After winning over San Francisco, Lion Dance Café comes home to Singapore

From nut-free laksa to mushroom goreng, chefs C-Y Chia and Shane Stanbridge have been whipping up produce-centric and vegan interpretations of Singaporean street food of Singaporean street food in San Francisco since 2013, to much fanfare. 

This year, the co-owners of Lion Dance Café shuttered their restaurant and relocated to Singapore, where C-Y – who was born here to a Singaporean father and French mother – is keen to reconnect with her roots through the recipes she grew up with. 

“We had spent so much time and effort establishing ourselves in the US, and we were very fortunate that it was going extremely well,” shares C-Y of the move.

“But my family was still here, and I’d been in the US for almost 15 years. I’d always felt that, at some point, I would want to go home and try being in Singapore again. It just felt like it was time.” 

These days, the couple spend their time scouring the wet markets at Chinatown Complex and Tekka Market for fresh and interesting produce. 

They’ve also been busy hosting pop-ups at venues such as craft beer bar Druggists, where they dish out Lion Dance Café signatures alongside bar bites drawing on Sichuan, Italian-American and Singaporean influences. 

Highlights from the monthly pop-up include makrut peanuts, fried with lime leaves, lemongrass and chilli, and a hearty brinjal cutlet sandwich served with sambal arrabbiata and a creamy white wine sauce. 

“The industry has been really welcoming. There are a lot of great people providing excellent hospitality, and we’ve been welcomed with open arms. It’s been pretty cool,” says California-born Shane of the couple’s first four months in Singapore. 

For C-Y – who uses they/them pronouns – returning home has also offered a chance to rediscover a hospitality scene that has evolved considerably since they left. 

“Coming back and seeing how much the scene has expanded has been really stimulating and exciting. It’s been exciting to rediscover all of that,” they add.  

One of Lion Dance Café’s more distinctive dishes was its take on carrot cake, inspired by C-Y’s childhood memories of growing up in Singapore. After evening tuition, their father would often pick them up and stop for carrot cake on the way home.  

“That was one of the only times I ever saw him eating in the car, so it was something I really missed and wanted to make,” says C-Y.  

“As we started sharing food that was more personal to us, it made us more vulnerable as cooks. Instead of making dishes we knew would be hits, we were sharing something that meant something to us. Luckily, they became hits too.”  

Shane adds that California’s strong agricultural scene made it easy for the couple to source ingredients such as laksa leaf, ginger, galangal, lime leaf and curry leaf near their San Francisco base.  

“It was really fun to be able to make a lot of those classic and quintessential Singaporean flavours with produce that was grown locally,” he says. 

Before returning to Singapore in April, Shane and C-Y launched their cookbook, Lion Dance Café: Authentic, Not Traditional, bringing together popular Lion Dance Café dishes with their interpretations of family recipes, including Singapore favourites such as chwee kueh (steamed rice flour cake topped with preserved radish).

“A handful of the more than 115 recipes honour the inspiration and teachings of my family’s recipes, passed down to us through my aunts. The featured chwee kueh recipe is the one my aunts taught us,” reveals C-Y.

The title takes its name from a motto the couple have used since opening their brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2020 – one that captures both their approach to cooking and their response to the expectations that often accompany reinterpretations of familiar dishes.

“Whenever you’re making food that can be compared to something other people grew up with, you’re immediately asked, ‘Oh, is this authentic?’ or told, ‘It doesn’t taste traditional.’ You’re always being compared to this subjective, imaginary ideal of what that’s supposed to mean,” says C-Y.

“We decided to address that right off the bat by saying, look, our food is not traditional. It’s not based on any particular tradition. It is authentic to us. And through the cookbook, we’re also inviting our readers to start their own traditions and not be intimidated by what they think those traditions should look like.”

That philosophy runs throughout the cookbook, which celebrates the couple’s Italian-Californian and French-Chinese-Singaporean identities through recipes drawn from what they describe as a “shared pantry”.

Among the recipes closest to them is elote, a corn-on-the-cob dish Shane learned from a neighbour when he was four, alongside a curry puff recipe the couple developed together.

“I made a really spicy curry filling, and he came up with this flaky but easy-to-follow dough that is so crisp, buttery, golden and delicious that I think I got really spoiled,” C-Y shares. “Now that I’m back in Singapore, I can’t find a curry puff that I like as much.”

While C-Y and Shane aren’t ready to reveal their longer-term plans for Singapore just yet, they share that more pop-ups at Druggists are in the works, alongside discussions about potential collaborations with other venues. 

“There are some possibilities happening with people we’re really excited to work with, but I wouldn’t want to broadcast them just yet because we’re still hammering out some details,” says Shane. 

For now, they are also looking to stock their cookbook at more bookstores across Singapore, while taking on private dining, private chef and catering engagements. 

“We love getting back to cooking for people in a more intimate setting. Creating a menu specially for someone’s occasion is something we really enjoy doing,” says C-Y. 

The question of a permanent home for Lion Dance Café has also come up. “We’ve been asked a lot if we’re going to open a place. For now, we’re in talks about a few possibilities for longer pop-up residencies. As far as a brick-and-mortar goes, we’re definitely looking into it. It just has to be the right set of conditions.” 

In the meantime, both C-Y and Shane are already thinking about dishes they hope to bring back. “Now that we’re here, we’re definitely plotting to bring chwee kueh back, served our way as bar food instead of breakfast food, on some future menus,” says C-Y.