By SGN | 13 May 2024
To visitors who find Singapore boring, Isabelle’s advice is simple.
“Explore!” she urges. “What you see as boring is just a fraction of Singapore, the typical landmarks and places that are showcased.”
Isabelle is the main creative force behind Pink Chilli in a Bowl, a 478-page tome co-authored with her architect husband Manuel. Published in 2023, it is the culmination of years of research and documents their cross-island exploration of the city’s sights and flavours.
“Pink Chilli in a Bowl is our contribution to highlight the parts of Singapore that many people have yet to see,” she says.
How to make a city a home
Hailing from Geneva, Switzerland, Isabelle and Manuel relocated to Hanoi in 2007, where he co-founded G8A Architects to escape the confines of strict building codes.
12 years later, they moved again to Singapore, as G8A’s work expanded across the region. Here, Isabelle continued to work as a Senior Medical Advisor with International SOS.
Having been raised to embrace diverse cultures and cuisines, Isabelle approaches each new city with an adventurous palate and boundless curiosity. When she moved from Hanoi to Singapore, however, she was thrown off by how orderly and systematic the city-state was.
She longed to understand Singapore beyond its polished facade and make it her home. Wandering its streets, often with Manuel, she began to take note of the spots that caught her fancy.
“I spent time eating, walking, talking to people and looking at the surroundings,” she says. “I always kept an open mind in order to be surprised by what I could find.” As she writes in the book:
For me, understanding how and what a city consumes regularly is a way to experience heritage, culture, and the current zeitgeist... Digging into a bowl of peppery bak kut teh or a sinful plate of nasi lemak in a semi-outdoor or outdoor spot with no air-conditioning made me feel alive and strangely connected to the streetscape... [These eateries] are the soul of the city, threading together the past, present and future with recipes that have been passed on through generations...
Food aside, Isabelle was fascinated by the diversity of patrons that brought these establishments to life – young and old, white-collar and blue-collar, conversing in various languages.
Her pool of observations formed the backbone of Pink Chilli, to which Manuel contributed his expertise on design. “He always has his architectural lens, which brings an understanding of place and space,” Isabelle says.
Manuel is particularly fond of Housing Development Board (HDB) blocks – public apartments that house 77% of Singapore residents – and their evolution through the decades. It’s an essential feature of the cityscape that he has contributed to, since G8A was the first foreign firm appointed to work on HDB projects: Punggol Waterway Terraces (2015), Tampines GreenRidges (2017) and Tampines GreenVines (2023).
Pink Chilli in a Bowl is the result of over three years of research and on-the-ground exploration. (Photos: Practice Theory)
Seeing Singapore in a new light
In its opening pages, Pink Chilli carries a disclaimer. “The book you are about to read is not a guidebook,” it says, “but rather a subjective survey”. From the beginning, Isabelle’s intention was to veer away from usual touristy portrayals and cast the city of Singapore in a different light.
With local culinary fare as a starting point, the book is an intimate study of everyday life in everyday places. Its pages contain sensory descriptions, padded with cultural context and a sensitivity to local vernacular (its glossary covers everything from ang ku kueh to zi char).
Even the title Pink Chilli in a Bowl expresses an atypical perspective. It refers to chilli paste at the bottom of a pink melamine bowl – as when bak chor mee is being prepared – but in a surrealist gesture, shifts the word ‘pink’ to the front.
In organising her points of interest, Isabelle chose to ignore the conventions of Singapore’s towns and zones. Instead, she sorted them into 28 constellations (clusters) and 12 stars (standalone establishments).
“A constellation is a 20- to 40-minute walk between eateries, food shops and architectural landmarks,” she explains. “A constellation could be a small neighbourhood, but not always, and could be even shared between two neighbourhoods.”
While Singapore’s neighbourhoods have fixed boundaries, Isabelle’s constellations are loose and shapeshifting. On each black-and-white spread of a constellation’s map, a pink squiggle traces her inquisitive, meandering path as a flâneuse.
Pink Chilli in a Bowl isn’t Isabelle’s first outing as an author – neither is it her last. In 2013, she co-wrote an update to Nancy Chandler’s Map of Hanoi, a popular guide from the 1970s. Her next project: a book on the close to 200 markets of Ho Chi Minh City, where she and Manuel also maintain a residence.
Beauty is everywhere
Each of Isabelle’s 28 constellations has its own distinct charm. “It all depends on the way you look at things, but beauty is everywhere,” she muses. For a lively glimpse of HDB life, she recommends visiting Crawford; for an eclectic shophouse ambience, Jalan Besar.
A constellation like Tanglin Halt offers a mishmash of cultures and bygone eras: low-rise 1960s flats alongside colonial-era bungalows, an ornate Hindu temple next to a Catholic church topped by an ‘origami’ roof.
Without a doubt, the constellation the couple are most familiar with is Tiong Bahru, where they live. It is also here where Manuel runs TB80, an event space for creative exchange.
“We love the art deco architecture, the authentic local food, and the fact that private and public housing co-exist without gates separating them,” Isabelle says.
Throughout her picks, Isabelle demonstrates a taste for the quirky. She highlights unusual eats – durian and chicken cheese puffs at Richie’s Crispy Puff in Yuhua, colourful enamel steamboat vessels at Lee Kwang Kee Teochew Cuisine in Toa Payoh North – and striking buildings such as the Butterfly Block in Alexandra or the Rocket Shophouse in Telok Ayer, designed in the 1930s by a pioneering Singaporean architect.
The book highlights striking architecture such as the Butterfly Block in Alexandra, the Rocket Shophouse in Telok Ayer, and the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Tanglin Halt. (Photos: Mindy Tan)
When it comes to food, she is drawn time and again to dishes and snacks made or prepared by hand – an antidote to the mass-produced, processed food that floods the modern world.
“I am always amazed when I meet people like old ladies making kueh with wooden moulds [Kuehs and Snacks in Alexandra] or the man smoking bak kwa on bamboo trays in the back of his shop [Kim Hock Seng Bak Kwa in Geylang East],” she says.
At Zul’s Traditional Dry Chilli at West Coast Drive Market, one of Isabelle’s 12 stars, she was mesmerised by the motorised stone mills grinding dried chillies into a smooth paste called cili giling that is supplied to restaurants.
On its surface, then, Pink Chilli in a Bowl may be a catalogue of food and architecture. At its heart, though, it’s an anthology of spaces and stories.
Discover your own stars
In a constantly morphing city like Singapore, shops and eateries can be here today but fade away tomorrow.
The character of Tanglin Halt has somewhat hollowed out as residents are resettled in brand-new HDB blocks and their old neighbourhood readied for redevelopment. In Isabelle and Manuel’s own backyard, longstanding establishments like Tiong Bahru Galicier Pastry and Old Tiong Bahru Bak Kut Teh have shuttered within the past couple of years.
To Isabelle, Pink Chilli offers less an evergreen view and more a transient snapshot of Singapore, specifically between the years 2020 and 2022. Ultimately, her constellations are personal, not universal, and she invites the reader to map their own.
“With this project,” she says, “I hope that Singaporeans, long-term residents and tourists become more inspired to explore streetscapes around the city and discover their own stars and constellations to share with others.”
Meet Isabelle
Isabelle is a Senior Medical Advisor with International SOS and the co-author of Pink Chilli in a Bowl. Originally from Geneva, Switzerland, she and her husband Manuel split their time between Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City.
Connect with her here.
