Three Shores From Home
Why a Tamil kitchen serves Malay, Chinese, and Singaporean food.
Our story is really the story of one batter, carried across three shores, and shaped most of all by the years it spent in Singapore.
It began in Chennai, in Tamil Nadu, where cooks ground rice and lentils by hand and spread them thin on a hot griddle. That is the root of everything we make: the dosa, the idli, the vada, the sambar, and the filter coffee. It is our Tamil foundation, and it has never changed.
But it was in Singapore that our kitchen truly grew up, and where these recipes lived and were perfected for the longest time. For years the cooking belonged to the hawker centres and kopitiams, the open-air food halls where Tamil, Malay, and Chinese communities eat side by side every day. You cannot cook in that world without falling in love with all of it, so the menu opened its doors. From our Malay neighbours came flaky roti canai and sweet drinks like sirap bandung. From the Chinese hawker stalls came Indo-Chinese favourites like gobi manchurian. And from Singapore's beloved kopitiam culture came the Milo Dinosaur and a love of a good cup of tea. This is where Dosa Express found its voice.
Now we are home in Fremont, and we serve all of it, still 100% vegetarian, still made the way it was in those Singapore kitchens. That is why one Tamil kitchen proudly serves four cultures on one long table. Three shores, one batter.
Chennai
Where the batter was born. Rice and lentils, stone-ground and slow-fermented, on a griddle in South India.
Singapore
Where it grew up and stayed longest. The recipes matured here, in the hawker centres and kopitiams, learning from Malay and Chinese kitchens next door.
Fremont
Where it lives today. Four cultures, one vegetarian kitchen, served warm to the Bay Area.
A few things about Singapore
Singapore is a tiny island nation in Southeast Asia, at the southern tip of Malaysia, only about 85 miles north of the equator. Many people cannot find it on a map.
Singapore is one of the most crowded places on earth: nearly 6 million people live on just about 270 square miles, roughly the size of a single city.
Tamil is one of Singapore's four official languages, alongside English, Malay, and Mandarin. Tamil communities have cooked there for well over 150 years.
