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MasterChef: Dessert Masters semi-finalist Kay-Lene Tan reveals what it was like to compete against her role models and the quarter-life crisis that inspired her to pursue her dream career.
The past year has been exceptionally busy for Kay-Lene Tan. From taking on the role of Head Pastry Chef at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Melbourne to being a semi-finalist in the first ever series of MasterChef: Dessert Masters, the talented chef has been catapulted into the limelight – and she’s loving it.
When BeanScene catches up with Kay-Lene in winter 2024, she’s taking a well-earned career break before embarking on an exciting new venture with friend and TV chef Adam D’Sylva. Decca, a European-style neighbourhood restaurant and wine bar, is due to open in the Melbourne suburb of Alphington in November and Kay-Lene will oversee the pastry department.
“Adam has constructed a dedicated pastry bar for me. It’s the first of its kind in Melbourne, so I’m incredibly excited,” she says.
“The plans are all falling into place and it’s going to be a really cool project. Adam and I have a long-established working relationship and he’s been exceptionally generous in trusting me with Decca’s pastry section.”
That relationship started in 2013 when Kay-Lene was hired as the Executive Pastry Chef of Tonka, Adam’s modern-Indian restaurant in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD. After almost six years in the role she was promoted to Head Chef, leading the kitchen team for two years until she made the move to cook among the clouds on the 80th floor of The Ritz-Carlton in early 2023.
Reading the Singaporean chef’s resumé is like flicking through a fine-dining guide to the best restaurants in Melbourne and Singapore. With stints at Joël Robuchon Restaurant, Pollen Singapore, and The European, one would assume Kay-Lene had been in the industry for decades. But, just two years before she landed a job at the world’s most Michelin-star-adorned chef’s restaurant in Singapore, she was on a completely different career path.
“I was working in documentary production in Singapore until my mid-twenties, when I had what I describe as a quarter-life crisis,” Kay-Lene says.
“I’m a big believer in the idea that when you have a job you love, you never work a day in your life. I was seeing all my friends finish their degrees and start these amazing careers and I didn’t feel the same. It spurred me on to figure out what my real passion was.”
Growing up in a Peranakan household, food had always been a huge part of Kay-Lene’s life and something that brought her family together. Inspired she had found her passion, she enrolled in the At-Sunrice GlobalChef Academy in Singapore.
“When I graduated from the Academy, it just so happened Joël Robuchon was opening his flagship restaurant in Singapore. I applied for a job and was placed in the pastry section,” she says.
“I was thrilled to be able to pursue pastry because I love the attention to detail and precision of the craft. The discipline of it really appeals to me.”
In 2018, Kay-Lene was awarded the Hostplus Hospitality Scholarship, which gave her the invaluable opportunity to travel and do stages in the kitchens of some of the best chefs in the world. During the eight-week paid scholarship, she worked alongside Dominique Crenn at Atelier Crenn in the United States and Ana Roš of Hiša Franko in the Slovenian countryside, both of whom hold three Michelin stars.
Kay-Lene says the experience of working with these female chefs at the peak of their careers has been one of the highlights of hers, and hugely influential.
“In the 15 years I’ve been in the industry, the working dynamic has changed greatly, and one of the goods things is that there are a lot more female chefs now,” she says.
“My biggest struggle earlier in my career was juggling the 90 to 100 hour working weeks. However, over the past 10 years there’s been a much wider understanding that there needs to be a better work-life balance in hospitality.”
In 2023, Kay-Lene was once again given the opportunity to cook alongside the masters of her trade – this time as a peer.
“Competing on MasterChef: Dessert Masters was the pinnacle of my career so far; truly the most amazing, humbling, terrifying, and stressful experience of my life,” she says.
“To this day, I still can’t believe I was asked to be on the first season. The cast was insane; Adriano Zumbo and Kirsten Tibballs are the godfather and godmother of the Australian pastry scene.”
While the competition was tough, Kay-Lene made it all the way to the semi-finals, placing fourth out of 10 professional pastry chefs, and tying with Kirsten. She says she learnt an incredible amount during the competition, which reaffirmed her love of the creative process.
“One of the beauties of working in hospitality is that everyone’s always going to have their own unique take on a certain ingredient or dish because we bring a lot of our personalities to the plate, as well as our experiences and stories,” she says.
“It’s amazing that you can give 10 pastry chefs the same brief and every single one of them will deliver a different twist on it. It’s what makes going out to eat so interesting.”
Image: Kay-Lene Tan.
Another thing she gained from the show was friendships, and to this day she regularly keeps in touch with the other contestants via a WhatsApp group chat.
“We’ll check in with each other to see how everyone is doing. A few months ago, I met [fellow contestant] Anna Polyviou in Singapore and took her to all my favourite places to eat,” Kay-Lene says.
It was in Singapore, in her teens, that Kay-Lene fell in love with coffee, a passion which is apparent in this interview, where her first words are: “coffee runs through my blood”.
“My coffee drinking habits started way before I became a chef. When I was studying for my diploma, I spent hours and hours hanging out with my friends in Starbucks, drinking double-shot vanilla lattes. We’d sit there from three o’clock in the afternoon until 10 o’clock at night,” she says.
Her taste for sweetened coffee stems from the traditional kopi coffee served in cafés across Singapore, which Kay-Lene drank with her family. The coffee beans are often roasted with butter and sugar for a rich, dark flavour, and then served with syrupy condensed milk.
Since moving to Melbourne, Kay-Lene has been indoctrinated into Australian coffee culture.
“Melbourne has ruined me. I can’t drink kopi or Starbucks anymore; they’re just too sweet,” she says.
“People in Australia take their coffee very seriously. However, what I’ve noticed recently when I’ve returned home is that Singaporeans who have studied in Australia have introduced a slice of that specialty coffee culture to Singapore.”
As Kay-Lene’s career has progressed and she’s worked at different restaurants across Melbourne, she’s always been quick to find a local coffee spot for those much-needed between-service flat whites.
“When I was working at Tonka, Tom Thumb on Flinders Lane was my go-to. At The Ritz-Carlton it was Commonplace Coffee Brewers, and at Tarts Anon I got the chance to enjoy Square One Coffee, which is served in the shop,” she says.
With such a penchant for good coffee, it’s not surprising that it features regularly as a flavour in her desserts.
“I enjoy the nuance of the different ways coffee can be roasted, such as in Singapore with the butter and sugar. When I was developing the dessert menu for Coda [another of chef D’Sylva’s restaurants in which Kay-Lene worked], I created a Vietnamese tiramisu, which played on the unique flavour profiles of Vietnamese iced coffee,” she says.
“I also recently did a collaboration with Italian restaurant Al Dente Enoteca, for which I created a coffee-based dessert. It was inspired by one of my core memories as a child of visiting an iconic bakery in Katong with my mum, where we would have a slice of marble cake with a cup of kopi – I can still smell it now. For my dish at Al Dente, I created a marble sponge which I topped with a kopi syrup and mascarpone.”
With a European menu planned for her new venture with Adam in Alphington, there’s a good chance Kay-Lene’s take on the classic tiramisu will be delighting diners in Melbourne again soon.
“Decca is in the suburbs, so it’s going to be a different crowd than the CBD clientele I’m used to,” she says.
“Adam and I both have the same vision to create a neighbourhood restaurant that people will want to come to every day. In terms of pastry, I’m going to be celebrating the classics, but with my own spin.”
This article appears in the August/September 2024 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
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