Tempting Musings

We sit down with Candice Leong or the Gluttonous Temptress an ex-private chef who has stationed her brilliant palate behind gastro bar Tempt to talk about her love of food, travelling the world, fearlessly pursuing new frontiers and embracing roots, however shallow or deep they may run into the Earth.

- Charmaine Tan

Hi Candice! Now that you are the owner of Tempt, how would you like to be addressed?

You can call me the proprietress. But I also like the word creator because I’m creative.

Does growing up as a theatre kid have anything to do with this?

Can you tell? [Laughs] Well, yes. When I was 14, I interned with Singapore Repertory Theatre (SRT), where I met Gaurav (Kripalani) — the current artistic director and my best friend. He and his husband are some of the biggest patrons of the arts scene here; that’s how we keep our ties with the theatre scene. When I was doing private dining, it was a dinner and a show. So with Tempt, I thought about extending that to how I welcome my guests. It’s my theatre now, I suppose.

That’s so nice. I read that you were in Germany when you first started to delve into food — how did you end up there?

I left for Barcelona to live for a little while when I was 25, then returned to Singapore, got back with my ex-boyfriend and moved to Germany for love. But I couldn’t work there because of my visa. The food there was also expensive and not that great, and my ex-partner was a consultant who was mainly gone from Monday mornings to Thursday nights. So I had a lot of free time on my hands, and there was nothing much to do except for, well, cooking.

So that was when you first started cooking?