Rempapa’s Shu Han Lee ‘didn’t even cook’ – now she works with Jamie Oliver, Sainsbury’s and Wagamama
The author, who founded the Southeast Asian food brand in her London home kitchen, cares more about deliciousness than strict authenticity
“I didn’t even cook [when I lived] in Singapore,” Shu Han Lee tells me quite frankly. It’s a strange thing to hear from a Singaporean cookbook author and entrepreneur who has spent the better part of her career refining and remixing the city state’s cooking for a global audience, but Lee just didn’t grow up thinking she would be a cook one day. In fact, she was discouraged from pursuing it.
“My mum grew up in a kampong [village], and she was the oldest daughter, so from the age of 10 she was cooking for the family. In her mind, why would you want to be slogging away in a hot kitchen when you’ve got the education to be sitting in an air-conditioned office behind a laptop?” she says.