“I have friends who begin with pasta, and friends who begin with rice, but whenever I fall in love, I begin with potatoes.”

This bit of spud-tacular prose from the novel Heartburn by Nora Ephron is the jumping-off point of one of the dishes on the new menu at casual French-comfort-food restaurant Summer Hill by chef Anthony Yeoh.

It is, of course, a potato dish; not just any potato dish, but a large vat of aligot, a specialty of France’s Auvergne region of mashed potatoes, butter, cream, crushed garlic and melted cheese, that gets wheeled out on a vintage-style trolley, and, table side, is scooped, stretched and manhandled into your bowl: The cheese gives the mash a bouncy, elastic pull.

This and other eye-widening dishes get wheeled out one after another on the restaurant’s very popular Weekend Brunch Trolley, available from Friday to Sunday. Yeoh calls this exercise a “dim sum style” meal, as you get a total of 12 different dishes presented as small plates. “Everybody loves dim sum. It's always popular, and it always, to me, is something you have on the weekends, and gather around for,” Yeoh explained.

So, it’s already fun – did we mention there’s also a snow cone bar? – but we’re getting distracted from what we wanted to say: That this new menu might be the most fun one yet.

Called “Savouring Stories: At the table with women writers”, it’s a celebration of works by women who have written broadly about food, from memoirs and cookbooks to novels and essays.

Each of the dishes comes paired with a short passage that will make you chuckle, ponder and, above all, salivate.

A pork and chicken liver pate with pistachios, for example, takes inspiration from the legendary food writer MFK Fisher’s Gastronomical Me, in which one of the stories she recalls is of a slightly deranged waitress who makes her eat a much bigger lunch than she wants to, including a delicious pate.

A spinach and garlic gratin pays homage to former food critic Ruth Reichl, who, in her memoir Comfort Me With Apples, recalls attending a feast “wrapped up in fumes of garlic” as the room became “giddy with garlic euphoria”.

And a grilled skate wing with brown butter and lemon raises a glass to a passage from Julia Child’s autobiography, My Life In France, in which she describes eating a Dover sole “perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce”.

Why the fixation on the feminine? “The reason we decided on this theme is because the type of food that we serve at Summer Hill is the food of the middle class, and that's always been known as the domain of mothers and grandmothers passing it down to their daughters. It’s comfort food, the type of food that people come home to,” Yeoh explained.

And, “The reason we chose to focus that through the lens of women writers is because when you see how women describe food in their books, they don't just talk about the technical details, like what pots to use, or what temperature the oven must be set at.”

Instead, “They talk a lot about the experiences they have around the food, and you understand what makes it special, because you then understand the rituals, the traditions and emotions they associate with it,” he continued. “And, yeah, they describe it in a much more vivid and beautiful way than men do.”

With male writers, “It’s like watching The Bear – very intense and more like a therapy session,” he quipped.

Designing the menu, a process that involved “re-reading all my favourite books”, took much longer than anticipated because “I ended up getting distracted” and reading entire books, he confessed. “I'd be like, ‘I'm supposed to just re-read this chapter’, and three chapters in, it would be two in the morning and I was still reading.” He also “ended up spending a lot of money” on more books by his favourite writers.

It was apparent that “most of the books that I'm drawn to, that I've learned from and have inspired me, were all written by women”, he said. “This is where my inspiration comes from, and that's where I get inspired to cook, and where I get inspired for menu dishes.”

It’s something that’s closely tied to his style of cuisine. “I knew that I liked French food, but I liked the country cooking, the rustic style of cooking,” he said. “I love that this menu is about reading, because that's where I learned that the type of food that really speaks to me is cuisine bourgeois. It's the comfort food that people come home to at the end of the day.”

And that’s simply because “this is how I like to cook at home. I've worked in fine dining restaurants before and I can appreciate and understand it, but it's never come across as authentically when I present it as this kind of food does, and I think that just speaks to my personality, where I love getting my friends over for a dinner party and having a big pot of stew in the middle”.

Savouring Stories is “a fun menu to do, to show people there’s an extra layer to food,” he said. “I get inspired by reading in between recipes”.

And, interestingly, he’s found that “people really enjoy the storytelling aspect – and it’s not about myself, but about culture and other people”.

It also helps that the food is just plain good. Summer Hill’s previous brunch trolley menu, named “Tour de France”, was so beloved by guests that Yeoh has had to bring some of the dishes back in the form of a weekday set menu (S$79). So, if you loved the Provencale beef stew or the mussels in white wine, you don’t have to look askance at this menu for replacing that one.

In the meantime, if you’d like to dip a toe into the gastro-literary worlds of women who write about food, here are Yeoh’s top three recommendations.

MFK FISHER

Seminal American food writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher published her first book in 1937 and went on to write nearly 30 more, discussing food and eating from all aspects including cooking, culture, history and philosophy; with one of her most famous books, How To Cook A Wolf, written during a food shortage in the second World War.

Anthony Yeoh: “Her memoirs read like an indie biopic that's going to be the dark horse at the awards circuit. Thoughtful, funny, considered and so very aware. Define This Word from Gastronomical Me is an entire chapter of a memoir that she's devoted to describing her lunch, if you think about it at face value. But, she turns it into a story that's compelling, funny, exciting and delicious all at once. Completely masterful storytelling that highlights, for me as a chef and restaurant owner, that a meal is made up of so much more than the food on the plate.”

RUTH REICHL

Best known for serving as food critic for both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in a career spanning 20 years, Ruth Reichl’s work includes keen observations about the culture of eating.

Anthony Yeoh: “Her career has spanned cookbooks, magazines, newspapers and now novels. But, what I most enjoyed were her memoirs. They're shockingly personal and surprising in how much of her life she lays bare, which she attributes to there being no other way around how she could convey the context and moments that made the meals in the books mean what they did. But, it's also what makes them such great fun to read, and by the time you get to her books on her adventures as a New York Times food critic in disguise and then her time as the last editor of Gourmet magazine, she's in full swing and writes with confidence that just makes you want to turn the page.”

PAULA WOLFERT

Award-winning American writer Paula Wolfert is the author of nine cookbooks with a focus on Moroccan, Mediterranean and French cuisine.

Anthony Yeoh: “I picked up her book The Country Cooking Of Southwest France many years ago not really knowing how important the Southwest really is to France. But, the introductions she wrote to each chapter really opened up the idea of cuisine regionale, the food specific to each region of France. And I learned how, coincidentally, all the things we as Singaporeans love (Truffles! Foie Gras! Duck Confit!) come from the sud-ouest, as the French call it. The pictures she painted made me want to visit this delicious land and it was where I went on my first visit to France.

Summer Hill’s brunch trolley buffet is available on Fridays at 12pm and on Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 1pm and 1.30 to 3.30pm. The Savouring Stories menu runs from now until the end of May. For more information, visit https://summerhill.sg.