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黄荣来 NG ENG LAI
Ran restaurant lines for five years and swore he'd never cook family recipes. Now owns the sambal, and will not let anyone else touch it.
Home/Our Story
What our parents left, we learned to cook back.
Wind Rice Arts began with a loss, a notebook, and three people who did not want a smell to disappear from the world.
/assets/img/story-hero.jpgWide family or kitchen photo · 2400×1030 (21:9)
Chapter one
A kitchen that smelled of pandan at four in the morning
Our mother was Nyonya, from Melaka. Our father was the one who woke first, lit the stove, and pretended he had not been up all night worrying about the rent.
Their stall was small — six stools, one long wok, a chest freezer that hummed badly. But by 6:30am the queue reached past the coffee shop next door, and the three of us were still in school uniform, tying pandan leaves into knots under the table because that was the only job we were trusted with.
We did not think of it as heritage. We thought of it as the reason we always smelled faintly of coconut at assembly.
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/assets/img/story-stall.jpgThe original stall · 1000×1250
“Taste it before you salt it. You are cooking for people, not for yourself.” — Our mother, to all three of us, constantly
Chapter two
Then the stove went cold
Father went first. Mother followed less than two years later, and in between she had already stopped cooking — her hands were not steady enough to lift the wok, and she would not let anyone see her try.
What she left behind fit in a plastic bag: an exercise book with prices from 1994 on the cover, forty-odd pages of measurements written in a shorthand only she understood. "Chilli — the usual amount." "Fry until it looks right."
The three of us are an accountant, a graphic designer, and a former line cook who had spent five years avoiding the family business. None of us could read those pages properly.
The notebook is still in the shop today, in a frame behind the counter. Page 11 — sambal tumis — has a burn mark shaped like a thumbprint.
How we got here
The long way back
1987
The first wok
Our parents open a six-stool nasi lemak stall in Melaka, cooking the Nyonya recipes from our grandmother's side of the family.
2019
The stall closes
After our father passes, our mother cooks alone for another eleven months, then quietly stops. The stall shutters without an announcement.
2021
Two hundred failed batches
The three of us start cooking in a rented flat kitchen on weekends, working page by page through the notebook. Most of it goes in the bin.
2023
It tasted right
An aunty who had eaten at the original stall for twenty years tried a plate, said nothing for a while, then asked for a second one to take home.
2024
Wind Rice Arts opens
风稻艺术 — wind for the pandan fields, rice for what holds a family together, arts because our mother treated a plate like a composition.
Today
Same recipe, same hours
The wok still goes on at 3am. The notebook is still the only reference. We still argue about how much chilli "the usual amount" means.
The three of us
Who is actually in the kitchen
No head chef, no consultants. Three people who grew up under the same table, dividing a job none of us trained for.
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黄荣明 NG ENG BENG
Designed the packaging, the logo and the notebook frame. Rewrote the menu eleven times to get the descriptions to sound like our mother.
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黄善怡 NG SAN YEE
Handles supply, staff and the parts nobody romanticises. Also the only one who can still read our mother's handwriting on page 11.
What stays the same
Four rules we don't negotiate
- 01Santan is pressed fresh. No powder, no carton, no exceptions.
- 02Sambal cooks for four hours or it doesn't leave the kitchen.
- 03Rice is steamed in small batches through the day, never held overnight.
- 04If it isn't good enough to serve our mother, we don't sell it.