two culinary icons with us – Ariff Zin, Head Chef at Rumah Makan Minang, and Violet Oon, pioneering chef-restaurateur. With lighthearted anecdotes, stirring recollections, and a mouth-watering spread of kueh, kaya and chilli after, the chefs explored how memory is passed down not only through stories, but through the dishes that live on at our dining tables.
Adapting with times and breaking barriers with food!
Ariff shared about his growing-up years spent in a kampung, where recipes were recorded only by heart. He learnt through watching and asking; later adapting and adjusting. From nationally beloved dishes like beef rendang to hidden gems like balado and kulai (which he playfully quizzed our knowledge on), Ariff shared about the hidden labour of love that goes into preserving his cultural roots through the food he cooks, while also stressing that these traditions can evolve. As he remains at the forefront of his generational family business, Ariff’s contemporary thinking and modern culinary training continue to shape his approach to reinventing the old. His latest creation – the “Padang Burrito” – is a quirky, healthy reimagination of the classic nasi padang. Ariff hopes that the next generation can connect with the evolution of traditional food, while still retaining nostalgic elements, in this case, a punch of spice!
Violet offered an equally personal reflection. “Your dining table is your family history,” she said, urging every household to keep a cookbook. What appears to be a simple listing of recipes will one day become a collection of stories: a window to the past. She also reminded us that while Singapore is often seen as a culinary melting pot, our cuisines are in fact still kept distinct. Despite hawker centres bringing people together through shared spaces, there are still boundaries: Muslims, for example, may not eat certain Chinese dishes. Violet urged us to break these barriers and learn to adapt recipes. Indeed, Chinese food can often be found in Malay kitchens – a testament to cultural exchange.
When asked about the importance of honouring taste memory, the two chefs shared some advice. “Do not innovate,” they said, “if the person eating your food is longing for the original.” For many, food is a portal to childhood, and taste is where memory is most vivid. It was a reminder that even amidst innovation, retaining elements of our history remain crucial in our cultural preservation.
This edition of the TEDx Singapore Salon series highlighted broader questions about what Singapore cuisine and identity really is. Is it a unified one, or a mosaic of cultures that live beside, but not always with, each other? Violet and Ariff suggested that while Singapore’s food reflects diversity, it isn’t a seamless fusion – and that might be its greatest strength. Every dish carries the weight of its own story.
From Grandma’s Kitchen was more than a culinary talk – it was a powerful reminder that food is memory, identity, and a story worth telling again and again.
Written by Samantha Tan
Samantha is a 17-year-old student with a passion for pretty much everything. When she’s not busy finding the next cafe to grab a bite at, you’ll find her hovering amongst Kinokuniya’s Literature shelves searching for her next five-star read. She is happiest when holding her third iced caramel macchiato of the day.