Saturday, November 28, 2009

Top Secret

Joo Heng Restaurant
360 Joo Chiat Road
Tel: +65 6345 1503

It is hard for me to explain, to anyone who has not lived in Asia, what tze char is. It is not a cuisine, nor is it a technique. There are no rules, recipes, or common ingredients (well, if you don’t count oyster sauce). It can be Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew in origin, or can draw upon a host of other influences. Upon reflection it is even more difficult for me to pinpoint what makes good tze char. Is it the unmistakable char and texture of food that is cooked at impossibly high heat? Is it the liberal use of soy and oyster sauce, in dishes that are both sweet and salty at the same time? No one really knows. But most people in Singapore know good tze char when they eat it, and I am no exception.

First, a primer. Tze Char (煮炒) is loosely translated as “stir-fry”, and to me refers to wok-cooked food that can be found in any manner of establishment in Singapore: from the lowly hawker stall to the larger places that almost approximate restaurants. These mid to larger places typically serve a variety of dishes, sometimes including big-ticket seafood items like crab and lobster. Someone once remarked to me that the true test of a tze char place is its fried rice, which is true to a certain extent. I have found the quality of the fried rice to be a consistent barometer of the quality of the food at any given tze char establishment, and since almost every tze char place serves fried rice in some form it is a easy comparison.

On my return from the States I set about trying to rediscover all the good tze char places in Singapore. Sin Hoi San, a perennial favourite, was still decent to good (and still expensive). My dad used to take us to this one stall, Keng Kee, in the Amoy St hawker centre that was his favourite, but their star has long since dimmed. There were many options, but no true contenders. I despaired, for every Singaporean needs a go-to place for comfort food. And then, I found mine.

My mother recommended Joo Heng to me warily, as if once hooked on it I would forsake her own home-cooked food. She herself had been to dinner there with her colleagues, and had come back with only good things to say. Given that the restaurant has been around for a long while, I wondered aloud why I had never heard of it, and expressed my many doubts in no uncertain terms. I must say that I no longer have any.

The excellence of Joo Heng makes me mad that I had not experienced it while growing up, and cannot therefore “lay claim” to the place. For it is one of those places that families go to with unwavering dedication and in ritualistic fashion, and generations have been weaned on their food. Yet I was doomed to be a late convert, to have my eyes opened only in adulthood.

Joo Heng is located along Joo Chiat Road, a stretch littered with KTV pubs and other less-than-savoury establishments. It is obvious that the place has expanded from its original size, for it is made up of two storefronts – one of which looks much newer than the other. I have tried eating on both sides, and I must say that eating on the older side somehow makes the food taste better.

I hesitate to recommend any dishes at Joo Heng, for while they are not all stellar there are too many of the the good ones to list. The must tries include the claypot tofu, the sesame oil chicken, and the fish-head steamboat. I think its real strength lies in the wok hei of the food. Just from the aroma alone you can tell that it has been cooked at high heat, and the efficacy of the restaurant’s runners means that the food always reaches your table piping hot. A warning: do let your food rest a little before attacking it. The taste is unmistakable – flavours are melded together like they only can at high heat; ingredients are flash-fried for a crispy exterior and succulent, tender interiors. A great example would be their omelette dishes – where they fry up eggs with savoury ingredients of your choosing: crabmeat, prawns, etc. My personal favourite is the omelette with whitebait. Because it is cooked at high heat, the edges of the omelette are crisped perfectly, and the inside is just the right side of runny. The saltiness of whitebait is a perfect complement to the egg. I order this as an appetiser every time.

So now, I am hooked. After I discovered the place I went around asking my foodie friends if they had heard of it, and invariably they all did. Those bastards just conveniently forgot to tell me about it. Apparently this is one of those places that everyone makes an effort to keep on the down-low, the secret neighbourhood favourite that everyone is possessive of. Writing this blog entry may defeat that aim (although I doubt it, given the minimal readership of this blog), but I felt I had to share.

Turning Japanese

Kazu Sumi-yaki
5 Koek Road
#04-05 Cuppage Plaza
Tel: +65 6734 2492

I will be the first to admit that I have a weak knowledge of Japanese cuisine, which is perhaps a gap in my culinary and gastronomic understanding. One always reads about top chefs going ga-ga over Japanese food and I have never fully comprehended why. I suppose Japanese cuisine must be taken in context – that is, you have to eat it in the right surroundings and go through all the right rituals (preferably in the company of a beautiful Japanese woman, of course). It doesn’t help that I have never had a transcendental Japanese culinary experience, or that even though I feel full at the time of eating it, I am invariably hungry again after two hours.

I met Winnie for dinner the other night and we (or rather I) decided to try out Kazu in Cuppage Plaza. One of the benefits of being such a snobby pain-in-the-ass about food is that people – at least the ones who love me – always let me choose the restaurant. However, it must be said that the weight of expectation can also be a curse sometimes. In any case, Winnie had also heard good things about this establishment, and she was quick to agree to the choice.

Cuppage Plaza is a rarity along Orchard Road: it is a relatively old shopping mall that is a far cry from the brisk, crowded havens of mass consumption that flank it. The upper floors are dominated by Japanese karaoke pubs, massage parlours, dance studios and Japanese restaurants – things you don’t often see in the cut-throat world of retail that is Singapore’s premier shopping district. For some reason the Japanese expatriate community has made Cuppage Plaza its own, and there are many businesses catered to the Japanese population in Singapore. It is never crowded, and walking from the always bustling Centrepoint into Cuppage Plaza always feels sort of like stepping into an oasis of calm. There are no words to describe why this is the case.

Kazu Sumiyaki, then, is a tiny restaurant on the fourth floor of Cuppage Plaza that serves sumiyaki – Japanese barbeque – basically skewers of meat and offal grilled over an intense charcoal flame. Despite its popularity among both Japanese expatriates and Singaporean locals it has never expanded, and so reservations on a weekend are a necessity. The place itself is small, and seems to have been built for the Japanese. By that I mean to say that the chairs and tables are not only small but also arranged in very close proximity to one another. For people like me who like to shift 45 degrees in my chair and sprawl out at the end of the meal, it is an absolute nightmare.

Compared with the American way of eating, which emphasises the protein in a single large portion, Japanese dining is markedly different. Starch is the staple – be it rice or noodles or something or other – and it is then supplemented by small portions of many different foods from all food groups. I read a study once saying that the Japanese consume 30 different foods on average in a single day. This, then, might be one of the keys to what is possibly the healthiest cuisine on earth – variety in minimalist portions. (That, and the low fat, high salt content and predominance of seafood.)

Winnie and I ordered some rice, and then set about picking as many different skewers of unidentified things as possible. The menu is very extensive at Kazu, and is dominated by meats – chicken, beef, pork. I had been exhorted to try the Kurobuta pork belly, and that was the first thing I asked for. Unfortunately Winnie is allergic to shellfish, and doesn’t eat liver, gizzards or hearts, so those were off the table (pardon the pun), out of respect to her. She did, however, make an exception and agreed to try the foie gras.

As the skewers started arriving fast and furious, it became a near impossibility to try and remember which was which, and we concentrated on getting as much into our mouths as quickly as possible. The foie gras was a major disappointment, nowhere as fatty as French foie, and only a fraction of its deliciousness. The Kurobuta pork belly on the other hand was nice and fatty, but needed a little more salt. Enoki mushrooms wrapped in beef were delicious, as was crispy chicken skin. The quails’ eggs were also done wonderfully, as was a dish of halved eggplant roasted, topped with ground pork and drizzled with a black bean tare sauce. Oysters wrapped in bacon were sheer decadence, and the beef tongue that I had all to myself was stellar as well. One of the surprises of the night was a recommendation by our waitress – mochi wrapped in bacon. Mochi is a Japanese glutinous rice cake typically eaten for dessert, but here it was light and impossibly fluffy, its sweetness underlined by the saltiness of the bacon. It only served to prove what I had known all along – that you can add bacon to anything and have it be delicious.

Kazu made me think about why I don’t eat Japanese food that often (although I remembered why when the bill came). But all glibness aside, the sheer variety of the foods we sampled was a delight in and of itself. It was like appetiser heaven. The waitstaff were friendly and the food came quickly and it did not stop. I could have sat there all night but it soon came time to go and I sighed as I dragged myself up off the chair. That, I suppose, is vindication enough of a good restaurant.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Oldie but goodie

I have written about it before so I will spare everyone the gory details, but I revisited the Blue Duck Tavern on my recent trip back to DC, and once again had a delightful experience there. The only exception was the terrible wines that we had to drink, but that might have been more a consequence of a limited budget. The first one we ordered, a 2007 Morgone from Marcel Lapierre, was absolutely undrinkable. We had to send it back, which Ty did with a wonderful touch of class. We left it to the waiter to pick a replacement for us, which was only marginally better.

You could argue that it is the sommelier's responsibility to make sure all the wines on the list are enjoyable - even the cheap ones - but hey, you can't please everyone.

This was a special for the day - advertised as a New Orleans gumbo with duck breast. Not much of a gumbo, and not enough spice, but still very delicious. The best part about the Blue Duck Tavern is that everything is brought to the table in these serving dishes, so it is very easy to share (and steal) food.


I regretted that my simple iPhone camera could not capture the true magnificence of the beef short ribs.


When in Rome, right? I was only in that part of town for so long, and I had to eat crabcakes. These were served on a bed of fennel, which could have been cooked a little longer but was quite tasty nonetheless.


Everything here is simple and heartwarmingly good. No fuss, no muss, no complications and/or avant-gardism. Just food done tavern style, done well and presented with pride. It is one of my favourite places in DC for lunch, not least of all because of the beautiful light it gets and the stunning open kitchen.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Surprise, surprise

Café Strindberg
Pohjoisesplanadi 33,
Helsinki 00100, Finland
Tel: +358 9681 2030

I must admit that it has been a long while since I have been surprised by a restaurant. These days, I rarely go out to eat without a thorough consideration of the options available to me, accompanied by extensive consultations and online research on the worthy candidates. I can’t remember the last time I just popped into a restaurant, in the hopes that it would be good. On the one hand, life is too short for mediocre meals, so any advance preparation and an element of discrimination must be worth it – right? On the other, this also means that by the time I actually set foot in a restaurant, I would have at least some inkling of what the restaurant was all about – who the chef was, what kind of food it served, what it was known for. For better or for worse, this takes the magic of unexpected surprises out of the dining experience.

I was in Finland recently for work, and our meeting counterparts had suggested a place close by their offices for a working lunch. In my mind I had written this meal off – expecting a simple sandwich place and a quick, hurried meal interrupted by the taking of notes and the back-and-forth of negotiations and explanations. As such, I didn’t bother researching the restaurant, and when I got there I had close to zero expectations of the place. It turns out that I had severely underestimated the Finnish.

Café Strindberg is part of the Kamp Galleria, an upscale shopping complex in the heart of Helsinki. It is on a corner right off the Esplanad – one of Helsinki’s major pedestrian and traffic thoroughfares – and at first sight looked extremely promising. The ground floor is a café in the truest sense – with a deli and pastry counter, tables and chairs scattered in a cosy manner, and Finnish rugs adorning the walls providing the kind of atmosphere that is perfect for sipping hot chocolate. The second floor consists of a bar area, with both hightop counter tables and laid-back couches; and the restaurant, an elegantly designed eating area overlooking the Esplanad. The windows are huge and spotless – this is a trend very prevalent to the buildings in Helsinki; I found out later that because daylight hours are so short in the winter and the fall, the Finns like to make the most of natural daylight when they can. For lunch, this makes for very pleasant dining – for some reason sunlight and white tablecloths relax me in a way that few other combinations can.

The place is clearly a tourist attraction – we heard a smattering of foreign languages at the tables around us, and the dead giveaway was that they had the menu in English in addition to the Finnish. Yet for a tourist attraction it seems to strike an easy balance between the cosmopolitan (it would not feel out of place on the Upper East Side) and the local (Finnish delicacies like herring and salmon soup are just some of the specialties here). Our waitress spoke in fluent and distinctly American accented English, and did her level best to make us feel at ease in a foreign land.

The bread is one of the main draws here – for in addition to being well-baked it comes with a stellar spread of hummus, something completely unexpected. Who knew that you could find good hummus in Helsinki? I threw decorum to the wind and focused on demolishing the contents of the bread basket; I was probably never going to see these people again and so gave myself license to pig out.

I had a Caesar salad to start – admittedly a boring choice, but for all its good food it is terribly difficult to find decent treatments of vegetables in Helsinki, and I was in need of some. I asked for a topping of crayfish, which was surprisingly fresh. Some of my colleagues took the more adventurous routes of liver in lingonberry sauce, and escargot – both of which received a thumbs-up, but which I did not get to try.

Our hosts proclaimed Helsinki as being renowned for fresh seafood, and I went with the Artic char on a bed of lentils. I particularly liked the lentils, simply done and to the right consistency, and something I had not eaten in a long while; but the fish itself was a minor disappointment. It was cooked well, but the skin still bore heavy traces of the salt that had been used to dry it out, which made eating it almost impossible. The king prawn risotto that one of my colleagues ordered looked promising, but I saw her reach for the salt and pepper not once, not twice but three times. There is no worse crime, I think, than under-seasoning food. But in sum the reports from around the table were generally positive, with the whitefish being a standout dish.

I don’t think I would have enjoyed myself as thoroughly as I did if I had gone to Café Strindberg with any advance knowledge of it. It may not have been a standout restaurant, but the quality was enough to surprise me, and the atmosphere was top notch. It felt like a great place for a leisurely lunch, and the people-watching both in the restaurant as well as on the esplanade outdoors was first-rate. The restaurant was a tad expensive, but perhaps the downstairs café would have been easier on the wallet and a better alternative for frequent repeat visits.

On the plane leaving Finland (for London, DC and New York – where I will continue to eat my way through old favourites and restaurants that I know so much about), I couldn’t help but rethink my approach to eating out. Perhaps once in a while it may be a good idea to just throw caution to the wind and gamble on the restaurant in the corner that looks inviting despite the limited human traffic and lack of word-of-mouth publicity. I may rethink that strategy the next time I just jump into a place and have a terrible meal, but the potential for romance, I think, is just too enticing.
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