These are the kind of lessons that Yip shares with his disciples, usually through a casual exchange via text. In fact, the dynamic is so collaborative that both Yip and his disciples can research a technique together. “There is no ego involved. It’s more like we are friends exchanging notes,” he says. 

Marvas Ng, head chef of Path Restaurant, tells me that under Yip’s mentorship, he’s found a “better balance between heavy dishes and light options”; Zor Tan, chef-owner of Born, says that he’s always “still learning” from him. For Edward Chong, executive chef of Peach Blossoms, his effusive praise for Yip is justified. “Where else can you find a mentor like him today?” he asks.

For the love of food

Today, many know Yip as a maverick of the dining scene with a massive repository of Chinese culinary knowledge. What many people don’t know is that food isn’t his first love, nor his second; politics is, followed by business, and then, and only then, food. 

It is, however, a love that has been around his whole life. Growing up in Indonesia, Yip enjoyed elevated home cooking from his family’s private chefs, and as a curious child, he loved to spend time in the kitchen, asking questions about the food. This gave him a “very strong foundation in appreciating flavours”, which only expanded with exposure to different cuisines while he was schooling in New York and London. 

It took a while, however, for Yip to return to food. After completing his undergraduate degree in London, he took jobs as a fashion buyer for Daimaru, a fashion writer for Signature magazine, and then continued working in magazines until he became group publisher of Panpac Media. It was in the 2000s that Yip moved into book publishing with Marshall Cavendish, where he became known for publishing cookbooks of little-known culinary voices at the time, such as Emmanuel Stroobant, Sam Leong, and Jereme Leung.

“At the time, there was no publisher willing to invest in a particular chef,” Yip explains. “Most of them were Cantonese, Sichuan or Peranakan cookbooks, and they never had [the chef’s] name on the front. I felt that it was time to give chefs their due, so I took the risk.” A risk it was—it’s hard to market a cookbook, especially if they are not known in Singapore—but it paid off. Stroobant now helms two-Michelin-starred Saint Pierre and starred in a television series 36 Ways to Live on the Asian Food Channel in 2012; Leong has a reputation as one of the best Chinese chefs in Singapore; and Leung now runs an empire of restaurants across major cities, including a darling of Singapore’s Chinese fine dining scene, Yì by Jereme Leung.

By his 40s, however, Yip began to feel restless. “I realised that if I didn’t change my career, I would be stuck with whatever I was doing for the rest of my life,” he says. How Yip measures boredom is his response to a crisis: if he doesn’t panic, “it’s time to go”. “I love it when I can’t sleep at night and bite my fingernails,” he says. So he packed his bags and moved to Hong Kong in 2002, where he started his first restaurant Bar of Soup.

Yip could have easily started a restaurant in Singapore (which he eventually did with the now-defunct Circa 1912, which opened in 2018). But he wanted a challenge. “The people there are so demanding, I learnt to perfect my skills even more,” he says, adding that he had to constantly think of new ideas to keep up with the pace of the Hong Kong dining scene.

It was there that Yip also became a TV personality and a frequent cooking demonstrator, which sharpened his showmanship abilities and outgoing personality. But it was in Hong Kong that Yip launched himself into the intricacies of traditional Chinese cuisine that he is known for today.

“One of the reasons I moved to Hong Kong was that it’s nearer to China for me to do research on Cantonese food,” he says. “So I went to all these remote villages to find out how certain dishes came about and why, and how different it is now compared to their version 50 years ago.” The sweet and sour pork of today, for instance, makes use of tomato sauce thanks to British influence in Guangzhou, but in the past, hawthorn was used instead. It was these “original” details that Yip eventually showcased in his Singapore restaurant.

Yip believes strongly in a firm culinary foundation informed by tradition before young chefs start to innovate. “It’s just like education, right? You have to go through primary school before you can move on to secondary school. It applies in cooking as well,” he says. “Without the foundation, you do not understand how to achieve certain flavours, and you do not understand the ingredients themselves. Without the basics, you’d be moving around like a blind bat!” 

Read more: The best Teochew restaurants in Singapore, according to restaurateur David Yip

Mentoring the next generation

Yip tells me all of this in a private room of Peach Blossoms, which is routinely recognised as one of the best Chinese restaurants in Singapore. Particular praise goes to Chong for his unique storytelling, as well as his inventive and elevated Chinese delicacies. 

It wasn’t always this way, however. In 2019, Chong was still regarded as a respectable, competent chef with several awards under his belt, but a visit by Yip sent Chong’s convictions reeling. The food was good, Yip agreed, but the dishes had no storytelling, no layering, and no link between the courses. “His most important point was that my food tasted just like my mentors,” Chong says. “It didn’t have my heart in it.” 

Chong couldn’t sleep after that. Yip’s suggestions would mean stopping operations entirely to come up with a new concept and new dishes. It was fortunate, then, that the pandemic shut everything down in 2020 anyway, giving him time to change up the ingredients, the cooking techniques, and the dishes—all in consultation with Yip, who, by then, had amassed a formidable wealth of traditional culinary knowledge.

The rest, of course, is history. Peach Blossoms ranks among Tatler Dining’s very own list of top 20 restaurants in Singapore, and is No. 74 on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants Extended List in 2024. “I didn’t expect that my restaurant could reach those levels. It just kept going up and up,” Chong says. 

Chong is just one of the chefs whose restaurants have benefitted from Yip’s mentorship. LG Han is another; in this case, Yip brought Han to the wet market to “introduce him to all the unusual ingredients, herbs and spices” that can be found in Singapore. “[Han] always says that I was instrumental in defining his cooking style into mod-Sin,” Yip says, advising him to stand out from the other pioneer of modern Singaporean cooking, Willin Low. In Han’s own words, “He’s been very supportive right from the beginning. He’s always so willing to share and very candid about his opinions and his feedback about my food.”

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But Yip also makes sure to guide not just his disciple’s food, but their branding as well. Sometimes, he takes Chong to China to get him to connect with and learn from other Chinese chefs. He forbids them from dressing sloppily in “bermudas and slippers”, even to report to work. “You must carry yourself well,” he insists. “I don’t want people to have this very archaic impression of chefs, that they are uneducated and brash. It’s about time that being a chef is a profession that people should respect.” 

Yip took on his very first disciple in 2010 when he met Xu Jingye of 102 House in the ancient town of Foshan, China. “He wanted to do traditional Cantonese food,” Yip recalls. “So I told him to cook traditional food, you have to at least taste the food before.” Xu was relying instead on cookbooks, which means the “essence” of each dish wasn’t quite coming through. But seeing his enthusiasm for traditional cooking, Yip offered to teach him; 14 years later, 102 House boasts two Michelin stars for its refined cooking. Again, Yip got him to wear nicer clothes to attend events and network; he even took him to art museums and Cantonese opera to become more cultured. “It’s more than cooking, it’s the whole package,” he says.

Why is Yip so generous? “I was very lucky that in my career, a lot of people helped me along the way,” he says. “I would like to pay it forward.” Yip adds that he enjoys opening up his disciples to their full potential and seeing their success. The reward is not recognition or monetary benefit either; in fact, he made Han promise not to tell people that he had helped him, up until Labyrinth won its first Michelin star. 

“I’m not doing all this for fame or glory. But I’m super proud when I see them grow,” he says. “I always say, when [my disciples] get accolades, I’m more happy than them!” He especially remembers the night that Xu called him after 102 House won two Michelin stars. “All of us started crying,” he says. “He really came a long way.”

Vanguard of traditional Chinese cooking and an indispensable mentor to brilliant chefs he may be. But I think the secret is that Yip is also a valuable friend—one who’s invested in his disciple’s growth and success, and one who does not hesitate to create knowledge together. The dining scene is richer for it. 

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