Japanese take on Sichuan dishes like mapo tofu, dan dan noodles and popcorn chicken now available in Hong Kong at Chatterbox Express – via Singapore
- Singaporean chain Chatterbox Express has partnered with Chen’s Mapo Tofu to offer a range of Japanese-adapted Sichuan dishes in Hong Kong
- The collaboration presents a very budget-friendly way to sample the mapo tofu of culinary legend Chen Kenichi, one of Japan’s most acclaimed Iron Chefs
Singaporean chain Chatterbox Express may be famous for its Hainan chicken rice, but in Hong Kong it has recently partnered with Chen’s Mapo Tofu to serve an entirely new range of chuka ryori dishes – Japanese adaptations of Chinese cuisine – such as mapo don and dan dan mien.
Chen’s Mapo Tofu is a casual offshoot of the Michelin-star Shisen Hanten in Singapore, part of a chain that was founded in the Japanese port city of Yokohama in 1958.
Yokohama’s Shisen Hanten was the first Sichuan restaurant in the city. Founding chef Chen Kenmin is widely known as the “Father of Sichuan cuisine” in Japan, while his son, Chen Kenichi, became one of the most acclaimed Iron Chefs on the long-running Japanese cooking series of the same name.
It was Kenichi who shot Shisen Hanten’s mapo tofu to fame and expanded the restaurant’s footprint all over Japan. He died in March 2023, aged 67.
His son, chef Chen Kentaro, had taken over the reins almost a decade ago and opened the restaurant’s first outpost at the Mandarin Orchard hotel in Singapore in 2014. It was awarded two-Michelin-star status in 2016, which it kept until 2023, when it lost one star.