Nadine Tay: From Serving Tables to Rising Female Chef of the Year
She did not start in a kitchen. She started carrying plates out of one, part-time, as a student — and spent the next decade working her way back in. The route Nadine Tay took to a charcoal grill on Hamilton Road, with the dates and the sources attached.
Nadine Tay did not start in a kitchen. She started carrying plates out of one.
Her first job in the industry was part-time service work at District 10 while she was still a student, and by her own account in The Beat Asia’s January 2024 profile, it was standing in the dining room that pulled her towards the other side of the pass. That is a more ordinary beginning than most chef stories admit to, and it is the reason we think it is worth writing down.
What starting in the dining room does to you
Most chef biographies begin with a grandmother, a wok, or an epiphany. Hers begins with a section of tables.
We would not push this too far — it is our reading, not something she has claimed — but it is hard to ignore how much of this restaurant makes sense in that light. Service staff learn the meal as the guest experiences it: the gap between courses that goes one beat too long, the table that has stopped talking because everything arrived at once, the dish everybody photographs and nobody finishes. A cook who has stood through a few hundred of those evenings is working with a different picture of what a plate is for.
It shows up here as a menu built for sharing rather than sequencing, plates that land when they are ready instead of in a decreed order, and a house style that has never once wanted to be reverent. That is easier to design if you have spent time on the receiving end of the alternative.
Culinary school, and the chef who pointed her at it
She enrolled at At-Sunrice Academy. The influence behind that decision, again from the same interview, was Chef Anthony Yeoh — and she went on to intern under him at Summer Hill. Mentors get named in these stories and then never mentioned again; in this case the mentor is the reason there is a career to describe at all.
A decade in other people’s kitchens
What followed was the unglamorous part, which is also the part that does the work. HungryGoWhere, reviewing us in November 2022, credited her with over a decade of experience across Wild Honey, Cocotte and Wolf — three very different rooms, none of them Middle Eastern.
That last clause is the useful one. A decade spread across kitchens with nothing in common is a different education from a decade spent climbing one. You collect other people’s systems: how one place breaks down a delivery, how another sequences a pass, which shortcuts hold up at volume and which ones fall apart the moment a room fills. Nobody hands you a philosophy at the end of it. You end up with a large pile of borrowed methods and, eventually, an opinion about which of them were right.
Then Artichoke, on Middle Road, where both she and Jonathan Lee spent time before starting Habibi-san. That kitchen is where the Middle Eastern half of our menu comes from, and it has its own post — partly because the restaurant in question no longer serves that food at all.
December 2020 — starting one of her own
She and Lee opened Habibi-san at 55 Haji Lane in December 2020, which was not an obvious month to open a restaurant anywhere. By the time HungryGoWhere came through in late 2022, her role was described plainly: head chef, responsible for the grill.
That last detail matters more than it looks. In a kitchen built around charcoal, the grill is not a station you hand off. It is the thing the whole menu is organised around, and five years later it is still where the cooking happens.
2022 — the award
In 2022 she was named Rising Female Chef of the Year, an award given under the Welbilt Asia and World Gourmet Awards banner. Her reaction, quoted in The Beat Asia: “Winning this award is truly an honour and achievement! It makes the years of hard work, sweat, and tears all so worth it.”
We want to be precise about this, because restaurant awards get inflated in the retelling and ours has been. That 2022 award is the only one this restaurant has ever won. We do not hold a Michelin star. We are not in the Bib Gourmand list. If you read otherwise somewhere, it is not coming from us.
The philosophy, in her words
The most useful thing in that interview is not the award quote. It is this one:
“My culinary philosophy is producing flavourful food at minimal wastage. Use every ingredient and stretch its benefits to the maximum.”
You can read that off the menu if you know what to look for. It shows up in the small components rather than the headline ones — garlic crisps and taklia on the labne, tempura crumb and roasted sesame over the babaganoush, crispy shallots and shredded bonito turning up wherever a dish needs a top note. Those are the parts of a kitchen that get thrown away in operations that are not paying attention. Here they are load-bearing, which is also why the prep fridge is full of labelled boxes rather than mystery containers.
It is not an environmental slogan. It is a cost discipline and a flavour discipline arriving at the same answer, which is usually how the good ones work.
Why fire
She is direct about the attraction, and it is sensory rather than technical — she gravitates to grilling for what the same profile records as “the combined flavours and scent of smokiness and caramelised exterior”.
That preference is the entire architecture of this restaurant. The charcoal is not a feature we added to a menu; the menu is what fits on a grill. What that actually demands of the people running it — heat, timing, and the assumptions that come with both — is a separate conversation.
The least pretentious sentence in the file
Asked to describe what Habibi-san serves, she gave The Beat Asia this: “We serve food that we ourselves enjoy eating.”
Which is, in practice, why the Brussels sprouts have survived five years and two addresses, why there is a pork collar chop next to a mezze spread, and why the drinks menu says “Serious food, never a serious mood.” on the cover. Nobody sat in a meeting and reverse-engineered that.
You can read the rest of what we say about ourselves, or skip the reading and book a table — Tuesday to Sunday for dinner, weekends for brunch. If you would rather know what the name means first, that one is short.
The minimal-wastage philosophy goes a lot further than the garnishes — we take it apart at prep and sourcing level in how we run our kitchen.