Refuge of the weary soul

Summer Pavilion
7 Raffles Avenue
3/F Ritz Carlton Millenia
Singapore 039799

Stepping into Summer Pavilion is stepping into a world of calm, one with an aura of refined elegance and luxuriating grandeur. This is not the place for business lunches, nor is it particularly appropriate for large celebratory banquets. Rather, one comes here to escape. The restaurant is set within a garden, with windows on three sides to let in the wonderful midday light and to afford a view of the greenery. The interiors are designed with a touch of the Oriental, tempered by restraint and an appreciation of understatement. For years it has been one of my favourite places to visit, let alone eat - and it was with great anticipation that I revisited this Singapore culinary stalwart for brunch on Sunday.



I appreciate a good place setting. Most times it is the first portent of the organisation and the attention to detail practiced by the restaurant and its staff. The devil, as always, is in the details - and a crooked set of chopsticks or a teacup facing the wrong way is a mark of disrespect towards the small things. I have a lot of pet peeves, and I am sure everyone else is no different. It boggles my mind whenever restaurants do not provide a chopsticks rest. I don't even care what it is made of and what it looks like; in fact - at lower end restaurants where they provide disposable chopsticks that come in a wrapper - I am perfectly happy to make my own makeshift rest with the wrapper. I just need something to rest my chopsticks on. Fortunately Summer Pavilion - as befitting a restaurant within the Ritz Carlton - is the model of excellence and hospitality, and I want for nothing as I sit down at the table to wait for my family.


The restaurant has never been known for its dim sum, but to reach out to Singaporean sensibilities it has started offering a limited dim sum selection to accompany its main lunch menu. There were a couple of highlights - the pei dan chok with salted egg yolk was quite extraordinary, with generous helpings of pork strips and century egg bits. It was cooked for so long that the individual grains of rice that made up the porridge had long since broken down, and you tasted the full flavour of its slow-cooked goodness. Also, this "butter bun" - basically a buo lo bao with coconut filling - was sweet and delicate and the pastry made to buttery, airy perfection.


They did not have the standard pai guat, but both the law pak gow and the fung zao were exemplary. The former was steamed and deep-fried such that the outer skin was crisp, yet the inside still soft and starchy. The latter was marinated in a sauce that was so light that I wondered if it was there at all, and yet I felt the tang of the spice and when the aftertaste hit me I marveled at how it could be so complex, have multiple ingredients and yet retain that lightness of essence so as to almost escape detection.



We also ordered the har gao, which was yet another empirical data point that proved my Grand Dim Sum Theory (cf: my previous post). The version here had the best skin I have eaten in a while - moist and so well-made that I temporarily forgot that it had once been flour.


Also worth mentioning but not particularly praise-worthy were the lobster roll - shaped like miniature curry puffs - and the deep fried prawn dumplings with century egg.



There were, unfortunately, a couple of misses. This vegetarian dumpling was very good to look at but tasted too much of shrimp paste and plum sauce. It also had pineapple in it, which gets points for innovation but unfortunately did not work out al all.


The captain had also recommended this honey spiced spare rib to satisfy my pai guat fix, but unfortunately it was too sweet and the meat was too tough. It was neither like pai guat nor like that other Singaporean honey-spiced pork delicacy: bak gua (pork jerky) - caught somewhere in the middle and reflecting the best qualities of neither dish.


To be fair, dim sum is not the main draw at Summer Pavilion. They have several specialties - from silver cod fish with Champagne sauce, through zucchini flowers with prawn, chicken and mushroom stuffing, to sauteed sliced ostrich in satay sauce. The chef is one of the most innovative Chinese chefs in Singapore and not afraid to stray from the classics. If there were such a thing as nouveau Chinese, Summer Pavilion would be one of its foremost practitioners in Singapore. They are well known for their barbequed meats and especially their preparations of duck - the most notable being the Peking duck and the "pi-pa" duck. We could not make up our minds, and so ordered the combination platter. Indecision can sometimes have favourable results, and in this case both the roast duck and char siew were quite delicious. The duck in particular (pictured, background) was salted perfectly and tender to the bite, while the skin was roasted to the point where you could crack it and break it off with the slightest touch of your chopsticks. It crackled as I chewed down on it, and the juices of the fat beneath the skin oozed delightfully out into the sides of my mouth.


For dessert we had egg tarts (not pictured), tang yuan with sesame filling, and chilled mango and white cream rolls. I recall many Sunday afternoons spent at my grandmother's house making tang yuan, and the dish has a special sentimental significance for me. It is curious how we always hanker after the foods of our childhood, as if trying to recapture a moment in time, a taste of an era that is otherwise slowly being forgotten. My mother says that she craves the foods from her childhood because she grew up in a large family and there was never enough food to go around - so whatever she ate seemed particularly special because of its scarcity. That may be one explanation, but I defied her to explain to me how it was that I spent my childhood stuffing my face with ungodly amounts of anything I could lay my hands on - and all these years later still hankered after those foods.



I like Summer Pavilion for many reasons - the impeccable service, the restraint and sophistication in both the decor and the food, and the innovation of the kitchen. But chief among the reasons is the fact that the restaurant is a refuge from the harried world that we live in: a dining room nestled within a tranquil garden and cocooned from the hustle and bustle of the skyscrapers and malls that surround it. Upon exiting the place I was momentarily disoriented as I tried to regain my bearings and figure out which direction to head. It was as if I had left the world temporarily for some quiet sanctuary, and now that I was back out again all I wanted was to head back in.

Sunday bloody Sundays

Peach Blossoms 鸿桃轩
6 Raffles Boulevard
5F Marina Mandarin
Singapore 039594
+65 6845 1118

Out of all the great traditional Chinese regional cuisines, I think my favourite has to be Cantonese, or Yue, cooking. Originating from Guangdong Province in Southern China, it distinguishes itself from the other regional cuisines by being known for its lighter sauces, more refined palate and preparations, minimal spice and above all, a dedication towards allowing its primary ingredients to shine though. In addition, the Cantonese are adventurous eaters, incorporating a variety of meats into their cuisine (snails, snakes, and so forth) but also using all their edible parts (chicken feet, duck tongue, beef tripe, etc). Popular spices include garlic (lots of it), ginger, scallions, star anise, five spice powder; and Cantonese cooks rival French sauciers for the flavour and variety of their basic sauces - soy sauce, hoisin sauce, plum sauce, black bean sauce, XO sauce, oyster sauce, and so on.

One of my favourite parts of Cantonese cuisine is dim sum, which refers to the variety of tapas-style snack foods usually served as breakfast or brunch in many restaurants. The practice of eating dim sum originated from the teahouses of old, which started serving snacks to accompany what was originally the main attraction - Chinese tea. To this day the act of eating dim sum for brunch is called "yum cha" - literally "drinking tea" in Cantonese - and any such brunch would be incomplete without the requisite pot of freshly brewed Chinese tea.

I arranged to meet Winnie for dim sum last Sunday, and despite her not being a big eater I was determined to try one of the several dim sum all-you-can-eat buffet options around the City Hall area. There are three within just a small city block - Hai Tien Lo at the Pan Pacific, Cherry Garden at the Mandarin Oriental and Peach Blossoms at the Marina Mandarin - all at different price points. At $30 a head Peach Blossoms was the most reasonable, so we agreed to meet there at noon.

I have known Winnie for a long time, and through all the changes over the years, lapses in communication and witnessing each other at our respective worsts, she has remained one of my dearest friends. I arrived at the restaurant first, and despite my typical impatience at the tardiness of others it was hardly a chore waiting for her to show up. She is rarely late anyway, and showed up not five minutes after our agreed meeting time. It gave me time to pick a table with good light, and to admire the place setting.


Ordering food is a skill worth honing in Chinese cuisine, and there are many unwritten rules. For a typical meal, especially in a group, it does not suffice simply to order what you want to eat. First of all, you have to understand how a kitchen works and the timing of their dishes. Chinese restaurants bring you each separate dish a la minuit, as soon as it is ready. There is no such thing as having food rest on the pass and waiting for all the dishes at a certain table to be ready before sending them out. If the servers and runners are efficient, you get your food literally seconds after it has left the chef's wok. With that in mind, I like to order at least one cold dish since these are usually the quickest to arrive - and you can safeguard against having your protein arrive before all your other side dishes, or the other way around.

Second, you have to account for diversity in ordering your dishes - not only in terms of ingredients but also in flavours and textures. It is considered faux pas, or at least tremendously frowned upon when ordering family style, to pick two dishes with the same main protein. Similarly, if you already have a dish with a starchy sauce, you want to steer clear of other starchy sauces for the rest of your dishes. If you have chosen a deep-fried protein, you may want to consider a steamed side dish to complement it. What I like to do is decide on the main proteins first - meats and seafoods - then based on those choices, narrow down the side dishes to reasonable complements. It never hurts to ask the waiter, because waiters at Chinese restaurants are incapable of equivocation. They will tell you, with brutal honesty and without hesitation, what is good (or rather, popular) and what the chef's specialties are. At the good restaurants, the waitstaff consider it their divine right to suggest, critique and even reject your choices. Who can blame them? They know the food, and the unwritten rules of creating a well-balanced and diverse meal, so will not think twice about making up your mind for you. These are the best kind of waiters.

There are more of these unwritten rules, but they all get thrown out the window for dim sum because of the sheer variety of dishes available. (Also, every dish invariably has shrimp in it, so it is kind of hard to account for diversity.) In traditional dim sum places, they have servers push trolleys around stacked with various dishes - and you just point out what you want. These are getting rarer and rarer (in Singapore at least). Now you typically just order off a menu and have them bring each dish to you once it is ready.

The staples of dim sum dishes are siew mai and har gao - every self respecting dim sum place has these. The former is a dumping of seasoned ground pork wrapped in a wanton skin and garnished with an orange dot made from either roe or diced carrot; and the latter is a steamed shrimp dumpling with a wheat flour wrap. It is my theory that the quality of these two dishes are inversely related, for the best har gao necessarily has the freshest shrimp and the most delicate of skins, and you usually have to go to the higher end places for the best versions of these. However, for siew mai, the less refined the seasoning - the better it usually tastes. I remained convinced that everywhere you go - you get a place that is good at making only one of these dishes, never both at the same time.


Another staple of dim sum is cheong fun - thin strips of rice noodle wrapped around a filling of meat or seafood into the shape of a roll, usually served drizzled with sweet soy sauce. Here we had it with a filling of barbequed pork.


One of my favourite dim sum dishes is law pak gow - otherwise known as carrot cake. The name is a little misleading, since it is typically made with white radishes instead of carrots, which are shredded and made into a dough with rice flour. The dough is then shaped into square patties, or "cakes" - often with other shredded ingredients such as dried shrimp or mushrooms. The patties are steamed and then deep-fried and served with sweet sauce. Because of their shape, Hunter called these Spongebobs whenever we went to dim sum in DC, which always made me laugh. One out of every five things Hunter says always makes me laugh uncontrollably, but the other four make me want to punch him in the face. Peach Blossoms made a Singaporean version of this dish - diced into smaller squares to resemble the Singaporean dish of chye tow guay - and served with bean sprouts.


A similar dish to law pak gao and similarly misnamed is yam cake - made in the same way but with taro instead. This is much thicker and starchier than law pak gao, and is a vastly inferior substitute.


Another of my favourites and quite possibly my outright favourite is a dish of steamed pork spareribs, typically topped with red chili peppers and scallions in a black bean sauce, called pai guat (pictured below, foreground). The version here had a little twist in that it eschewed black bean sauce for a chef's creation - in which I think I tasted curry powder. It was an interesting take on a classic and I enjoyed it, yet I couldn't help but feel a little cheated.


One of the standouts at Peach Blossoms was the fung zao - or chicken feet. These are first deep fried, then boiled and marinated in a sauce made from fermented black beans, red chili peppers and sugar. They are an absolute adventure to eat because of the gelatinous texture of the meat and cartilage, and the many small bones to pick out. Yet they are absolutely worth it.


It is also standard to eat congee, or porridge as an accompanying starch to dim sum. My porridge of choice is pei dan chok (century egg porridge). Century eggs are eggs coated in a mixture of clay, wood ash and lime and preserved for weeks or months. The yolk becomes dark green and has a cream-like consistency, while the white becomes a dark brown, slightly translucent jelly. It has a strong odour and distinct flavour, and is perhaps somewhat of an acquired taste. For my part, I absolutely love it.


I could not go without mentioning perhaps the most famous of dim sum dishes - cha siew bao - steamed buns filled with barbequed pork. Nobody really orders cha siew bao at restaurants, since it is pretty standard fare and unlikely to be transcendent or a life-changing experience. The only reason it ever gets ordered is because it seems to be the dish most palatable to babies or toddlers. Considering that it is usually on the table next to chicken feet and pork spareribs, I can see how it represents the safest choice. Once you grow out of eating cha siew bao, you never go back. For one, there are so many other dishes that are much tastier, and cha siew bao happen to be very filling, taking away precious stomach space for other more deserving foods. And even if you had a hankering for the barbequed pork, there is always cha siew sou - a cousin of the dish that is made with the same filling within baked puff pastry. Yet, since it was a buffet, we ordered a serving of this just to relive the good old days.


One of the best dishes we had was a dish of deep fried tofu in fried oatmeal. Tofu, literally translated as bean curd, is made from the curds of coagulated soy milk, and nothing you can get in America is even worth eating. As much as I despise them, I do feel sorry for vegetarians in America because the options available to them are limited and terrible. You can get by far better being a vegetarian in Singapore, in that there are more options and more variety, and chances are so much higher that you will actually enjoy your meal. The deep fried tofu at Peach Blossoms was crispy on the outside, yet soft and airy on the inside, to the point of it melting on the tongue.


Another standout was the steamed bean curd skin wrapped in seaweed and served in an abalone sauce. The soy bean is one of the ever-presents in Chinese cooking, you can usually find some form of it (as well as the black bean) in any good Chinese meal.


We also had a serving of sway gao in sweet soy sauce, which won points for its presentation as well as the fresh, succulent and juicy shrimp within it.


We walked out feeling absolutely stuffed, one of the downsides of having carte blanche to order unlimited servings of some of the most delicious food known to us. Winnie and I both agreed that as we got older - by some freak nature-over-nurture circumstance - our palates were gradually gravitating towards Chinese food. Lord knows we both enjoy other cuisines (and I probably enjoy them way too much and in way too large quantities), but more and more we craved the foods of our youth and the flavours of our ethnic heritage. It was probably not a bad thing, for those foods are plenty and diverse, and more importantly - unequivocally delicious.

Jewels of the East, Part 1

After living in the US it seems a little silly to refer to the opposing ends of Singapore as the East Coast and the West Coast, since you really only need an hour to drive between them. I grew up in the East, and like many other friends who did, have a certain amount of Easterner pride. I like to think that our surroundings have a large part to do with who we are, and that is why so many of my close friends are also Easterners; but in reality it probably has more to do with going home from school together and bumming rides from each other's parents. I think we all can agree though, that nobody likes the folks from Bukit Timah.

What I refer to as the East Coast (whatever runs along the parallel arteries of the ECP, Mountbatten/East Coast Rd and Geylang Rd/Sims Ave) is really a hotbed of culinary excellence and diversity. Geylang - the most well known of the red-light districts in Singapore and oozing a certain underbelly charm - is not coincidentally also a wonderful area for late night food. Bedok Town Centre, in what is a traditionally Malay-dominated residential area, houses many hawker stalls among which I would be hard-pressed to pick a favourite. The Eunos/Sims Ave district has amazing Malay staples. But what I thought I would do is compile a short (and ever expanding) list of some of my favourite foods and the best places to get them on the East Coast.

Curry Laksa

I have always been fascinated by Peranakan culture - a mix of cultures brought about by the assimilation of traditional Chinese immigrants into the historically Malay populated Straits Settlements. Peranakan food tends to be spicy, a little on the sour side, and dominated by such exotic ingredients as kaffir lime, coconut milk, galangal, lemongrass and belachan. The resulting palate is almost overwhelmingly intoxicating and overpoweringly flavourful. One of the traditional Peranakan dishes is laksa, a spicy noodle dish served in a coconut curry broth and garnished usually with coriander and sambal.

The best place to get laksa on the East Coast, and maybe even all of Singapore, has to be Katong, on East Coast Road right across from Roxy Square. Spurred by the phenomenal success of the original 328 Katong laksa, several other imitators have sprung up around the area - one even bold enough to set up shop right across the street. To be fair, I once tried all the other places that claimed to be the original Katong laksa, and they were all actually pretty decent. The original, though, beats them all hands down.


Katong laksa is served with shrimp, fish cake, and a healthy dollop of sambal belachan on the top. The latter is a chili paste, made by pounding red chili peppers and shrimp paste in a mortar and seasoning with salt, sugar and lime juice. True believers can eat sambal with anything. Absolutely anything. If done well, it has a spice and a tang that adds heat to any dish and elevates its flavour profile. The sambal is done well here, but the true star is the coconut curry broth, dominated by the distinct flavours of kaffir lime and lemongrass, but rounded out with the sweeter notes of the coconut milk. This place is one of my first stops whenever I return to Singapore, and with good reason.

Bak Kut Teh

Traditionally eaten as a breakfast food, bak kut teh translates literally as "meat bone tea" and is basically a broth boiled with pork ribs and spices like star anise, cinnamon, cloves as well as a whole host of medicinal herbs the names of which I never knew and never will. When I was younger my family would take road trips up to Malacca and my father would always take us to this ramshackle roadside shop just off the highway, about an hour or so outside of Malacca. He had discovered it once making the same trip by himself, and had made it a point from then on to make a stop there whenever he could, regardless of who he was with. That bak kut teh remains the best I have had and was miles better than anything you can find in Singapore, but there is a place on Joo Chiat Road that almost approximates it.


Sin Heng Bak Kut Teh is closed on Mondays but open 24 hours the rest of the week, and I have spent many a late night or early morning there winding down a night of drinking. It has a spartan layout - tables, chairs, an open kitchen - but in my mind it is the 4am Shangri-La. They do it the right way here, in that they make the broth a lot more medicinal than most places, use more garlic than most places, and also boil it with beef bones so you can occasionally find bits of marrow in your broth.

I brought the lovely Karen Lee here, shocked that she had not been here despite it being a two minute drive from her house. It was remarkable how quickly we reached an agreement on our side dishes. One of the downsides of ordering food "family-style" is that one always has to make compromises on the choice of dishes. It is very rare that everybody at the table ends up with their first choices. Invariably somebody will be allergic to shrimp, or won't touch liver - so when Karen and I spontaneously agreed on what else we wanted, it made me very happy.

In addition to the bak kut teh, we also ordered a side of braised pig's trotters in a dark soy sauce. There were heaping amounts of fat on the trotters, which fell away almost instantaneously at the tenderest of touches.


We also got a side of brinjal (also known as aubergine or eggplant) in sambal belachan. I came late in life to the eggplant - when I was younger I used to shy away from it with a vehemence that my mother always found funny and frustrating. Now I am trying to make up for lost time - I can't get enough of the stuff.


Bak kut teh is typically eaten with white rice, and is not complete without both dark and light soy sauce as a dipping condiment for the meats, spiced up by crushed garlic (optional) and thinly sliced red chilies (not optional).




Sin Heng did not disappoint. The broth was undoubtedly the star of the show - intense garlic and medicinal herbs, and a dark, mysterious colour not typical of the dish. We asked for a refill of the broth, and because Karen has a winning smile and a charming manner the waitress kindly obliged. Every time I eat there I enjoy myself, yet every time I eat there I can't help but think of that ramshackle roadside stall on the road to Malacca.

Black Bean Beef Hor Fun

Karen repaid the favour by introducing me to her favourite version of beef hor fun, at Kim Moh in the Laguna Park estate. I personally have always gone to Geylang for my beef hor fun, but Karen assured me that the standard there had dropped, and that this place was much better. Her opinion was borne out as we took another lunch trip on a lazy Friday afternoon.


Hor Fun is a dish of flat, wide rice noodles, typically stir-fried with meats or seafood and most times covered in a sauce that has a gravy-style consistency. One of the most popular local versions of beef hor fun involves preparing it with a sauce made from fermented black beans, which have a unique sweet and salty taste to them.

Karen waxed lyrical about how in the perfect beef hor fun - the sauce should be a little gummy but not overly starchy, while the noodles should each be individually coated with the sauce, so much so that they slither and slide about as you try to maneuver them into your mouth. This sometimes makes for a messy meal, but I am sure babies around the world agree with me when I say that food you can play with - always tastes better.

We ate this with a side of kang kong - a green leafy vegetable also known as water spinach. I think kang kong is not grown much elsewhere in the world because it looks like a weed to some. But it has a natural mildly sweet taste - unlike the bitterness of other vegetables like kale or chard - and is a perfect foil for many local flavours.


One of the things that they do right with the beef hor fun at Kim Moh is that they do not skimp on the sauce. The noodles are submerged in it - a rich, thick soupy mix of black beans, garlic, red chili peppers, soy sauce and oyster sauce. They gave us so much that we hit upon the brilliant idea of mopping up the remains with some zha man tou - basically sweet bread rolls that have been freshly deep-fried. There is something almost primordial about mopping up sauces with bread - it is truly one of the joys of eating.

To Be Continued.....

In the next installment of our food tour of the East Coast, we'll take a look at Still Road pepper crab, the Beach Road hae mee that is now on East Coast Road, and the beef noodles with soup at Laguna hawker centre.

A taste of Singapore, part 1 (Classic Edition)

The culinary landscape of Singapore is a testament to how specialisation and the theory of comparative advantage can yield tremendous quality and quantity at low cost. All over the city, in food centres, coffee-shops and restaurant rows, you can find what we refer to as a hawker, or a street vendor. They typically sell one dish, and one dish only - and it is a dish that they have no doubt spent decades hunched over a stove or a grill perfecting. The result is fabulous food, prepared fast, and at ridiculously low prices. You can have a full meal in Singapore, non-alcoholic beverage included, for SGD$5 (USD$3.20).

The story of Singapore food is the story of immigrant cultures, and in that respect is a story not unlike that of America's. Fortune-seekers arrived in Singapore from Mainland China by way of Thailand and Malaysia, and brought with them their local specialties that soon evolved into distinctively Singaporean versions. As a people we love food, and each individual is on a lifelong quest to build up a repertoire, a repository of knowledge - where the best versions of each local dish are. It is as much a mark of pride as it is fodder for conversation. The best bak kut teh? That 24-hour place in Joo Chiat. The best laksa? Got to be Katong laksa, and make sure you go to the real deal at number 328, not the imitation ripoff across the street.

Upon my return to Singapore I arranged with fellow foodie and friend Victor to embark on a day's worth of eating - an expedition to traverse the tiny island in search of good food and good times. We decided that since I had gone so long without them, that this expedition would cover the basics of local food, and we would save the rest for future trips. Victor, like me, is a huge fan of roasted meats, and we started off with a place we had both been to before and loved for the basic cuts of roast pork - char siu and siu yoke.

Both char siu and siu yoke are barbequed cuts of pork that have their origins in Cantonese cuisine. The former is usually the shoulder - glazed with honey, five spice powder, soy sauce and all manner of other spices before roasted at low heat and sliced thinly. The results are slices of pork that have a deep red exterior charred to a crisp, and a tender, succulent pinkish interior. The latter is the pork belly, first roasted at low temperatures and then finished off at high heat to get the exterior layer of fat crackling and crisp.


Loon Seng, on Kellock Road in River Valley, was our chosen destination for these delicacies, and they did not disappoint. Deep red slices of char siu, coated in a tangy, sweet sauce and glistening even in the warm midday light, and strips of siu yoke with crunchy skin crackling to perfection, yet moist, juicy meat that almost melted on the touch of the teeth.


Like any good Chinese boys we ate this with a generous helping of rice, and it made me think that the reason Singaporeans tend to over-season and over-salt for strong, bold flavours, was because we typically eat our foods with starches that have minimal seasoning. The slice of pork that may be overwhelming to the tongue by itself would be perfect if consumed in the same mouthful as plain white rice, or noodles, or with bread.


There was no conversation as we scarfed down the roasted meats, pausing only to periodically close our eyes and savour a particularly succulent piece, or to bite down on the black char. There was nothing to do but finish every last bite of it, because the meat at the bottom of the platter is always the best, since it has been soaking in its drippings the longest.


One of the Singaporean staples is a dish that utilises char siu as a topping to egg noodles, served dry or in a soup with pork wontons. Called char siu won ton mee, it is simple, but delicious in its simplicity. We tried a version of this from Kallang Food Centre at Old Airport Road, and while the sway gao (boiled meat and shrimp dumplings) in the soup (not pictured) was less than impressive, the noodles were tart and vinegary, coated with a thin layer of soy sauce, chili oil, and sprinkled with a healthy dash of white pepper.


What makes this dish is the accompanying condiment of sliced green chili peppers marinated in light soy sauce. Green chili has a sourness to it that rounds out the noodles and the pork; and a different kind of spice that complements the chili oil.


While we were there we also tried another Singaporean classic - Hokkien prawn noodles. This is the dish that I missed the most while living abroad. Brought to Singapore by Chinese immigrants from the Fujian province, it is a dish of egg noodles and rice noodles boiled in a seafood stock, then stir-fried in lard with shrimp, squid, fish cake, spring onions and lime. The secret is all in the stock, typically made with both fresh and dried shrimp - the latter being similar to kelp in its intensity of flavour. I am sure that there are stocks out there that have been simmering for months and years and decades, never really thrown out but reheated and reconstituted each day. The accumulated flavour of those stocks is what makes a truly transcendent dish of Hokkien prawn noodles. The one we tried, Nam Sing at Kallang Food Centre, was reputedly one of the best around, but we found that it had lost its lustre after the renovation of the food centre, and we walked away thinking that we had other favourites around town (Victor preferred Bedok Town Centre, while I was a staunch supporter of the Still Road place across from the black pepper crab stall).


I would be remiss if I did not also mention char kway teow, a dish of flat rice noodles stir-fried in lard, light and dark soy sauce and with bean sprouts, Chinese sausage, fish cake, cockles and green onions. The best part about this dish is that if done the proper way (as opposed to the healthy way), it is also fried with zhu you cha - crispy fried croutons of pork lard. These miniature heart-attacks impart another level of flavour to the dish and are delicious by themselves. You can usually ask for these to be removed, but then you risk being judged by the discerning Singaporean, and dismissed as a real connoisseur of local cuisine. The version here is from No. 18 Zion Road Hawker Centre, which was very good and usually has long lines of people queuing up for it:


It was regretful that we had so little time (and only one stomach). To get through all that we did in a day was impressive, but there were so many other classics that we passed over - Hainanese chicken rice, fried carrot cake, lor mee, fish head noodles, the list goes on. As we parted ways Victor and I agreed that we would do this regularly, and come up with themes for our future expeditions. A taste of Singapore: Offal edition. A taste of Singapore: Malay edition. A taste of Singapore: Dessert edition. It was an ambitious plan that we laid out, but I had no doubt in our commitment and drive to accomplish it.

Feast of Burden

"That is not our burden, honey. That is our gift." - Coach Taylor, on having to pay for daycare for baby Gracie (Friday Night Lights)

Cooking for someone is a tremendous responsibility. This is even more so if that someone happens to be a discerning eater with a knowledgeable palate, able to tell the amazing from the amateur. And it is especially so if that person happens to be your mother.

I recently moved back home to Singapore, giving up my kitchen in Washington DC and my numerous state-of-the-art kitchen appliances, and packing my knives and other implements. It was a bittersweet moment leaving, for I had been able to call that kitchen my own (Clayton rarely used it, and if he did his usage was limited to the microwave and the coffee maker). Moving back home meant moving back to the kitchen I grew up in, which was a good thing; but it also meant moving back to what was now my mother's kitchen.

As I have written before, I did not cook much growing up. Both my parents worked, and we had live-in help prepare our meals. Our maidservant ran the kitchen with ruthless efficiency, and had little tolerance for disturbances. She seemed to be able to do everything ten times quicker if she were doing it all herself, as if relieving her of a simple task was actually removing a crucial component of the process she had mapped out in her mind - so we gradually learnt not to bother helping out, and ceded control of the kitchen to her. She alone could operate the heavy machinery, she alone knew where everything was kept. It was amazing what she could squirrel away out of sight with just a lazy Susan and several leftover peanut butter jars. It was her castle, her domain, and we were just lucky beneficiaries of her daily sacrifices.

When we were all grown up there was then no need for live-in help, and my mother gradually took over the reins of the kitchen. She delegated little and had impossibly high standards for what she did allow others to do, and so she wound up doing almost everything herself. After all those years she still seemed intensely energised by that maternal drive to feed her children, which manifested itself in an unwillingness to accept assistance, and a propensity for self-sacrifice that was deeply humbling.

My mother alone knows what each of us like and do not like to eat, and how our tastes run; and looking back, I realised that she had spent a large portion of her life subjugating her desires to accommodate those of her children. We are all of us picky eaters and we take after our father in that respect; so managing to feed us a constantly varied, healthful diet that we all enjoyed must have been no easy task.

Morgan told me a story one time of how he and his brother absolutely loved this lemon chicken dish growing up, and made his mother make it so many times that the dish became patella non grata in their household. I can only imagine what I have similarly ruined as a culinary experience for my own mother. I realised that I had never seen her out of the context of being my mother, as an individual eater, with her own set of preferences. Thinking back, I seem to recall that in restaurants she more often than not liked to say, "I'll just have what you're having." Whether this was out of indecision or a deference to our knowledge and palate, it was very worrying. I could not live with myself if it were because she had gone so long without eating what she really liked, that she had forgotten what that was exactly.

Yet upon coming back from DC, I noticed a subtle shift in the dynamic of my mother's kitchen relationship with her children. Maybe I had been oblivious to it before, but she has slowly begun to extricate herself from that maternal provider role, and to cast off that burden of self-sacrifice. In the numerous meals I have made together with her since coming back, I have discovered so much more about her palate I either did not know, or had not noticed before. She prefers her food lightly seasoned, cooked with minimal fat, and only mildly spicy, yet had spent so much time and energy cooking to please a family that enjoyed rich, savoury flavours and spice so hot that it bludgeoned the tongue. She is alone in the family in her taste for soups, and prefers her meat off the bone and against the grain. Unlike me she is not a fan of shellfish, and turns her nose up at some of the more exotic cuts I want to prepare - pig's trotters, sweetbreads, even liver.

It was tremendously difficult to infiltrate my mother's kitchen. I felt like I was in high school all over again and begging to use the cars. When I did manage to, the pressure to perform was enormous. Would it be up to her standards? Would I enjoy it? How do I reconcile our different tastes? How do I apply what I have learnt of Western cuisine? What is this thing we call a wok and why does it so dramatically alter cooking times? Where's the damn salt!? Why can't I find anything around here?

And that's when I realised what I had missed out on in my cooking education - cooking as burden, cooking as responsibility. I had hitherto been so enamoured with cooking largely because I did it for my own pleasure: I made what I wanted to, and to hell with anyone else. Even as I organised dinner parties for friends or cooked for significant others, I only made what I wanted to eat, and nobody else had any say in the matter. Sure I dealt with the occasional twist and catered to the occasional preference - Kellyn's lactose intolerance, Amanda's love of scallops and (worst of all) Laura's vegetarianism. But I did not deal with them every day, and I sure as hell did not alter what I ate, only what they did.

And so I adjust, and accommodate. It makes the cooking process a little more challenging, I must admit. Before, I did things because it was the way things should be done, or the way I liked to do it. Monter au buerre, why would we NOT do it? Why would anybody NOT want us to do it? I suppose I never truly cooked for others so much as cooked for myself. The food I made came out of the kitchen filtered through my palate, not that of anyone else's.

Now I try to think about every action I take in the kitchen. Take adding salt - how much, and at what juncture? Should I balance the dish out with sugar? And so on and so forth. I cook with restraint, with care. Most of all I cook with the knowledge that the act itself is one of great responsibility, and not to be taken lightly.

Home is where the 'Weck is

America has had a reputation as a culinary wasteland. We saw ourselves and were seen as having no true character, no soul, no history. Somehow, tuna noodle casserole and meatloaf became iconic American dishes. And yet, what lay and lies a bit under that stereotype is a truly imposing variety of regional cuisines, all of which have their own history, and often, their own ingredients, on account of the climate and location. I can't think of Maine without thinking of lobster and shrimp. I can't think of Maryland without craving crab-cakes. Living in Rhode Island I loved the fried calamari you would find in dozens of variations, the Portuguese chorizos and seafood stews, the deep fried clams I ate at the beach. The pacific northwest has its wild salmon, and incredible variety of produce. So-cal and the Southwest have their Mexican influence and BBQ traditions. Jason has often mentioned his love of Louisiana Creole cuisine.

There's no shortage of regional flavors and recipes, but one that is particularly close to my heart and is the iconic food of my hometown, Buffalo, NY. Buffalo has had a number of waves of immigrants in its history including Poles, Germans and Italians. Some of the great butcher shops in Buffalo are remnants of these old school food-cultures. One great hold over from a more German era is the Kummelweck roll. Supposedly brought from the Black Forest to Buffalo by immigrants working on the Erie Canal in the 1800s, this kaiser-esque bread is studded with caraway seeds and sprinkled with sea salt. In Buffalo the roll is then turned into what is lovingly known as Beef on 'Weck, slow roasted beef, kummelweck roll, beef jus, and as much prepared horseradish as you can stand. There are only 4 components really, the roll, the meat, the jus and the horseradish, but it is shockingly delicious. Heart clogging and sensational. If you didn't make a mess, you didn't do it right. To cut straight to the chase, I wish I was eating one right now.

The Shanghai Cocktail Chronicles

"If I'm not wasted, the weekend is." - Jimmy Lerch (attributed)


It is easy to lose yourself in Shanghai, both literally and metaphorically. The city is steeped in history as diverse as it is rich, and the people who have come and gone have left marks on the city as varied as they are indelible. It is an incredible confluence of both old and new, both foreign and Chinese, which creates a narrative that is perhaps unique to the city.

I had the good fortune of spending a weekend in Shanghai being hosted by a couple of old college buddies who have made the city their home, and it was a great pleasure to see them again. We had changed much - that was certain - but as we raised our glasses to one another it kind of felt like the old times again.

It was perhaps appropriate then, that in a city such as Shanghai, such a blend of cultures and influences - that I rediscovered the magic of the mixed drink, otherwise known as the cocktail. I have never been one to be terribly partial to liquor; beer is more often than not my poison of choice. And I suppose I have never really had a really transcendent cocktail. But Jose, Jimmy and Angel brought me to one of their favourite lazy Sunday hangouts: a French restaurant, owned by an New Zealander, in an area formerly known as the International Concession. They swore by the talent and palate of the resident mixologist - as they are called these days - and JImmy sold me on the place by claiming that it was the perfect place to pass a rainy afternoon. It did not rain, but once we got there I saw what he meant.

The Hamilton House is located on the first floor of one of the beautiful buildings that litter the strip known as the Bund, on the banks of the Huangpu River. It was here that the turn of the century saw a building boom of French, British and American banks and trading houses in many different architectural styles. I saw some beautiful Art Deco and Beaux-Arts buildings, somber in their ornamentation and oozing both history and character. It was not lost on me that directly across the river was a stretch of modern glass-windowed skyscrapers, each one trying to outdo each other in the race to the clouds.

What Jimmy meant by his comment was that the Hamilton House was a cozy place with tall windows, through which you could see out into a busy intersection. Evidently he had spent several rainy afternoons here - either by choice or by necessity - tracing the rivulets of rain as they trickled down the glass and watching the world go by, sipping on a cocktail and forgetting about life for a while.


As I browsed the cocktail menu I marveled at the variety of ingredients that went into each drink, and lamented the sad state of the much maligned mixed drink. Most of what gets ordered at bars today does not deviate much from the standards - rum-and-coke, gin-and-tonic, vodka-and-soda. The Hamilton House made me yearn for an era gone by, where a bartender worth his salt could draw on the flavours and tastes of different types, ages and brands of liquors, bitters, aperitifs and juices to make a tasty concoction. If done right, the cocktail can be a creation in itself, a mini-feast for your senses of taste and smell and sight, in addition to that all-important responsibility - to get you drunk.


I started out with a Sun Wukong (above, foreground), made with kiwifruit-infused vodka, passionfruit liqueur, dragonfruit, lemon, lemoncello and green tea. Jose ordered his regular drink - called an Oriental Mule (above, background) that had passionfruit-infused vodka, coriander, lemongrass, ginger, lime and ginger beer in it. I thought these two were the standouts of the evening - just sweet enough to satisfy the palate, just bitter enough to be worthy of an alcoholic beverage. Not only were the flavours well-balanced, but they were local, and seasonal. Evidently a significant amount of thought and effort had gone into the making of these drinks. I should imagine that drink creation is quite enjoyable, for you can always drink your mistakes. Everyone's a winner.


As day turned into dusk, the conversation flowed as freely as the alcohol. I feel like the older I get, the more time I spend reminiscing. Not that there is anything wrong with the present moment, but thinking and talking about the past is a habit easy to pick up and difficult to shake off.


There was a drink on the menu called the Soixante Quinze (above, left) which I absolutely had to try - Bombay Sapphire, Calvados, absinthe, lemon and champagne. For me it was a jolt back to the days when people drank Sazeracs, or Negronis, or pounded any manner of stiff drinks like their life depended on it. I absolutely loved it. It was hair-on-the-chest strong, with the licorice taste of the absinthe and accents of apple thanks to the Calvados. Also pictured is the Cha-tini (above, right) which was similarly delightful, but in a more refined manner. "Cha" being the Chinese character for tea, it was a mix of jasmine tea-infused Bombay Sapphire, Martini Bianco and lemongrass. The two drinks were Yin and Yang together, and disappeared far too quickly.


My last drink was a Henley (above) - Bombay Sapphire, Pimms No. 1, guava nectar, apple juice, lime and mint. At this point you could probably have fed me turpentine and I wouldn't have noticed the difference. It had been the perfect lazy Sunday: we had gotten up late, had brunch on Wujiang Lu*, walked the French Concession, stopped for cocktails and were now headed back home for dinner and then movie night, curled up on the couch or sprawled on the floor in front of the HD TV, drifting in and out of an alcohol and food-induced coma. Truly, life does not get any better.

* Back alley off the main artery of Nanjing Xi Lu, famous for outdoor food vendors and dive restaurants selling all manner of grilled meats and steamed dumplings, among other delicacies

If my trip to Shanghai did anything, it gave me a renewed faith in the cocktail. I have always been a fan of the culture of the Roaring Twenties, and as we sat and watched the cars buzz past, looking out through the window at an intersection of four Art Deco buildings, I felt transported. It was Prohibition all over again and people treated the cocktail with reverence and respect. Everyone, men and women, drank hearty drinks with absinthe and pastis and herbsaint and Pernod and Pimms, with whiskey and bootleg gin. Bartenders made your drinks with care and a sense of purpose. The night before the Hamilton House expedition we had made the acquaintance of a gentleman at one of Shanghai's finest bars, who introduced us to another delicious cocktail called the Scottish Crush - basically a Mojito with Scotch instead of rum. It got a few of us a lot drunker and a lot faster than we expected - and was roundly celebrated and cursed at in equal measure the next morning. Shanghai certainly loves its cocktails, and so do I.

Of wine and wine-making

While we were in San Francisco we decided, like millions of others every year, to make the pilgrimage out to wine country. It would have been plain silly of us not to do it while we were in the area, and we could not have picked a better day for it, really. The sky was cloudless, and despite the sun beating down upon us there was a balmy breeze that kept us cool. I had just left a city that was beginning to get into the throes of winter and this was more than welcome.


For over on the left coast the leaves were just starting to change colour, and it was rather nice to get out into the country. The air was certainly different - fresher and cleaner, and it was nice to see a little topographic relief after being in Kansas much of the previous few months. One of the vineyards we visited was located at the foot of an extinct volcano, which made for some impressive landscaping.


I had never previously visited a vineyard or winery and had at best only a hazy notion of how wine was made, so I found the tours very informative. What left the greatest impression on me was the tremendous pride and passion everyone had for their wine-making. They knew it and they knew it well, and when they waxed lyrical about each little step in the making of their wines and why they made the choices they did, you could not help but respect them. It made me a little sad; I could not hold forth on the intricacies of my profession for longer than several minutes - and even then it would be probably only to complain about it.


But it ultimately gave me a greater appreciation of wine. As one of our tour guides put it, it gave you insight into the "story" of a particular wine. The knowledge and appreciation of how even the most minor decisions could affect how the wine eventually drank - when to harvest the grapes, what oak to store it in, etc - made me pause to think. Despite the commercial nature of the wine-making industry today and its highly mechanised process, at its heart it was still a labour of love. The product that finds its way to your lips was - if done correctly - a product of someone else's care and dedication.

We had the good fortune of meeting Kathy Inman - of Inman Family Wines - a small producer of hand-crafted Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir in the Russian River Valley. We were interrupted twice during our conversation by her phone ringing - first her husband wanted to know about dinner and then her daughter called about getting a ride home from band practice. It was quite funny at the moment but it did underscore the human element of these winemakers - faces you never see, hidden behind the labels on the bottles.


It was late in the season when we went, and the grapes for most wines had already been harvested. We did, however, manage to sneak a taste of some grapes fresh off the vine at one vineyard. Because of the intense heat of these dog days of summer some of them had already dried up considerably, but the good ones that I bit into were tart and not overly sweet.


The wine tastings themselves were also great fun, but more than once I wished for some proper food to accompany the wine. The latest Opus One, for example, called desperately for a bistecca alla fiorentina. I wished for raw oysters while drinking the Miner Family Vineyards Chardonnay. I suppose, in the wise words of the philosopher Jagger - you can't always get what you want.

I came to wine late in my relatively young life: my parents were not drinkers, and neither popularity nor knowledge were widespread when I was growing up in Singapore. These days I am quite the snob myself, and wine culture has definitely taken a few large strides forward in my hometown. The past few years have seen many wine bars and local gourmet wine shops sprout up in the unlikeliest of neighbourhoods. I find, though, that there tends to be a lot of Australian wine (the proximity of our countries goes some way to explaining that), which is not my favourite. An Aussie mate of mine once told me that Australia does not export any of what the locals consider good wine, and so what the rest of the world gets is the swill that they themselves will not drink. The same thing applies with that other famous Australian alcoholic export - Fosters lager. No self-respecting Aussie will touch the stuff.

But even then, we don't get a lot of what I consider the good stuff in Singapore - the Bordeaux, the Burgundies, the Brunellos - the Old World stuff that I love so much. I attribute this to two reasons. One has to do with limited supply; and I think the EU and the US, which have been buying wine for ages, get first dibs on these wines - which in turn does not leave much for the rest of the world. This is something that can hopefully be remedied by the globalisation of demand - the increasing wine savvy of the Asian market and the potential for untapped markets may shift the balance of power this way across the globe. The second reason, though, is one of taste. I think the average Singaporean palate is partial to spicier wines, with more fruit, which make New World wines like Spanish Riojas, South Africa Syrahs, Chilean Cabs, and Argentinean Malbecs generally more popular here - and I'm just talking reds. In many respects these wines stand up better, and are more suited to the cuisine here anyway.


On the ride back into the city I gave a lot of thought to what little I now knew about the wine-making process. Like many other processes - for example a manufacturing process - it could be broken down, separated into mini-sections that could be further studied, understood and optimised. The growth, the harvest, the fermentation, the mixing, it goes on and on. There was so much that was scientific about it, so much that gave itself to the scientific method. Yet so much else was not. Clearly the quality of the harvest was at the mercy of the elements. Choosing grapes, or knowing when to take the wine out of the barrels, or deciding which grapes to blend for the wine - depended on the taste and palate of the winemaker.

In that respect it was not unlike cooking. To be successful, you needed to understand and adjust for many different elements - some scientific, some not, some under your control, and others not. And just like cooking, the fruits of your labour are gone in an instant, often all too soon.