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Culture Kitchen gets a Flying Start

Jetstar’s third biannual Flying Start grant has been awarded to Culture Kitchen, an organisation that connects Singapore to the world through food –

highlighting migrant communities and their cuisine in a series of pop-up events. This month, 2015’s first Culture Kitchen kicks off after National Day, celebrating

two aspects of Singapore’s national identity: diversity and food

t h e P e n i n S u l a P l a z a b u i l d i n g rises, tall and sepia-toned, out of a busy crossroad in Singapore’s central business district. For most, the 30-storey tower is the place to buy anything and everything photography-related. But for Singapore’s 200,000 strong Burmese community, the building is Little Myanmar. Here, travel agents specialise in Burmese bus routes, minimarts trade in the nation’s ubiquitous fish paste, ngapi, and one-person shops blend and roll the betel-nut concoctions that are a Myanmar favourite.

For Adrianna Tan, a not-for-profit founder and start-up entrepreneur, Peninsula Plaza was an opportunity. This vertical Yangon offers a glimpse into the microcosm of Singapore’s Burmese community, and its mouth-watering restaurants, minimarts and hawker shops seemed like a way to bring people together over one of Singapore’s favourite obsessions: food.

Tan (pictured at right) is the founder of Culture Kitchen, an organisation that promotes cultural exchange and connects Singapore to the world through cuisine. She is also the recipient of Jetstar’s third Flying Start grant, a biannual program that awards Singapore-based not-for-profit and community organisations with S$10,000 in cash and S$10,000 in Jetstar flights.

Culture Kitchen was founded in 2013, partly inspired by Tan’s post-university travels. Whether it was a home-cooked meal with a family in Yemen or an encounter with locals at the market, Tan says the power of food allowed her to “form an instant bond” with anyone, anywhere on her whirlwind tour of the world.

“I wanted to do something simple, which is bringing people closer together,” she explains. “And I thought this was something we could replicate in Singapore, because we have so many nationalities living in a small country.”

Singapore has long prided itself on its multicultural social fabric

W o r d S a l e S S a n d r a b e r g a m i n P h o t o S c o u r t e S y o F c u l t u r e K i t c h e n

“I wanted to do something simple,

which is bringing people closer together”

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Jetstar.com 55

08 2015

and the harmony between the many ethnicities that inhabit the Lion City. Combine this with a love for food, a national cuisine that stems from diversity and, as Tan says, a population of adventurous eaters, and you have the perfect recipe for an organisation like Culture Kitchen.

In September of 2013, Tan and a team of volunteers held the first pop-up event or “kitchen,” themed around North Indian biryani and Singaporean nasi beriani – one dish with two interpretations – in an activity that brought together locals and Bangladeshi workers.

Since then, Tan says, the focus has shifted to highlighting specific ethnic groups, beginning with Singapore’s Burmese community and the Peninsula Plaza.

“It was striking that people would go to this building to buy a camera but they wouldn’t go upstairs to eat,” she says. “It’s not because they didn’t want to, but because they didn’t know what to buy.” The Burmese Culture Kitchen event included a cultural tour of the Peninsula Plaza building and a screening of a Burmese

documentary, along with the showcase of Myanmar cuisine.

The first Culture Kitchen event of 2015 will take place this month, after the SG50 and National Day celebrations. This time it takes the form of a massive outdoor picnic highlighting the growing Filipino community in Singapore and their traditional cuisine.

“Very few people know about the Philippines, compared to Thailand,” Tan told me. “But Filipino food and

culture is what we call ‘same, same, but different’ – it’s very similar, but it’s not.”

With Jetstar’s Flying Grant funding, Tan and her team plan on making Culture Kitchen a regular quarterly event over the coming year, setting up an education fund for foreign nationals and providing flights to low-income migrants who need to return home due to an emergency – which Tan says the team is especially excited about.

The “kitchens” will continue every quarter until August 2016, when a large-scale festival serving Singapore’s national dishes will take place in a public square, around the time of National Day again. The idea is that in celebrating Singapore’s national cuisine, participants celebrate the country’s international roots. With the social and material barriers removed for them, all people really have to do is show up with an open mind and an empty stomach.

“You could do this in Singapore on your own,” Tan says, “But you would need to spend quite a bit of time with another community. We sit everyone at the same table – literally.”

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