Noksu and Ng Jing Wen (centre) were featured in Apple TV’s 2025 documentary series, Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars. - APPLE TV via ST/ANN
SINGAPORE: Noksu, a 15-seat restaurant located in a New York subway station, has a new executive chef. Singaporean Ng Jing Wen, 30, formerly its chef de cuisine, took over the reins from Korean chef Dae Kim in September 2025.
With a Michelin star on its mantle, expectations are high. And a seat at the table is not easy to come by – even Grammy-nominated girl group Katseye reportedly had trouble securing a last-minute booking.
But Ng is taking it all in her stride. She plans to steer the restaurant in a more contemporary Asian direction.
That could mean curries from India and spices from Thailand, as well as Singaporean ingredients like candlenut and soya sauce. The goal, she says, is to “take diners all over the world”.
Getting to where she is has been quite a journey too, one that started in the living room of her parents’ Opera Estate terrace house.
“When I came home from secondary school, I’d turn on the TV and watch MasterChef Australia, or Jamie Oliver, or one of those cooking competition shows. And I’d think, okay, that looks fun,” says the former Changkat Changi Secondary School student.
Her first taste of kitchen life was cooking pasta with store-bought sauce and baking for her friends.
“They’d call me the baker and gas me up, and it made me think that this was something I could actually be good at, and that maybe I should pursue it,” says the self-professed academic underachiever, the second of four children of a retiree and a regional manager for a German glue company.
In 2010, her mother opened a cafe in Raffles Place selling fried rice and curry. While Ng was not allowed to touch the food, she entertained herself by decorating the space and soaking in the adrenaline of the kitchen.
That decided it for her; she told her parents she wanted to be a chef. Initially, her declaration was met with scepticism.
They worried that she would have “no life”, that she was not going to make a lot of money, that she would have to tough it out.
Alternative prospects were proposed – how about business? – but she stood her ground.
“From then on, I just wanted to show them that I could make a career out of being a chef.”
Fuelled by defiance, she went all in. After secondary school, she obtained a diploma in Culinary & Catering Management from Temasek Polytechnic in 2015. And when the time came to get her degree, there was really only one option: Culinary Institute of America (CIA), Singapore.
Between Singapore and New York
Ng has now lived in New York for nearly a decade. The rhythm of life there is as natural to her as the undulating of a knife. She has the pilates membership and the accent. She loves Singapore, but her future lies in America.
The Big Apple, one of the world’s most competitive culinary centres, was not a city she dared to set her sights on, until a CIA internship in 2017 at The Modern, a two-Michelin-starred contemporary American restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, showed her what life could be like in a different country.
She worked her way up the ranks, making it to chef de partie by 2020, a promotion to sous chef dangling just within reach. Then the pandemic ground everything to a halt, and she found herself slipping off the ladder completely.
“I lost my job. It was like, my whole life I’d been working up to that, and then it suddenly got stripped from me. And I had no idea what to do next,” she remembers.
Her options were to remain in New York – which she did, for five months, but “wasn’t doing anything” – or to fly back home, where “at least restaurants were open”.
Practicality drove her to the latter, and she took up the chef de partie post at Restaurant Zen, then a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Bukit Pasoh Road.
But this was no triumphant homecoming.
“Oh my God,” she recalls. “It was so tough. It was so stressful.”
The days were long – 85 hours of work a week, according to her estimates – and the pay disappointing. She also had trouble adjusting to a different kitchen culture.
“I felt like people in Singapore were less open-minded. When I was voicing my concerns or suggesting new ideas, they were very closed off about it, so that made me really unhappy,” she says.
Then in 2021, The Modern came calling again. The restaurant was reopening and executive chef Thomas Allan wanted her on board. Here was her chance, not just to return as sous chef – the position once promised to her – but to restructure the team and build the restaurant back up from scratch.
Stepping into a managerial position for the first time, she steeled herself for a fresh bout of imposter syndrome.
“Even though I didn’t have all the answers, I just had to fake it till I made it, and that’s stuck with me. Even now, I think it’s very important to just show people that you’re confident, that you know what you’re doing.”
As an Asian woman in an American kitchen, she had to learn to speak up.
“Everyone here is so expressive. What I learnt is that you have to ask for what you want in the US, and most of the time, you’ll end up getting it because you asked.”
She already had pretty thick skin, forged as an intern and line cook. Insults, sabotage and even the occasional chicken hurled at her head were all par for the course in those early days.
As before, doubt only fortified her determination.
“Instead of moping about how the other cooks hated me, I wanted to come back the next day and show that I could cook better than them.”
The one thing that made her squirm was being too comfortable. It was for that reason that she left The Modern in 2022, craving a fresh challenge. Her next job with Baxtrom Hospitality Group took her four streets down to Rockefeller Centre, where she worked as executive sous chef at 5 Acres Restaurant.
But after spending her entire career in fine dining, the restaurant’s spread of casual classics – mac and cheese, burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, Caesar salads – did not quite suit her palate. Onwards it was, then, to a fledgling restaurant hidden behind a code-locked door in a subway station.
Under pressure
On paper, taking a chance on Noksu looked like a downgrade. The only available position was that of line cook, a role Ng had long since graduated from.
“But I didn’t mind, because it sounded so exciting,” she says. “I wanted to learn. I just wanted to be in a serious environment and, as part of the opening team, create something that could potentially be good.”
She joined Noksu in September 2023 and, within a month, was promoted to chef de cuisine, second in command to chef Kim, a culinary wunderkind who began his career as a dishwasher at Ria in Chicago’s Waldorf Astoria hotel and trained under famed American chef Thomas Keller at Per Se in New York.
While Kim was “intense” and at times “hard to work with”, they were able to develop a working rapport.
“We both had similar training and I could kind of tell what he was thinking and execute things the way he wanted,” she recalls.
New York Times food critic Pete Wells called him “a star in the making” and praised his dishes as “uncannily good” in an otherwise mixed review that criticised Noksu’s lack of a distinct identity – “imitation pearls on a string that circles the world”, he wrote.
Tetchy critics were but one thing weighing on the team. Heaviest of all was the hope of a Michelin star.
The stakes, as Ng puts it, were impossibly high: “If we didn’t get it, the whole restaurant would go out of business. Without accolades, nobody wants to work for you, and you won’t have a lot of people coming in to eat, especially since our location is so weird.”
Together with a colleague, she watched the 2024 Michelin ceremony unfold on a live stream from a dim sum restaurant near Noksu. Awardees were read out alphabetically. When it got to “N” and they heard their restaurant’s name, both chefs screamed.
“The server had to ask us to shut up, but it was the best feeling ever.”
Retaining the star in 2025 was just as stressful, especially since she likely devised the menu inspectors sampled the second time round.
“My a** was on the line and I was the one steering the ship, so I felt responsible for everyone in the restaurant,” she says. Much to her relief, her work paid off and the restaurant kept its star in 2025.
Now the grind begins anew. She hopes the powers that be appreciate her marriage of Asian flavours with French techniques.
“I want people to eat my memories.” These memories of home, she says, are what will set her apart from New York City’s thousands of aspiring chefs.
Noksu’s most recent menu features an egg custard dish with peekytoe crab, inspired by Thai crab omelette, as well as a pandan dessert with caramelised seaweed – her nod to home. The 10-course tasting menu costs US$250+ a person.
“We just have to make sure that everything we do is of a certain standard. Sometimes, we don’t even know what the standard is, to be honest, which can be frustrating,” she says.
“There’s a lot of problem-solving, and there are times I think this is too much, maybe I should have listened to my parents.”
Most of the time, though, she has to pinch herself. Never did she imagine, as a teenager watching the world’s most famous chefs cook onscreen, that she would end up in a kitchen like this.
Right now, she says, she is exactly where she wants to be. - The Straits Times/ANN
