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Chef Rosalind Lim heals through food
At her new cafe Onaka, Rosalind Lim is making health food delicious, practical and therapeutic
Dr Eat Right: Rosalind Lim is on a mission to prove you are what you eat.
Does a "naked burger" comprising a bun-less veggie patty of black beans and brown rice served with chipotle ketchup and garbanzo mash sound appealing?
How about a grilled tofu salad with avocado, walnuts and daikon dressing?
These are the kinds of dishes that chef Rosalind Lim is serving up at her new café Onaka in holistic health center Body with Soul (44/45 Rochester Park, tel +65 6779 0660).
Too tasty to be health food?
Lim's mission is simple: to help people heal themselves and lead healthier lives through eating right, without sacrificing the joy of eating.
Her approach comes in two forms: one through Onaka, a cafe geared towards serving healthy, organic food that is both appetizing and sustainable.
Freshly prepared on a daily basis, the menu includes soups, one-meal salads, grilled sandwiches, organic burgers, whole wheat Panini pizzas and Asian favorites such as tom yum and red curry.
Second, as a consultant, customers approach her with a host of health issues -- hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol and compromised immune systems -- and Lim's job is to construct a restricted diet/eating plan that includes finding practical alternatives to common ingredients, developing recipes to a customer’s taste and training domestic helpers to prepare the food at home.
Lim’s story
Lim's path to healthy eating started more than 20 years ago in San Francisco. There, she was exposed to organic food, farm produce, boutique eateries like the famous Californian artisanal restaurant Chez Panisse, and it changed the way she approached eating and nutrition.
Onaka's ninja burger, meatless and guiltless.
She embraced the natural food scene in San Francisco, devouring its attitude, ideas, cookery and way of living close to the land while operating in an urban environment.
A decade later she returned to Singapore and very quickly realized how challenging it was to eat similarly here.
In 2007, she quit her job to set up her healthy eating business Onaka.
The restaurant's name is an acronym for Optimum Nutrition And Kitchen Arts, but the name also means "stomach" in Japanese.
She opened a café and cooking studio at the Biopolis and several months later a second café at Body with Soul.
What makes her happiest about her business?
“The fact that I see my customers coming two or three times a week, and bringing their children with them,” says Lim, who is the mother of an 11-year-old.
Chunks of tofu replace the need for meat at Onaka.Fusing the body and soul
Chunks of tofu replace the need for meat at Onaka.
Most of Onaka’s customers are from Body with Soul.
They come to benefit from the wellness center’s network of practitioners, whose specialties range from art therapy to osteopathy, acupuncture, yoga and pilates, psychology and general practioner services.
This holistic approach to wellness can easily be glossed over but a visit here proves otherwise.
Here, a patient is treated in totality, combining different approaches to find a way that works best. A psychiatric ailment might be treated with the help of a nutritionist, psychologist and general practioner.
Onaka’s concept to eating right sits perfectly with Body with Soul’s approach to wellness and while it is part of the whole health concept at Rochester Park, before long we might just see people coming here just for the food, especially the naked burger.
Onaka
