Every culture season ships the same way: Volume 1, then a Volume 2 roughly six months later — not two versions dropped at once, one built on what the first one taught me. The new season format is 10 core courses, five savory then five dessert, bookended by small bites to open and sweet treats to close, outside the count. That's a real structural change from how the current Neighbourhood Menu runs, and it's deliberate — more room to actually build a savory-to-sweet arc instead of stacking desserts back to back.

None of that happens without runway. The promo push for a new season — R&D photos, behind-the-scenes, the actual captions — starts about two months before launch, and that push only has material to work with if reservations are actively happening in the meantime. Which is the honest version of "book a session": it's not just dinner, it's what feeds the next volume's content. Neighbourhood pays for Melayu's promo cycle, Melayu pays for Indian's, and so on down the roadmap.

Melayu

The Melayu Menu — Vol. 1 (~Jun/Jul 2027)

The starting point is "craving food" — the stuff Malay households eat any time of day, that never sits cleanly in savory or sweet: nasi lemak, mee rebus, mee siam. That in-between quality is exactly what makes it interesting to rebuild as dessert. I'm not sweetening a savory dish and calling it done — I'm pulling apart what actually makes mee rebus taste like mee rebus (the thick sweet-potato curry gravy, the yellow egg noodle, the sambal on the side) and rebuilding those parts with pastry technique instead of a wok.

Still genuinely in R&D, not locked: a sambal ice cream paired against a mee rebus reinterpretation is the current direction I'm circling. Even the noodle isn't settled — boil-and-blend gives you that starchy, glossy texture the egg noodle has; frying gives you something snappier and more textured. Both are on the table. I'd rather show you the actual mess of figuring it out than pretend this is finished.

Why start here at all, out of every craving food that exists: because mee rebus and mee siam already do half my job for me. A gravy that's simultaneously starchy, sweet, savory, and sour is basically a dessert's flavor architecture wearing a savory costume — the sambal on the side is doing the same "sharp thing that cuts through richness" job that yuzu or lime does in the desserts already on the current menu. I'm not importing a foreign logic into Malay food, I'm pointing out the logic was already there.

இந்திய

The Indian Menu — Vol. 1 (timeframe TBD)

Same lens as Melayu, pointed at a different pantry: the everyday craving food, not the banquet version. Think roti prata, teh tarik, thosai, the stuff sold off a cart at 11pm — not the stuff plated at a wedding. I haven't started R&D on this one yet, so there's no dish to name here. What I can tell you is the method won't change: take something that's already loved exactly as it is, break it into its actual components, and see what happens when those components get pastry technique instead of a kadai.

What I keep coming back to, even before R&D starts: teh tarik is already a technique built entirely around texture — the "pulling" is there specifically to aerate the tea and build a foam head, which is a dessert move (think of any whipped, frothed, or foamed element on the current menu) dressed up as a drink-making ritual. Prata's whole appeal is a laminated, layered dough — the exact same structural idea behind a doughnut or a croissant, just cooked flat on a griddle instead of fried or baked. The overlap is already there in the technique, before I've touched a single ingredient.

中华

The Chinese Menu — Vol. 1 (timeframe TBD)

Comes after Indian in the roadmap, same reason it comes after and not before — order isn't random, it's just queued. The candidates in my head right now are the hawker-stall staples that Singaporean-Chinese households actually crave on a Tuesday, not banquet dishes — but nothing's been tested yet, so I'm not going to name a dish and lock myself into it before the R&D even starts. When it does, it'll show up here the same way Melayu did: messy, unconfirmed, updated as it moves.

The honest reason I haven't jumped ahead and started testing early: every volume so far has taught me something about the last one, and Chinese craving food covers such a wide range — teochew porridge sides, bak kwa, the whole kopitiam breakfast set — that I'd rather walk in with the Melayu and Indian lessons already banked than guess now and redo the work later. Slower start, fewer wasted ingredients.

峇峇娘惹

The Peranakan Menu — Vol. 1 (timeframe TBD)

The newest addition to the roadmap, and arguably the closest one to what eightysix already is — Peranakan food is already a mashup, already the product of two cultures sitting at the same table and refusing to pick one. That's basically the whole eightysix premise applied to a cuisine that got there first. No R&D has started, no dish is picked, but this is the volume I'm personally most impatient to get to.

Part of why it's last and not first, even with how excited I am for it: I want three other volumes' worth of technique behind me before I touch a cuisine that's already this layered. Kueh alone is a masterclass in texture — gelatinous, starchy, coconut-forward, often built in visible strata — and I'd rather bring a fuller toolkit to it than rush in early and undersell it.