Lion Dance Cafe’s Vegan Singaporean Cookbook Will Be Its Parting Gift to the Bay

Over the course of its four-year run in downtown Oakland, Lion Dance Cafe was a one-of-a-kind spot. The only 100% plant-based Singaporean restaurant in the Bay Area, it had a punk-rock aesthetic and drew consistent lines around the block; it was wildly popular among vegans and omnivores alike.

Fans of the restaurant were understandably heartbroken, then, when chef-owners C-Y Chia and Shane Stanbridge announced last spring that they were closing the restaurant and preparing to move to Singapore to allow Chia to be closer to their family. Since then, the chefs have kept busy with a steady stream of pop-up collaborations. Now, they’re ready to leave the Bay with one final parting gift: a self-published Lion Dance Cafe cookbook called Authentic, Not Traditional that will allow longtime customers to make the restaurant’s famed shaobing sandwiches and rich coconut laksa at home.

Chia and Stanbridge have spent the better part of this past year writing, recipe-testing, and photographing the book. Now, as the final step, they’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the cookbooks printed and shipped by early next year.

Reached by phone, Chia and Stanbridge explained that the book’s name, Authentic, Not Traditional, is a nod to the challenge so many immigrant and diasporic chefs face any time they’re cooking their home cuisine. “A lot of times, people who come from the same place as you say, ‘This is not authentic because it’s not like my mom’s,’” Chia says.

But Chia says they’ve never tried to pass off the food at Lion Dance as “traditional.” Since its early pop-up days, the restaurant has always been a mix of different sensibilities, including Stanbridge’s Italian American background, and flavors and ingredients specific to the Bay Area. In Singapore, Chia notes, there are dozens of styles of laksa, and none of them are traditionally vegan.

“This is authentic to us,” Chia says about the recipes in the cookbook. “It’s genuinely a representation of our most honest form of cooking.”

Among other things, Authentic, Not Traditional will be the only purely vegan Singaporean cookbook that the chefs are aware of. The hope, Chia says, is that fans of the restaurant will be able to recreate their favorite dishes, but also that people who’ve never heard of Lion Dance Cafe will be attracted to the book — say, folks who want to get into vegan cooking, “but books about veggie burgers are not speaking to them.”

Chia and Stanbridge were approached by traditional publishers, but after hearing the experiences of other chefs, they decided that self-publishing would give them the creative control to make the book they wanted. For instance, they’ve included little winks and nods to their regular customers that a traditional cookbook publisher would likely have cut.

Besides, Chia says, making the book themselves seemed more in keeping with the restaurant’s DIY ethos anyway. After all, long before its chefs were nominated for a James Beard Award, Lion Dance first made a name for itself as an underground pop-up located inside punk club Eli’s Mile High. So, Stanbridge, who has a background in photography and cinematography, shot all the food photos for Authentic, Not Traditional. Chia did almost all of the food styling. “We borrowed lights from a friend,” Stanbridge says. “We had fun working with props that were in the restaurant already to convey a sense of the place.”

Being able to control the timing of the book was also important. Chia and Stanbridge expect to move to Singapore by April of next year, and they wanted to leave the cookbook as a parting gift to their Bay Area regulars — not have it get stuck in production for another year or two.

To help choose which recipes to include in the cookbook, the chefs crowdsourced a list of customer favorites, which turned out to be slightly overwhelming, they say, because of how often the restaurant changed its menu. The shaobing sandwiches alone had dozens of variations — so many that they started numbering them (e.g., #74, “the tomato one”). Other customers requested even deeper cuts, Chia says, like “that one shrub you had on the menu for one week three years ago.”

The chefs decided to whittle the cookbook down to 100 greatest hits, which is still a work in progress:. “Even now, we’re still 20 recipes over,” Stanbridge admits.

The final version of the book will cover several variations of those shaobing sandwiches. (One of Stanbridge’s proudest accomplishments is coming up with a no-knead recipe that allows home cooks to recreate the springy, focaccia-like shaobing itself without any special equipment.) The book will also include recipes for Lion Dance’s vegan laksa, sticky pandan nian gao and fiery sambals — all the crowd favorites.

Meanwhile, the chefs say a handful of independent bookstores have expressed interest in eventually carrying the book. For now, however, the only certain way for fans of the restaurant to secure a copy is through the Kickstarter campaign.

The good news is that with a little more than two weeks to go, Chia and Stanbridge have already surpassed their $37,500 goal. Extra funds will allow them to plan a little farewell book tour in February, once the book has gone out into the world.

Chia says they didn’t grow up in the U.S., so they never had a high school yearbook — but the cookbook will be a little bit like that for them, full of sweet quotes from regulars and friends they’ve made in the Bay Area food community.

“We’re leaving in five, six months after spending our whole adult lives here,” Chia says. “It’s very bittersweet.”