Fashion & Food: Salt Salon — Fashion & Market

Sisters Sarah Tan and Sonia Tan

Salt Salon is the brainchild of sisters Sarah and Sonia Tan. A living and dining brand, it creates content by exploring food culture from the perspectives of fashion, art, design and more. Salt Salon hosts private dinners in Singapore where they are based, and elsewhere, using local ingredients. Aimed at bringing back the spirit of yesteryear salons, they gather diners for meaningful conversation and an all-round good time. In this interview, Sarah and Sonia speak to us about Salt Salon’s raison d’être, the encounters both intentional and serendipitous in this adventure together, and the endeavours they have cooking up behind the scenes.

Sarah & Sonia pictured at bookstore Post Poetics in Seoul for our debut book launch. Image courtesy of Salt Salon.

Hello, Sarah and Sonia! Could you please introduce yourselves?

Sarah: Hi! I’m Sarah, the older sister and co-founder of Salt Salon. I helm menu development and all the cooking, save for the dessert, which Sonia prepares. I work very closely with Sonia on the creative direction behind all the work we put out on our social feed. I am the storyteller and take charge of all the copywriting you read on our posts. Aside from that, I also write a Substack on personal style, food, art, travel, culture. It is a living repository for my mind’s preoccupations!

I was not trained in anything I am doing now. I have not cooked in a restaurant professionally. Cooking was something I picked up, initially out of necessity, while living with my sister overseas. Over time, I grew comfortable with it, and the kitchen became my refuge and creative playground. I spent most of my 20s living in New York. I moved there first for college, where I majored in finance, and then worked at an investment bank for close to five years. I am most definitely not crunching numbers or building financial models anymore.

Among all my practices, I think storytelling forms the bedrock of everything that I do. People, places and the past inspire me greatly. I love poring through archives, images, books across a whole spectrum of genres, from history to art, fashion, craft and more.

Sonia: I am Sonia, the younger sister and other co-founder of Salt Salon. While we both are creative directors in our own right, I am more of the visual director, where I am responsible for bringing the brand to life visually, be it in photography or illustration. My training and background however, is quite the contrary from what I do now. I did not take art in school, so I do not have formal training in either art or photography. I majored in accounting undergraduate, then worked in business development in a corporate setting while living in New York. After seven years in New York, I moved back to Singapore and decided then to make the switch into branding and advertising where I managed accounts.

“At Salt Salon, we say that Sarah makes the food while I craft the mood.”

Living in New York played a big part in developing my creative mind, and finding different avenues to express that. In college, I minored in art history which taught me an appreciation of how art and design lived and endured with people through time. For that reason, museums were a big part of how I spent my weekends. Something is always happening somewhere in New York, and there are many personalities with different stories that inspire me. All this exposure nurtured my creative sensibilities.

What motivated the creation of Salt Salon, and how would you describe Salt Salon?

Sarah & Sonia: We hosted regularly when we lived in New York. There is nothing that surpasses the inexplicable joy of gathering a table of people together to eat, share, laugh and talk all together. While living in New York, we spent a lot of time with an older couple, Howard and Mirella. Mirella is an Italian artist who moved to New York in the 1980s. She is probably the best cook I know.

To this day, she is one of my biggest inspirations in life and in the kitchen. Mirella and I cooked together for countless friends in her downtown SoHo loft, and Sonia and I would always encounter so many fascinating, diverse personalities at their dinner table. We miss this element of spontaneity and happenstance that can strike when we least expect it. With that spirit, we created Salt Salon in the hope of inspiring and gathering individuals around a table.

Salon-style gatherings were especially prominent in the 1900s, most notably with Gertrude Stein’s weekly Saturday salons held at her Parisian abode. Along with her partner Alice B. Toklas, they frequently hosted cultural luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse and more.

In a similar vein, Sonia and I want to gather, inspire and create through our weekly supper clubs. We dine with strangers and bring a community closer together. The Italian writer Italo Calvino remarked that a good story should be as satiating as good bread. At Salt Salon, we dream of exchanging stories, ideas and aspirations over dinners we host in Singapore and beyond, wherever the world and people take us. It is what we like to think of as an everlasting meal.

How does fashion act as an influence or a key component of Salt Salon?

Sarah: Fashion and dressing up have been inextricably enmeshed in my everyday life, for as long as I can remember now. I grew up having a strong notion of what I liked and disliked. I am still like that. I am consistently, and obsessively hunting down one thing –usually vintage and old–or another.

For me, an ideal aesthetic outcome is about finding balance and functional harmony, be it in an outfit, in a dish or in a floral arrangement. I think about how to build layers, straddling between varied textures, colours, proportions and so on. It is a dynamic and intuitive process.

Sonia: I think that whether or not one enjoys fashion as a subject matter, dressing up is a big part of everyday life. It is an expression of how one chooses to show up. So I think with everything else we do as hosts at Salt Salon, from designing a menu to setting the table, fashion is just another language through which we express our desire to approach things with intention. We want Salt Salon to be a brand that inspires the art of living, for the lack of better words.

Hosting the r y e team with a homemade Korean spread for a Lunar New Year dinner party. Photo by Sonia Tan. Image courtesy of Salt Salon.

What are the challenges that you have met with, and how have you overcome them? In a similar vein, what have been the milestones that have carried you forward?

Sonia: We have many aspirations local and global for Salt Salon. We like to call ourselves a living and dining universe because everything we do at Salt Salon is built around the act of gathering and all that comes with it. And it is a universe because the possibilities surrounding it are endless, whether they come in the form of products, stories or experiences.

Sarah: Recently, we self-published a cookbook, SOUP. It is the first installment of a series targeted at the home chef. I wrote the cookbook, while Sonia captured and illustrated all the visuals present. It was challenging but also one of the biggest milestones we have achieved as sisters and now, a professional working duo. I hope it sets the tone and direction for the upcoming series, as well as future projects.

Sarah, you write a newsletter by the same name on Substack. What do you enjoy most about it?

Sarah: I started my Substack at the request of many friends who wished to read my longer-form writing. Writing proved to be exceptionally cathartic and illuminating. When I first conceived it, I wanted to feature recurring subcolumns, such as“Sal.torialist” for musings on style and fashion, and to write about myriad interests, from cooking to fashion to travels. There is a lot more I want to build out editorially on the platform, but for now, what I love most about it is that it is my personal space to share any ruminations and preoccupations.

Sonia, you create fashion-focused photos and illustrations for Salt Salon. Please explain your process as well, how they present your unique point of view, and equally, what you enjoy most about it.

Sonia: I toggle between two visual languages: photography and illustrations. Both mediums allow me to give things I see and feel another lease of life, albeit with different personalities. Photography is a second language for me, and a way to capture the small everyday moments that often slip by unnoticed. It is my way for me to share my view of the world, and my way of expressing a part of myself that I cannot articulate with words.

Illustration was something I picked up quite serendipitously one day while travelling in the UK. I started sketching daily scenes for fun, and after a while, holding pencil to paper grew to be a meditative practice for me. I specifically love drawing people, which is probably why I draw fashion-forward portraits sometimes. I use pencil, pastels or acrylic on paper, and occasionally iPad illustrations.

How do your individual interests and skills complement each other in developing Salt Salon?

Sonia: It feels symbiotic. Wherever I fall short, Sarah is able to pick up after me, and vice versa. Between the two of us, Sarah is the creative director while I am the visual director. When it comes to content creation, I am responsible for the art direction while Sarah leads on words and storytelling. It is a blessing that we can coexist as sisters and creative partners. We could not be more opposite but I think this yin-and-yang dynamic creates a healthy balance. We love traveling together and it is where we get most of our inspiration from.

Sarah: Sonia could not have articulated it better. I am grateful that we have been able to work together since embarking on this journey as creative partners together. It often feels like she is able to read my mind and intuit things about me even before I can. I have been told that a dream job is one that I can create for myself. It feels extra special that we get to build this from scratch together.

How did the collaboration with Unisecon come about, to present Saria pleated wraps? The names of the colors, hawthorn red, aubergine, panna cotta and black sesame are delightful, and represent that food and fashion relationship very well.

Sarah: I have been friends with Nina Jiang, the founder and creative director of New York-based label Unisecon for a few years now. The starting point for the colour palette also ties to an interesting story. Nina was feeling nostalgic for hawthorn flakes, a childhood snack she used to have growing up in Beijing. She went all the way to the Chinese supermarket in Queens, New York, to procure the snack—unexpectedly sparking inspiration for the collection’s colour palette.

Last December, an idea suddenly came to mind that Salt Salon and Unisecon could perhaps collaborate on an apron that was not necessarily meant for the kitchen! I like the idea of multi-functional garments, like a scarf that can turn into a sarong-style wrap skirt, or a long chain that could double up both as a necklace and a belt. Sonia, Nina and I wanted to create something with staying power and aesthetic function. The Saria pleated wrap is so fun to style because it can be worn on the waist, as a top like a bustier, or even cross-body like a toga. My artist and florist friends also love it for the many pockets it has—something I asked Nina to maximise! It actually has four pockets, two of which are concealed strategically behind the pleated panels.

Photos from the two-day launch event for SOUP at bookstore Post Poetics, in Seoul earlier this April. Images courtesy of Salt Salon.

Please tell us more about the making of the cookbook SOUP, and the experience launching it at Post Poetics in Seoul.

Sonia: A cookbook is a marriage of both our creative expressions: cooking and writing for Sarah, and photography and illustration for me. Both of us collect cookbooks and photo books, and we have always envisioned creating one together. Everything was developed and shot at home by the two of us.

The Post Poetics launch was an amazing experience. We sold out quicker than expected. We wanted to create a semblance of the Salt Salon experience, so we cooked a soup out of the recipe book and served a giant pot of it at the event. Anyone who stopped by could try a sampler of the soup, which made it feel like a giant block party.

Sarah: The turnout of the event went beyond all of our expectations as more than 200 people showed up over the two-day launch. Sonia and I have spent countless hours at this bookstore and there was no better place for us to launch our first publication. Moreover, Wan Cho, the founder of Post Poetics, was so encouraging throughout the process. He has built an inspiring space loved by creatives all around the world, and it was uplifting to see so many of them gathered in one place.

How have elements from your experiences living in New York, traveling frequently to Seoul, and your current environs in Singapore infuse into your practice?

Sarah: Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my father and my late maternal grandmother. Both of them had a big influence on me. He is an architect, while she was an interior designer by trade, though she later became a full-time homemaker. However, she did not stop creating, decorating or designing. She was very good at sewing, and upheld a yearly tradition of crafting my sister and I a handmade nightgown every birthday. I still wear them today. In her own way, she showed me that beauty could be found in the quotidian moments of everyday living. She was the kind of person who could turn “trash” into treasure. Because of that, I am constantly thinking how I can repurpose, stretch and improvise the existing into the new and unexplored.

Meanwhile, my father often took my siblings and I to bookshops, where he would spend hours poring through books for design inspiration. Now, I look to books of all kinds whenever I feel in need of a mental or visual refresh. The inspiration might not hit immediately but being exposed to images and the right words always help to plant seeds whenever I am in a rut.

Being back in Asia gives me the chance to explore more of this side of the world, which proved geographically challenging before. I adore local markets of all kinds, and make it a point to visit one when traveling. It is an anthropological adventure as much as a gastronomical one!

Sonia: The way I am and how I perceive the world is definitely an amalgamation of all my memories collected at different life stages, whether it’s growing up in Singapore, spending our 20s in New York or just traveling to different places.

Since moving back to Singapore, it is about synthesising everything we have encountered and sharing it with people around us. The one thing we loved the most about being in a city like New York was that air of spontaneity. That was what we wanted to bring about with Salt Salon, and hopefully our guests so far have been able to feel that spirit!

As I ask these questions, I gather that it all comes together in a way of life, rather than being separated into discrete categories of e.g. food, fashion. How do you plan for Salt Salon to grow?

Sarah & Sonia: That is exactly it: we want to inspire a way of living. While we will have the supper club and home dining experiences as the anchor, we are programming a pipeline of upcoming events. Next up, we are planning a book launch event in Singapore.

We will also continue to organise more Salt Salon Studio sessions. Salt Salon Studio is our series of workshop-style events where people come dine, and also learn a skill with us. We co-hosted a beading luncheon and workshop earlier in March and have plans to do another one in July.

In the longer term, we want to keep building on product and brand collaborations in the homeware and living space. There are several artists-turned-friends we would love to collaborate on a series of objects with them that users can live with for a long time. Regarding our Salt Salon cookbook series too, we are already bubbling with ideas for the next instalment of the series (hint: pasta!) and will get to work very soon.

Visit Salt Salon for more information. The Singapore SOUP launch will take place at Aa Furniture on 21 June 2025, from 1pm to 7pm, with complimentary soup to enjoy while it lasts.