The Hainanese thread

What is the Hainanese thread in the Don pie story?

The Hainanese thread is the family line that runs under the whole story. Chef Don Lim is the son of a first-generation Hainanese immigrant who ran a chicken rice stall on Purvis Street. Our own records place the stall in the 1960s; another family account gives its years as 1955 to 1972. That second account is the family’s own: the story of Lim Tee Kheng and his Purvis Street stall is told on singaporepies.com, the Lim family’s heritage site.

So before there was a Don pie, there was a Hainanese family cooking chicken for paying customers in the middle of the city. Chef Don is the second generation of that family to feed people for a living. His nephew Kelvin Leong, who helped him open our Tyrwhitt Road kitchen in 2021, is the third.

What is a Hainanese-style chicken pie?

A Hainanese-style chicken pie is the chicken pie many Singaporeans grew up with: chunks of chicken, potato and vegetables in a thick, creamy gravy, often with half a hard-boiled egg, under a golden crust. The name points to the Hainanese cooks who are widely credited with bringing Western-style dishes into Singapore’s kitchens and coffee shops.

The pie is not a copy of an English pie. The filling is chunkier, the egg is a local habit, and the seasoning is tuned for people who also eat chicken rice and curry. When food writer Leslie Tay reviewed our pie in 2023, he described its old-school Hainanese character in exactly these terms: half a hard-boiled egg in each pie, with potatoes, peas, carrots and chunks of chicken. For how this local pie sits beside its cousins abroad, Pie Singapore has a clear explainer on Singapore vs British vs Aussie pies.

Where does the Hainanese connection to Western food come from?

The connection comes from work. It is widely told in Singapore that many Hainanese immigrants, arriving later than some other Chinese communities, found jobs as cooks in British households, on ships, and in hotels and clubs. There they learned to cook Western dishes, and later brought those skills to their own coffee shops and stalls. That is why “Hainanese Western food” is a recognised style here, from pork chops to stews to pies.

We tell this as the commonly told history it is. We are a pie kitchen, not historians, and we have not tried to put dates or numbers on it. What we can say is that a Singapore chicken pie with chunky filling and an egg inside belongs to this tradition, and so does ours.

Did the chicken rice stall shape the pie?

We do not know of a family story that links the Purvis Street stall directly to the pie recipe, and we will not invent one. What we can say is simpler and true: Chef Don grew up in a household where chicken was cooked for customers every day, and where the standard was set by people who would come back tomorrow if the food was right.

The pie recipe itself began later, in 1983, in a staff cafeteria. That story is in The Original Don story. The Hainanese upbringing is the background to it, not a claim about it.

What makes our pie Hainanese in style?

Four things make the Original Chicken Pie recognisably Hainanese in style, and all four are things you can see when you cut one open.

1. Chunks, not mince. Tender pieces of chicken with potato and vegetables, so the filling has bite.
2. Half a hard-boiled egg. Our signature egg sits in the filling. Blog posts about Chef Don’s pies from 2006 and 2008 mention it, and so do reviews today. Our craft note on why there is half an egg in a Singapore chicken pie goes further, and donchickenpie.com asks the same question from the eater’s side: why does Singapore chicken pie have a boiled egg inside?
3. A gravy that binds. The filling is held together by a creamy gravy rather than left loose or runny.
4. A golden, flaky crust. Our pastry dough is made in-house and baked until golden.

What we do not say is that our pie is the first or only Hainanese-style chicken pie in Singapore. Neighbourhood bakeries were already selling chicken pies here in the 1970s and early 1980s. Our claim is narrower: this is Chef Don Lim’s version, baked today in the DonChef kitchen he co-founded. See Who made Singapore’s first chicken pie? for what is and is not known.

Hainanese, British and modern pies compared

This table describes common patterns, not rules. Plenty of bakeries break them, and that is fine.

Why the Hainanese thread matters to “original”

The Hainanese thread matters because originality in food is about lineage as much as invention. Our pie did not appear from nowhere. It comes from a cook who came from a cooking family, working in a tradition that Singapore already loved. When we call it the original Don pie, we mean it is the original of Chef Don’s pie, made in Chef Don’s kitchen. That is a claim about provenance, and provenance is what this site is for. Read our full standard in What “original” means.