When you think of the word “poise”, you would likely imagine a person who carries themself with grace, elegance and dignity. It won’t be the word that comes to mind when you look at Steve Lancaster. The 33-year-old Devonian looks like the good-humoured fellow you’d want to have a few beers with after a day on the football field. Not that he’s an unpolished jock. It’s just that for a Michelin Star-hungry chef who just opened his first ever restaurant, Lancaster is surprisingly mellow.
Poise is the name he chose for his 18-seater restaurant on Teck Lim Road because of its lesser-known meaning: balance, equilibrium and harmony. “That’s what I think of in terms of flavour building,” he explains. “I didn’t want a random word or street name or even my name for the restaurant.”
Balance is necessary when juggling all the influences Lancaster has accrued in his career. He has trained in the world’s top restaurants in the UK, Australia, Sweden and, most recently, Singapore, where he helped Saint Pierre earn its second Michelin Star in 2019.
Now at Poise, he turns coq au vin into fancy lollipop-style starters and pairs caviar with potato foam. And he’s proud of the “random ingredients most people haven’t seen before” like pine cones, spruce tips and garlic capers that he procures seasonally from around the world.
Lancaster does what he likes, throwing all his favourite styles and techniques under the broad umbrella of modern European cuisine. He has a wall lined with curious ferments, and he handpicks all the songs that make up the restaurant’s playlist of ’80s rock music. Is it unusual for a fine dining restaurant? Sure. Does he care? Not a whit. If there’s one thing he has learned from his training in some of the most demanding kitchens imaginable, it’s that nothing else matters when you know what you want.
Lancaster’s road to culinary greatness didn’t begin with a grand epiphany or a charming story about grandma’s cooking. “I was 13. I needed a job during the weekends, so I got one washing plates at a cafe,” he shares. Enjoying the buzz of the kitchen and quickly realising he was “a nightmare at school”, he joined a reputable pub at 15.
His life was going well for the first two or three years until he became resentful of the long hours that prevented him from having a typical teenage experience. “My friends were going on these lads’ holidays, and I couldn’t join them because I was always working. I threw a hissy fit and my head chef basically said, ‘Shut up. This is the way hospitality is. If you want to go down this path, either do it well or do something else.’ That’s when it sunk in — that I really wanted to do this. After that I started looking through the Michelin Guide for the best restaurants I could work at.”
At 18, Lancaster left the pub as sous chef and joined former one Michelin Star restaurant Drake’s on the Pond in Surrey. “I could basically run the kitchen at the pub by the time I left, so I joined Drake’s as this cocky Devon lad,” he laughed. “But in two days, I realised I was nobody. That was another wake-up call.”
He recalled when head chef Steve Drake picked up a load of ruined mushrooms and threw them at him demanding if that was how they did things in Devon. “But my second mentor was even worse!”
His next trial by fire (and brimstone) was in the kitchens of Daniel Clifford, who ran two-Michelin-starred Midsummer House in Cambridge. “Everyone was telling me that if I survived six weeks there, I’d do well,” he recalled. “Clifford would go mental if he found a packet of crisps lying around that someone forgot to throw out. It was that intense. It was hard cooking at such high volume because we usually only had about six chefs. We tried to get more but people rarely stayed. There were days I had to hit myself just to psych myself up on the way to work.”
Not only did he last six weeks, but he also stayed a whole two years. “It was a brilliant place. I loved it. I walked away from those kitchens knowing I was strong enough to go to any kitchen in the world.”
Fortunately for his mental health, things calmed down. His time in Australia taught him about work-life balance, where he described the Fat Duck Group as “the nicest company you could work for”. By the time he left, he was 26 and ready to front a kitchen, but was still eager to learn more. So he went to Sweden to learn how to ferment and preserve stuff. To him, Scandinavian food is the highest level of cuisine.
After joining Oaxen Krog by Magnus Ek in Stockholm, Lancaster’s approach to food dramatically transformed. “I used to love rich, fatty foods, and how butter made everything better. But after a full-course meal, you end up in a food coma. I don’t like that feeling.
“With Scandinavian food, there is so much acidity from the fermentation that it makes the entire meal quite light,” he says, explaining why he has incorporated much of their techniques for Poise. “You will be full here, but not so full that you can’t have a glass of wine or beer afterwards. I’m not trying to destroy people with food.”
Rounding out his education and evolution was his role as head chef at Saint Pierre, where chef-owner Emmanuel Stroobant gave Lancaster permission to go wild. “Most of the chefs I had worked for wanted me to do as I was told. I learned a lot from that. But Emmanuel let me create anything, do anything, with no holds barred, and that boosted my creativity. I wouldn’t be the same without that experience, and I’m thankful for that.”
The food speaks for itself. Poise had a weeks-long waiting list within three months of its opening in May — just from word of mouth. Guests entering the space, which was converted from SCDA Architects’ former showroom and redesigned for Poise by architect Chan Soo Kian, can see Lancaster and his team in action, thanks to the open kitchen concept. But if you’re looking for Hell’s Kitchen-style drama on account of everything Lancaster has endured, you’ll be disappointed. “I’m nice and chill in the kitchen,” he said, grinning.
“I get antsy if someone keeps making the same mistake, but I keep my cool. Even the chefs I used to work for are now more chilled out, but I’m glad I got to work for them when they weren’t. However tough it was, and however hard I had to hit myself to get through it, I don’t regret a single day.”
Photography: Mun Kong
Grooming: Nikki Fu, using Laura Mercier
