Meet the Rising Star of the Bay Area’s Singaporean Dining Scene

Dabao Singapore’s nostalgic and upscale renditions on classics including laksa have made waves.

It wasn’t until Emily Lim got married that she realized her James Beard nomination for the Emerging Chef award might not be a fluke. People gave speeches at her reception, and she felt emotional as friends and family spoke about the community she’s built for Singaporeans in the Bay Area. Although the U.S. Census Bureau cited a 139 percent increase in Singaporeans living in California between 2010 and 2020, it’s still not easy to find even iconic Singaporean dishes such as laksa in the region. Through her celebrated pop-up Dabao Singapore, Lim is out to change that.

And she’s already well on her way having taken over a SoMa pop-up space and with plans to headline an upcoming food festival later this spring. Her food, including her popular curry puffs, is even available at Chase Center. Over the last four years, Dabao Singapore went from a COVID-era cottage business to a James Beard Award-nominated pop-up phenomenon faster than just about any other food project in the Bay Area. “I was not expecting the nomination at all,” Lim says. “There are so many talented chefs out there, and I’m just doing my own little meal-kit thing from when I started.”

She’s a bit modest. Harkening to the Singaporean food stalls, or hawker centers, that she grew up visiting with her friends, Lim has leaned into putting high-quality chile crab with butter noodles and kueh bingka front and center. She’s even partnered with the Singaporean Tourism Board to cater events in the Bay. Her laksa, unlike those that use a premade laksa paste — arguably the equivalent of instant ramen, in her mind — involves about 21 ingredients, resulting in a seafood curry that diners say transports them back to Singapore. The flavors and spices get muted by some American restaurants’ preparations, but Lim wants to show diners that a noodle dish from Southeast Asia can be just as rich and luxurious — and expensive — as a noodle dish from Italy.

Lim started learning those skills in 2014 when she interned at San Mateo’s All Spice. She was leaving a marketing job to dive into food and set her sights on working at the Michelin Guide-listed Southeast Asian restaurant. She launched Dabao in 2020 when she and her other industry friends lost their jobs, all of them immigrants left with little funds and few resources. She paid them under the table and worked out of her apartment, only getting everything above board in May 2020. During the pandemic she tried all the different things, focusing on catering and pop-ups instead of meal kits, then back to meal kits as Delta and various restaurant closures circled back around.

Her food came at the right time for a community wanting more. The lack of Singaporean representation in the Bay’s culinary scene leaves many wanting, signified by the uproar caused when Mama Judy Hawker Fare owner Judy Wee promptly closed her popular Alameda restaurant in October 2023. There was Mexican and Southeast Asian fusion outfit IndoMex, too, which quietly ceased operations over the last year or so. Singaporean fine dining project Makan Place quit in 2020. Lion Dance Cafe has championed the cause of decadent laksa with a plant-based menu, but will close its permanent space at the end of April.

Currently, Lim is scouting spaces for Dabao’s first permanent location, hoping to bring one of those Singaporean-style hawker stalls she treasures. The dream, she says, is to open chicken and noodle shops all over the country; she wants Singaporean culture to catch fire online as a way to preserve generations of flavor into the future. It was only in 2024 that she felt like the business had legs, citing the necessity to do this for herself and to help those around her taking so much time. Expanding the business is how she says she can do her part to commemorate Singaporean culture. “Everyone has a degree in Singapore at this point, and the hawkers are dying out,” Lim says. “But the community cares and appreciates the work I put in. That’s when I felt validated.”