Who is the original Don?

Who is Don in “Don Pie”?

Don is Chef Don Lim, the cook who founded Don Pie and co-founded Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab. His Chinese name is 林德發. The pie shop he opened at Far East Square in 2000 was called DON: Your Personal Pie Club, and the people who bought from it shortened that to Don, or Don Pie. The name on the shop was the name of the man in the kitchen. The names people use for his pies have multiplied since; donpies.com untangles Don Pie, Don Pies and Don’s Pie if you are unsure which one you are looking for.

On this site we call him “the original Don” for a simple reason. Several businesses and websites in Singapore have used the word Don in connection with pies over the years. We are not here to discuss any of them. We are here to say clearly which Don started it: Chef Don Lim, whose recipe we still bake.

What is DonChef?

DonChef is the name Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab bakes under today. Every pie that leaves the kitchen is a DonChef pie, made to the original recipe that Don Pie founder and kitchen co-founder Chef Don Lim created in 1983. When you see “DonChef’s Original Chicken Pie” on a menu or a box, that is the recipe this page is about.

Where does Chef Don Lim come from?

Chef Don Lim comes from a Hainanese cooking family. His father was a first-generation Hainanese immigrant who ran a chicken rice stall on Purvis Street, in the 1960s by our own records. Food was the family trade before it was Chef Don’s. The family’s side of that history, including his father Lim Tee Kheng’s stall, is kept on singaporepies.com.

We are careful with family history. We publish the parts that the family has made public on our own About page and nothing more. You will not find invented childhood anecdotes on this site. If a detail is not on the record, it is not here. The fuller story of that background, and what it means for the pie, is in The Hainanese thread.

How did Chef Don Lim start making chicken pies?

Chef Don Lim started making chicken pies for a staff cafeteria. In 1983, by his own account, he was baking pastries for the cafeteria at Hewlett-Packard, in what he calls “the HP days at Depot Road”. His chicken pie recipe was created and refined there.

That origin matters to how the pie tastes. A cafeteria pie has to satisfy the same people day after day. It cannot rely on novelty. It has to be filling, consistent and good enough that nobody tires of it. Those are still the qualities we bake for.

What did Chef Don Lim build?

Chef Don built a pie business from a single shop. DON: Your Personal Pie Club opened at Far East Square in 2000 (the pie club website gives 2001) and grew into a restaurant across the street at China Square Central, 20 Cross Street, with more outlets in the 2000s.

Blog posts from those years describe his pies in terms our customers would recognise today: a flaky crust, a generous filling with chicken and vegetables, and an egg inside.

Why did Chef Don Lim sell the Don Pie brand?

Chef Don Lim sold the Don Pie brand around 2014-2015. Our own About page says 2014; some published accounts say November 2015. After the sale, the brand changed hands more than once.

We do not tell the brand’s later story, and we do not comment on anyone who has traded under it. What matters for this site is what Chef Don did next: he kept cooking. For several years he did not sell pies at all.

What did Chef Don Lim do after Don Pie?

After Don Pie, Chef Don Lim cooked crab. From about 2015 he ran Don Signature Crab, a crab bee hoon stall in a coffee shop at Blk 206 Toa Payoh North. Food writers covered the stall from 2017, praising the soup. In 2019 his pies returned, sold as Don’s Pie & Cake at Toa Payoh Food Centre II, 1008A Toa Payoh North.

One food writer later headlined the comeback “The Don is back!” (ieatishootipost, 2023). We tell the whole chapter in The Toa Payoh years, and the full arc from 1983 to today in the Original Don story.

Where is Chef Don Lim now?

Chef Don Lim is part of the kitchen he co-founded at 39 Tyrwhitt Road in Jalan Besar. In 2021, during the pandemic, he asked his nephew Kelvin Leong to help him revive the business, and together they opened Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab. That makes three generations of one family feeding people: a chicken rice stall, a pie shop, and now a kitchen that does both pies and crab. Chef Don Lim still appears at the kitchen’s events.

The kitchen is the founder’s kitchen. The recipe is the founder’s recipe. That is the whole of our claim to the word “original”, and it is explained in What “original” means.

A short fact file on Chef Don Lim

What we have not published, and why

People ask us for more: how old Chef Don was when he started, stories from the HP years, what went wrong and what went right. Some of those stories exist. We have chosen not to put anything on this page that is not already in a published source or our own records, because a heritage site that guesses is worse than one that waits. As more of Chef Don’s own account is recorded properly, we will add it here. Until then, donpies.com’s profile of Chef Don Lim covers the same dated ground from the outside, and our timeline of the original Don lists every source.