Meet Violet Oon, Singapore’s pioneering food journalist turned chef-restaurateur and local food champion

Singapore cooking doyenne Violet Oon has been a fervent champion of Singapore cuisine for over half a century, having donned various hats as a cookbook author, television personality, culinary ambassador, and chef-restaurateur.

However, starting her career in journalism remains a source of immense pride. Oon was a pioneering food reporter and critic at New Nation and The Sunday Times in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1987, she started her food magazine, The Food Paper, which reported on the dining scene, from the Hainanese community in the hospitality industry to food recommendations from taxi drivers.

The 76-year-old says with a smile: “I am so happy and proud to have started out as an old-school newspaper journalist. Cooking is like journalism — you are sharing information about a culture. As a journalist in those pre-Internet days, you’re the window to the world for your audience. I felt a great sense of responsibility towards them.” 

Over the years, Oon has amassed an extensive inventory of heritage recipes. Some are heirloom recipes from her Peranakan aunts, who taught her how to cook at 16, while others were gleaned from her journalism career, which gave her rare access into the kitchens of hotels, restaurants, hawker stalls, and family homes. 

She adopted a detailed, hands-on approach to learning recipes from chefs, hawkers, and home cooks. She adds: “I do not just ask for recipes — I ask them to ‘show me how to cook’ so that I could learn the techniques, record every detail, and share them with my readers.”

This knack for precision, which includes measuring ingredients down to every centimetre and gram, was instinctively drilled into her when writing recipes in her cookbooks. “In those days, I would even write down the smell you’re supposed to get; like when you cook a rempah, you know it is ready when you sneeze,” she says. 

“It is important to capture these techniques from the previous generation before they are gone, as they are not written down. Food is sentimental; if you don’t capture it, it’s gone.”

In the latest chapter of her storied culinary career, Oon and her children opened the flagship outlet of Violet Oon Singapore in Dempsey in mid-April. Food-wise, she has “delved much deeper into Singapore culture”, with a focus on Peranakan cuisine. She says: “I want to do dishes that are technically challenging to prepare, and revive genuine recipes of the past.”

Menu highlights include hati babi bungkus, or pork liver balls, which Oon cooks for her family during festive occasions. The dish is fastidious to prepare — pork liver is mixed with coriander powder, before being delicately wrapped in pig’s caul lining. The meatballs are then steamed and chilled before being fried to a golden brown. She points out: “Hati babi bungkus can be as technically challenging to prepare as an exquisite dish in a three-Michelin-starred restaurant.”

Other new dishes include nasi ulam, an aromatic rice salad sprinkled with finely julienned herbs; gulai nangka, a spiced turmeric-infused young jackfruit and prawn curry with salted fish; and daging panggang sambal hijau, a grilled Black Angus ribeye topped with green chilli sambal. 

Seasonality has also been introduced to the menu, with rare dishes like kerabu pucuk paku, a fiddlehead fern salad with lemongrass, and sambal udang belimbing, made with the sour fruit grown in the restaurant’s herb garden. Visitors can also get acquainted with ingredients like torch ginger, blue pea flower, and ulam raja. 

One of the enduring factors behind Violet Oon Singapore’s success lies in its deft preservation of old-school flavours. Part of the secret sauce lies in the meticulously documented recipes. While Oon’s children — Tay Yiming, CEO of Violet Oon Singapore and Tay Su-Lyn, the creative director — largely run the show, Oon is the culinary curator and chef.

She comes up with recipes and trains the culinary team in the restaurant group, which includes the National Gallery branch and the Ion Orchard outlet, which will move to a new, larger premise on level four of the mall in June. The store’s three private dining rooms, indoor veranda and gift shop will be launched in the third quarter of this year.

Oon says: “I train them down to the point of measuring how wide the ingredients are chopped to and down to each gram. I’m very proud of our team, who really are invested in doing things the right way.” These steps are then incorporated into standard operating procedures in the restaurant’s central kitchen. 

A Peranakan house 

Throughout the hour-long interview, Oon heartily regales me with stories behind the recipes and vivid memories of her family holidays across Europe in the 1960s, from travelling around England in a caravan to seeing a spit-roasted chicken over a fireplace. These experiences, which imbued her with a worldly perspective from a young age, proved pivotal in her culinary career.

Opening Violet Oon Singapore in Dempsey fulfilled Oon’s long-time dream of having “a Peranakan house”. Dining in the restaurant, which is in a restored colonial building, feels like a visit to an elegant mansion. It comprises a 134-seater main dining room and three private dining rooms, including a grand 20-seater stateroom on the mezzanine level lavished with palm tree-like chandeliers, an al fresco dining area, and a herb garden. 

Like its other branches, the Violet Oon Singapore restaurant in Dempsey sports a black, gold, and emerald green palette. The interiors are accented by colourful antique Peranakan tiles (collected by Su-Lyn from old Peranakan houses) and opulent chandeliers hanging from the tall ceiling. The walls are embellished with momentos, from childhood photos to newspaper clippings.

Dempsey also holds a soft spot for Oon, who served as the choir mistress of the Singapore Armed Forces’ Music and Drama Company in 1976. It was then located in the former British army camp compound. She recalls: “I used to be fetched by an army car to Dempsey from the newspaper building, Times House in Kim Seng Road, and after the choir training session I was sent back to my reporter’s life!”

In the family

2025 also marks the 13th year that Oon has been running the Violet Oon Singapore restaurants with her children. They launched Violet Oon’s Kitchen in Bukit Timah in 2012 and have gone on to expand the brand through merchandising and catering. Oon and her children, who wholly own Violet Oon Singapore, spent a seven-figure sum setting up the restaurant two months after the lease was received in January.  

Oon believes that her love for food has rubbed off on her children as she has been promoting Singapore cuisine since they were young, accompanying her on work events and overseas filming trips, and growing up with her home-cooked dishes (complete with a fully set-up table).

She says: “They grew up with my DNA — they saw how Singapore food is being loved and held in high regard and respected in other countries. And now, they are translating it in their voice and with their strengths.”  These days, the trio operate like a “trapedite”, discussing everything from the food, decor and various elements of the dining experience.

Her daughter, Su-Lyn, says: “My brother and I have been eating her dishes for over 40 years. We know what the ‘Violet Oon taste’ is and reference it to what we do at the restaurants.” 

The family was embroiled in a legal dispute with their former business partner, luxury and lifestyle company Group MMM and its director Manoj Murjani. The case lasted two years before the family won the civil suit in January 2024.

The opening of Violet Oon Singapore in Dempsey heralds a new chapter for Oon, who opened a few cafes in the 1990s and led teams of Singapore chefs in food festivals overseas. In 2019, the Singapore Tourism Board awarded her the Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to Tourism.

Travelled the Singapore journey

When asked what the proudest achievement of her illustrious food career is, she chuckles: “Whenever I take a Grab (taxi), people know who I am. They know about the restaurant and what I’ve done for Singapore food.”

She adds: “I am also proud that we survived the tough competition in Singapore’s dining scene as a family and have become so much stronger. We have kept to the holy grail of curating, collating and celebrating Singapore food, and that motto is still going strong.”

Oon is also one of a few individuals who have witnessed the evolution of Singapore food, from its humble beginnings to holding its own on the global dining stage, with the introduction of the Michelin Guide here and hawker culture being recognised on the Unesco heritage list. 

On she would like to be remembered, she says: “I would like to be seen as somebody who’s been championing Singapore food. I am very proud of being Singaporean and to have been through the whole Singapore journey, from colonial times to its transformation to what it is today. I want to be seen as somebody who’s travelled the Singapore journey and been true to Singapore.”