Quick answer
Singapore Pie comes from three generations of one Hainanese family. Lim Tee Kheng ran Jee Hai Hainanese Chicken Rice at 8 Purvis Street from 1955. His son, Chef Don Lim, created his chicken pie recipe in 1983, founded Don Pie and later co-founded Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab, which bakes under the DonChef™ name today. The kitchen at 39 Tyrwhitt Road now bakes the Singapore Pie, a soya-sauce chicken rice pie that joins both stories in one pastry.
Who was Lim Tee Kheng?
Lim Tee Kheng was one of the first-generation Hainanese immigrants who helped shape Singapore's chicken rice culture. He founded Jee Hai Hainanese Chicken Rice at 8 Purvis Street, near Beach Road, in an area long associated with Hainanese cooks and eating houses. He is our grandfather, and the reason this site exists.
Family accounts differ a little on the dates. This site has always given the Purvis Street years as 1955 to 1972; other family tellings simply place the stall in the 1960s. Either way, Jee Hai belonged to the generation that turned a southern Chinese poached-chicken dish into something Singapore now treats as its own.
A Hainanese chicken rice stall runs on a few things done carefully every day: tender chicken, rice cooked with chicken stock and fat, and the aromatics that hold it together, ginger, garlic and sesame oil, with soya sauce and chilli on the side. Those flavours are the ones we later put inside a pie.
Chef Don Lim and the 1983 chicken pie
One of Lim Tee Kheng's children, Don Lim, also went into food, but through pastry rather than rice. In 1983, while serving pastries at the Hewlett-Packard staff cafeteria (the family still calls them the HP days at Depot Road), Chef Don Lim created the chicken pie recipe that DonChef's Original Chicken Pie still follows: chunky chicken, potato and vegetables in a secret spice blend, with half a hard-boiled egg, under a golden, flaky crust.
The brand's own tagline calls it "Singapore's original Chicken Pie, since 1983". That line is about the recipe's age and its unbroken line back to Chef Don Lim, not a claim to the island's first chicken pie: Singapore's bakeries were selling chicken pies long before 1983. For a fuller portrait of the man behind the recipe, read who the original Don is.
Far East Square and China Square
In 2000 (some accounts say 2001), Chef Don Lim opened his first pie shop, DON: Your Personal Pie Club, at Far East Square in the Raffles Place area. The shop grew into a restaurant across the street at China Square Central, and through the 2000s the Don Pie name became well known around Raffles Place. A food blog that visited in 2008 recorded a whole pie at $18.
Those were good years for old-school pies in Singapore. Other bakeries built their own loyal followings in the same era, among them Oven Marvel at Sunshine Plaza, a separate business with no connection to ours whose history is collected in the Oven Marvel story. If you want every date in our own story in one place, there is a dated timeline from 1983 to 2026.
The Toa Payoh years, as history
Around 2014 to 2015, Chef Don Lim sold the Don Pie brand and turned to the other dish the family cooked well: crab bee hoon soup. From about 2015 he ran Don Signature Crab from a coffee-shop stall at Blk 206 Toa Payoh North. From late 2019 his chicken pies returned too, sold as Don's Pie & Cake at Toa Payoh North Food Centre II (1008A).
Both Toa Payoh stalls have closed. There is no Singapore Pie or DonChef outlet in Toa Payoh today; the nearest are the AMK Hub kiosk and the Tyrwhitt Road flagship. Readers who want the full chapter can read the Toa Payoh years in more detail.
2021: the return to Tyrwhitt Road
In 2021, during the pandemic, Chef Don Lim asked his nephew, Kelvin Leong, to help him rebuild. That year he and the family co-founded Chicken Pie Kitchen & Don Signature Crab at 39 Tyrwhitt Road in Jalan Besar, opposite Jalan Besar Stadium. The pastry dough is made in-house, and the pies are baked in small batches in deck ovens on site, under a "zero overnight pies" rule.
Takeaway kiosks followed at AMK Hub, Wisma Atria, White Sands and Tiong Bahru Plaza, all run directly by the kitchen. Addresses, hours and the nearest MRT for each are on our outlets page.
DonChef™ today
Today the kitchen bakes as DonChef: DonChef's Original Chicken Pie, the DonChef kitchen, pies baked by DonChef's team. The recipe is the one its co-founder, Chef Don Lim, first made for a staff cafeteria in 1983, and it remains the standard every pie is baked to. He still appears at the kitchen's events.
The range has grown around the original: black pepper chicken, chicken shepherd's pie, curry, beef and apple pies, kueh lapis and cakes, and the crab bee hoon that carried the family through the Toa Payoh years.
Why a Singapore Pie? Three generations in one pastry
The Singapore Pie is where the two family stories meet. It takes the flavours of Lim Tee Kheng's chicken rice (soya sauce chicken, rice, a braised egg, ginger, sesame oil and garlic) and seals them inside DonChef's pastry. We describe it as a bridge between three generations: the grandfather's chicken rice, the son's chicken pie, and the grandchildren who run the kitchen with him today.
It is stamped with 發 (fa) and 財 (cai), and it is best known as the Fa Cai set, a Chinese New Year tradition. Read about the soya-sauce chicken rice pie and the rest of the range, or see our answers to common questions, including halal status and reheating.