#5: Andrea Tan

Eat a Peach by David Chang 🍑🍑, two important pantry essentials 👩‍🍳, caesar salads at Call Me AL 🥗🥙, Conspiracy Chocolate 🤫🕵️‍♂️🍫🍫!

ANDREA TAN’S GOT THE MUNCHIES.

She’s building her world around food. Born in Malaysia, Andrea studied Food Science and now works in corporate sustainability (which means she uses phrases like “decarbonization strategy” and “emission profile” daily). After five years living in Hong Kong, Andrea runs two separate Instagram accounts all about the city’s food and drink: @bigbeerbelly shares Hong Kong’s best happy hour deals in service of the overworked and underpaid young professional; @tanmunch shares her original home-cooking and is run with her brother. She’s also a food writer on substack: Her newsletter, Secret Sauce, blends the genres of the personal essay and the recipe (check our her guides on making scallion oil noodles and brown butter boozy apple cake!). “[Food is] the first language of love I ever knew,” she writes, and her voice rings of an uncertain 20-something trying to understand her place in the world through food. Here are her recommendations:

Read Eat a Peach by David Chang 🍑📚

I really enjoy memoirs written by famous chefs. You can get into their minds, and the impression I get is that you need some level of volatility to be a chef — to go with the flow, and have the right balance of intuition and methodology, which I find really interesting.

Reading Eat a Peach by David Chang, you’re really in his mind. One thing that struck me most is his honesty. He’s acknowledging how cutthroat the industry is, and intertwines the story with his personal life. And for someone who doesn’t have experience in the F&B industry, it’s just a really eye-opening way of getting to know it.

Use miso 🫕

A pantry essential that doesn’t go wrong — it lends both a sweetness and umami that can be used in a variety of ways, all the way from cookies to roasted greens.

Use lemongrass 🌿

I really love the Southeast Asian spices like lemongrass. Lemongrass is such a crucial component of Malay food, actually. And it’s good in the freezer. So you can just stock it up and use it whenever you want to.

When you start grounding lemongrass with ginger, and use it to marinate chicken, it makes a super easy and amazing dish packed with flavor.

Eat at the Caesar Salads at Call Me AL in Sheung Wan 🥗🥙

I love a good twist on a salad (specifically on a caesar salad!). The one at Call Me AL had long slabs of romaine leaves, and layers of sweet corn, blue cheese, bacon bits, avocado and cherry tomatoes.

Sometimes I think salads tell you a lot of things about a restaurant — it’s often my indicator of the restaurant’s creativity, how much they can do with how little. This one from Call Me AL just screams fun and fusion!

Buy Conspiracy Chocolate!! 🛸🍫

I was recently gifted with some Conspiracy Chocolate and I would totally recommend them as a high quality desk snack — or even a gift!

I generally love supporting small businesses that tell a story — food, fashion, etc. and Conspiracy Chocolate is one of them. They’ve got such fun flavors like Sichuan Pepper and Miso Pine Nut. They’re also dairy-free and have their cacao beans sourced from Vietnam.

The chocolates make for such a fun conversation starter in the workplace too which has been a delight!