30-year-old Singaporean cook Maira Yeo was recently crowned Asia’s Best Pastry Chef 2022, sponsored by Valrhona, as part of the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants awards programme. Over the last 20 months, she has revolutionised the dessert offer of acclaimed restaurant Cloudstreet, just as the venue and its chef-owner Rishi Naleendra went through a period of intense soul-searching.
Yeo and Naleendra tell 50 Best how they push the limits of what’s possible in pastry and beyond, why they’ve shifted their focus from the restaurant’s food to their team and how they’re finding sweetness in unexpected ingredients
Over her year and a half as Cloudstreet’s pastry chef, Maira Yeo has created countless desserts for the restaurant – but her all-time favourite features no traditional sweet ingredients. In fact, its star produce is a vegetable: celtuce, a varietal of lettuce usually grown for its thick stem, which is even larger and gnarlier than a broccoli’s stalk.
In Yeo’s dessert, the plant takes many forms: it is served as a celtuce and yuzu sorbet, celtuce and lime jus, and as confit celtuce cubes. Easily recognisable for its bright green colour, the dish – in which celtuce is paired with green chilli yoghurt and coriander cress – is finished tableside with delicate drops of vanilla oil made by the pastry chef herself.
Proudly unusual, eclectic yet extremely well balanced and eye-catching, the dessert is a great representation of the young chef’s developing style and of what Cloudstreet stands for. Opened in 2019 by Sri Lankan chef Rishi Naleendra and his wife Manuela Toniolo, the venue has been on the rise in recent years, debuting on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2021 and maintaining its status in the 2022 edition.
Asia's Best Pastry Chef Maira Yeo's signature dessert of celtuce, yuzu, green chilli and yoghurt, garnished with drops of vanilla oil
“The desserts we do at Cloudstreet have to reflect what the restaurant is,” says Yeo. “Our savoury food has a lot of personality. For instance, we like to find cuts of meat that are less commonly used, to showcase how ingredients can shine when you apply different techniques. It would be strange if the desserts were to take a very safe and typical approach.”
Indeed, no one could accuse Yeo’s desserts of being boring. An ice cream made from celeriac is served with fried capers, vanilla rose custard and slices of guava that have been pickled with roses sealed with champagne vinegar and aged in-house for a month. A soursop fruit sorbet dusted with kaffir lime leaf powder is accompanied by seasoned jambu discs and curd infused with juniper berries.
Highlighting savoury notes at the same time as they capitalise on the natural sweetness of fruits and vegetables, these creations have earned Yeo a growing fan base among the 318-strong group of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants voters that elected her as the winner of the Asia’s Best Pastry Chef Award 2022, sponsored by Valrhona. The cook received her accolade on stage at an emotional in-person awards ceremony held in Bangkok in late March.
Maira Yeo and the Cloudstreet team travelled to Bangkok for the first live Asia's 50 Best Restaurants awards ceremony in three years, where she won the Asia's Best Pastry Chef Award, sponsored by Valrhona
“The desserts we have at the moment are the best we’ve ever had,” confirms Naleendra. “The last thing I want to see on a Cloudstreet menu is a raspberry sorbet with a chocolate something. You could take the celtuce dessert and put it in any restaurant in the world and it would still be one of the best things you’ll ever eat. Once you stop thinking that it was made with green chilli and coriander, it just eats so well, it’s sweet but has a nice savoury note, and I love the way it looks.”
Naleendra and Yeo both accept that not everyone will enjoy their unique cuisine. They have often had pushback from customers, with Naleendra saying that it has become his job to give his team the confidence to do something different, despite some people’s opinions. The celtuce dessert’s evolution has seen the duo removing elements from it, deciding that they didn’t need to go further just to make it more obviously palatable.
The year 2020, with the arrival of Covid-19, turned out to be a turning point for Cloudstreet. Rebuilding the team after losing more than half of his staff, Naleendra pushed to make the restaurant better than ever. The moment happened to coincide with Yeo’s return to Singapore after a period abroad, when she had sought to expand her knowledge with experiences in eateries across the US, Canada and Norway.
The pastry chef’s first instinct was to support her local community and it wasn’t long before she founded Covid Bakes Lah, a bake sale project whose profits went to two charities, HealthServe and the Umbrella Initiative, which support migrant workers and provide aid for the homeless in Singapore. Yeo’s CCB (Crackly Chocolate Brownie) cookies, baked in her home oven, soon stole the show on Instagram – but she was also looking for a new challenge.
One of Yeo's most popular bake sale items, the CCB (Crackly Chocolate Brownie), which she conceptualised during the pandemic
What started as a short-term collaboration between Yeo and Naleendra to support the pastry kitchen at Cloudstreet in mid-2020 turned into a full-time role when the restaurant expanded to the floor above it. As Yeo puts it, “When it first started, Cloudstreet was a one-story restaurant. Now, it tells two stories.” After enjoying an eight-course tasting menu in the main dining room, diners move upstairs to savour the sweet courses.
“For the guests, if feels like they’re starting on a new menu,” says Yeo. “After you sit down in one place for two or three hours, you get tired. Moving to the second floor helps them feel refreshed and improves their experience.” Here, Yeo serves three sweet courses and six petit fours, with an option to exchange the first dessert for a cheese platter.
2020 also became a watershed year on a personal level for Naleendra and Yeo. “Six or seven years ago, it was all about what goes on the plate and what matters to the chef,” says Naleendra. “I don’t think I was a very nice person to be around then. But now, we take our staff more seriously than anything else – more than our food or our customers. Everything else just comes secondary to how we treat our people.”
“Those things are still very important,” chimes in Yeo. “But now we know how to get good food more consistently, and to do that the people who make it have to be happy.”
The duo highlights how things have changed at Cloudstreet. Their dishwasher, who has been working with Naleendra since before he opened his flagship restaurant, wears the same uniform as the cooks, and the chef stresses his kitchen isn’t very hierarchical. Naleendra counts among his proudest achievements the fact that his head chef is a father and is able to combine having a family with working at one of the best restaurants in Singapore.
Cloudstreet's vibrant interior mirrors the eclectic style of its dishes
“I’ve always cared for the staff, but before, I had only ever known how to show tough love,” shares Yeo. “So I had to learn to show it in a different way. In my mind, you need to work hard and push yourself because life is difficult. I’ve always felt the responsibility to make sure that my team grows into stronger people, because that’s how things get easier – although they don’t actually get easier, you just become better.”
“She has become a mentor,” adds Naleendra. “She’s staying back late every night just to speak to the staff and help them with their problems. Working at some of the best restaurants in the world is hard, but it’s even harder to work on your own skills and become someone a little different, and that’s what’s she has done.”
Receiving the Asia’s Best Pastry Chef title was a perfect moment for Yeo to stop and reflect on the last whirlwind 20 months. “I was used to having this army-level discipline. The evolution has been that my work has become a joy,” she says. “I have all these achievements and now I have people around me to share that joy with, people who care. When you create something that you think is kind of cool and you show it to someone and they get excited and happy for you, that joy just multiplies.”
Take a peek into Cloudstreet and Yeo’s work in the video:
The new edition of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants 2022, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, was announced on Tuesday 29th March at live ceremonies in Bangkok, Macau and Tokyo. Browse the website, join the community on Instagram, follow us on Facebook, visit us on Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date with the latest news and announcements.
