When Shu Han Lee left Singapore to study in London at 18, she had no grand ambitions of building a food business. Yet her mother insisted that she squeeze a small packet of rice and a rice cooker into her 25kg suitcase. “I don’t know how you mess up rice in a rice cooker,” she said with a laugh. Learning to cook Singaporean food from scratch turned out to be the easy part. The irony was that Lee had left Singapore knowing remarkably little about the food that would later define her career.