He may be a familiar face in Singapore’s culinary scene and a prominent advocate of halal products and services for the last 29 years, but chef Mel Dean has lost none of his enthusiasm for cooking, creating new dishes and reinventing old ones. In fact, as the new culinary director of Permata Singapore, he has made it his mission to elevate Nusantara cuisine.
Nusantara is an old Javanese term that generally means “archipelago”. The cuisine, Dean explains, comprises Malay, Indonesian, Peranakan, Singaporean, Bruneian, Southern Thai and Filipino cuisines as these islands were all part of the Nusantara archipelago.
