Tan Boon Hock · 1953
Founder. First-generation Hainanese cook. Arrived from Wenchang with a clay rice pot and a memorised recipe.
Est. 1953 · Our Story
A Recipe Crosses an Ocean
In 1953, a young Hainanese cook named Tan Boon Hock boarded a junk in Wenchang carrying three things — a clay rice pot, a recipe his mother whispered before he left, and an unwavering belief that a single dish could feed a family for generations.
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Archive · 1953
Tan Boon Hock
Founder. Photographed at the original Bukit Pasoh shophouse, the year he took over the kitchen from his cousin and began serving the recipe his mother had pressed into his memory.
Chapter One
The Migration
Hainan in the 1950s was a poor place. Boon Hock's family had farmed Wenchang chickens for four generations — black-feathered birds raised on coconut husks and kitchen scraps, prized across the island for their fat under the skin and the flavour they carried into broth.
He arrived in Singapore with sixty Singapore dollars, a wooden suitcase, and a slip of paper bearing the address of a distant cousin who ran a kopitiam on Bukit Pasoh Road. He started by washing dishes. By the end of the first year, he had convinced the cousin to let him cook one stall on weekends.
By 1956, the queue for his chicken rice ran past two coffee shops and around the corner. The cousin retired. Boon Hock took over the kopitiam.
Chapter Two
The Shophouse
In 1972, Boon Hock bought the second floor of the same shophouse and knocked through the ceiling. His eldest son, Tan Senior, had spent four years quietly apprenticing in the kitchen — first chopping spring onions, then poaching, finally tending the broth that ran from morning to close.
The brass lamp above the cashier was installed that year. It still hangs there. The terrazzo floor — speckled jade, ivory and ochre — was laid by a craftsman from Negeri Sembilan who travelled down for two weeks and refused payment until Boon Hock fed him chicken rice every morning of his stay.
When Boon Hock retired in 1981, he handed Tan Senior a single page of handwritten notes — the broth ratios, the poaching temperatures, the rest times. Nothing else has ever been written down.
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Chapter Three
The Bird
In 1962, on a quiet drive up to Pahang, Boon Hock met the Lim family of Karak — third-generation poultry farmers who had brought a flock of Wenchang chickens with them when they emigrated from Hainan a decade earlier. He tasted one bird, bought six the next morning, and signed a handshake supply agreement that has never been written down.
Sixty-four years later, the Lim family — now in their fourth generation — still raises the same Wenchang strain on the same hillside. The birds are reared free-range for ninety days, fed on coconut shavings, banana stem and grain. They arrive at Bukit Pasoh by van at four-thirty every morning.
“We do not change the bird. The bird does not change us.”
Chapter Four
The Inheritance
Marcus Tan — third generation, grandson of Boon Hock — was supposed to be a banker. He studied at Le Cordon Bleu Paris in his twenties, ran a tasting-menu kitchen in London for four years, and came home in 2018 because his grandfather had begun forgetting things and his father, Tan Senior, would not slow down.
For two years, Marcus stood beside his grandfather every morning at four-thirty. He learned the broth not from measurements but from the way his grandfather smelled the pot and adjusted by hand. He still poaches the first chicken at first light. He still closes the kitchen at 8:30PM sharp — because Boon Hock did, and because some inheritances are not recipes but rhythms.
Three Generations
The hands that have held the recipe
Tan Senior · 1972
Eldest son. Master of the broth. Inherited a single page of handwritten notes and a kitchen that already had a queue around the corner.
Marcus Tan · 2026
Third generation. Chef-owner. Le Cordon Bleu trained, but the recipe came from the kitchen at four-thirty in the morning, beside his grandfather.
We have not changed the recipe in seventy years. Not because we are afraid. Because there is nothing left to fix.
Chef-Owner · Third GenerationVisit the Shophouse
Sit at our oldest table. Eat the same recipe Tan Boon Hock served in 1953.
Reservations open thirty days in advance. Walk-ins welcome at the bar counter from 11AM. The kitchen still closes at 8:30PM sharp.