The celebrated chocolatier, chef and artist talks about the importance of exploration in culinary creativity
Options: Come next year, you will be celebrating two decades in the business. Let’s talk about some key milestones and moments.
Janice Wong: It has to be opening my 2am:dessertbar at the age of 24. I had no playbook, just the instinct that Singapore was ready for a dessert bar that opened when most kitchens closed. Next year, we will celebrate our 20th anniversary. Being named Asia’s Best Pastry Chef in 2013 and 2014, two years back-to-back, also made me realise this wasn’t a fluke. It was a voice the region wanted to hear, and it pushed me to take pastry and art further than I’d planned to. Then, of course, there are the chocolate installations — edible art at scale. The Paragon In Bloom piece this year (800kg of chocolate, Singapore Book of Records) is the latest, but every one of them traces back to a single stubborn idea: dessert doesn’t belong on a plate. It defies gravity: on the walls, ceilings and surfaces unimaginable.
Tell us about your stint at the recently concluded TFWA Asia Pacific Exhibition & Conference 2026 and Taste of the World, a new concept focused on culinary storytelling, immersive experiences and the growing role of F&B in travel retail.
It was the new F&B heart of TFWA Asia Pacific 2026. There was a kitchen theatre, bar, live demos… the lot, and all under one roof at Marina Bay Sands. For me, it was a chance to show that food and beverage isn’t a side category in travel retail anymore. It is how travellers will remember a place. Visitors took part in tastings and conversations and got a real sense of what global F&B looks like when it gets the same stage as the big beauty and spirits houses. For example, I was just in Ozen Bolfushi in the Maldives, and over there, you will see that F&B isn’t an amenity; it is an experience, all about creating memorable tastes and culinary journeys for guests throughout their stay.
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Why does destination storytelling matter?
Because nobody will fly home and tell you about the duty-free aisle (laughs), instead, they will tell you about the bowl of laksa they enjoyed at 1am, the chocolate that tasted like the city in which it was made or their first memory of when they had it. Airports are the first and last impression of a place. It is exactly why platforms like Taste of the World exist. The traveller of today wants experience, not just transaction, and F&B is the most direct way to bottle a destination.
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And tell us about your Melbourne epiphany, when you went on a life-changing farm trip.
I was on exchange in Melbourne and went on road trips to the berry farms. They hand you a basket and let you pick straight from the ground, dirt and all. I bit into a strawberry with the soil still on it and tasted the earth. That was the moment. We don’t get that in Singapore. Everything’s washed, wrapped, kept very clean and you forget food actually comes from somewhere. That single strawberry rearranged something in me. If one ingredient could carry that much story and that much place, then this was the language I wanted to speak for the rest of my life. I went home, enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and never looked back.
What or where’s next then?
Travel retail is the next frontier, which is why I was at TFWA this year. Airports reach more people in a week than a flagship store does in a year, and the audience is exactly who I want to talk to: curious, well-travelled, hungry for the new. Beyond that, Thailand and the Middle East are very actively on the table. Different palates, same instinct: people want art they can taste.
Where would you say have been your most inspiring destinations?
Tokyo, for its precision, where every gesture means something. Oaxaca in Mexico for soul, and chocolate the way it was meant to be before we sanitised it. Copenhagen for the courage to be weird on a plate. And Kyoto, always Kyoto, for teaching me that restraint is its own kind of maximalism.
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What’s at the top of your travel hit list?
Lima. Lisbon. The Faroe Islands. Anywhere with an ingredient I haven’t met yet.
What are you reading right now?
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.
What are you listening to right now?
Lo-fi when I’m sketching, jazz when I’m plating, silence when I’m tasting. And on long flights, podcasts about AI, wellness, longevity, anything that lets the food brain rest so it can come back sharper.
What was your original childhood ambition?
I wanted to be a tennis player. Discipline, geometry, knowing exactly where you want the ball to land. It turns out that ambition transferred well.
Describe your idea of a perfect Singapore weekend.
Saturday morning at Tiong Bahru market for kueh and people-watching, then a long walk through Gardens by the Bay. Lunch would be hawker fare, while dinner would be somewhere ambitious. Sunday would be considerably slower: coffee at home, a gallery or a museum, then back to the kitchen because that’s where I rest. And I would end the night at 2am with a glass of something cold in the company of the team. — As told to Diana Khoo
