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So I caused a bit of a kerfuffle today with the peranakan Nasi Lemak post about the Lemak Boys (disputed).
One of the more recent trends over the past few years is to see that peranakan food become extremely upmarket and fine-dining, almost a new wave of restaurants. Violet Oon is a great example.
These tend to be corporatised entities that are a bit separate from the family restaurants that started in the 60s. Guan Hoe Soon comes to mind.
But let's leave this aside and let me be very clear about the fact that the peranakan culture that is often discussed about and represented in Singapore tends to be one that is exclusionary and written by the rich, often chinese peranakans.
Again, no real problem with this, but one really has to ask: all the time making fabulous feasts, creating laborious Tok Panjang, all the tumbuk-tumbuk. This took time, patience, and wealth.
It does not help that representation of peranakans tend to be precisely that: families of long histories, fantastical wealth, and the center of social life in pre-colonial and colonial times.
My grandmother, as a chinese peranakan of modest means, married my grandfather, who immigrated from Fuzhou in the early 1900s. Both of them worked during the day, and when my grandma got back she barely had time to fix the elaborate dishes that peranakan cuisine is now known for.
The easier to prepare dishes like ngoh hiang and chap chye featured heavily. They mostly ate seafood as meat was expensive, and the dishes featured a lot of stir-fries. Even still, elaborate peranakan dishes were not really her forte, nor was she that kind of cook.
This does not mean that she was not discerning as a customer, and of course everyone wants the best ingredients to cook with, and it would be foolish to think that only peranakan women had (stereotypically) a monopoly over good eats.
Back to the Nasi Lemak question, these new restaurants are irritating because they feel less like I'm trying someone's family dishes, and more like I am paying for another staid dining experience that is conveniently Peranakan.
And the signifiers of Les Amis group opening a really expensive nasi lemak joint, and haphazardly slapping the word Peranakan in front of it without any hint of a "peranakan" twist (whatever that means) strikes of me as opportunism.
It reminds me of the Nyonya Nasi Ambeng that Violet Oon tried to pull off a few months ago. https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/trending/violet-oon-restaurant-nyonya-nasi-ambeng-dish-backlash-12802548
In a market environment that prioritizes heritage, authenticity and prestige, no doubt we will see the label of peranakan and nyonya being used as a signifier of cultural capital and gentrification.
If your family is peranakan, and you make a smashing Nasi Lemak dish with nyonya dishes (please, not just you colour the rice with blue pea flower), fantastic. Take pride in that. But at least recognise who came before you and created the cuisine that you borrowed from initially.
No one is stopping you from cooking nasi lemak. Just don't erase brown people in the process of doing so.
