Mobile uploads - food lomo

Calling for teams to compete in chili cookoff!

It was inevitable. One of my favourite events of the year when I lived in DC was the annual chili cookoff that my friends and I organised. If there was one thing better than a hot, spicy bowl of red in the dead of winter, it was getting to eat many spicy bowls of red all in the same sitting. That's why I loved the chili cookoff. That, and the daytime drinking.

So even though it's not really right for it in Singapore - I'm bringing it back! Chili cookoff in January, y'all - see the flyer below for more info.


We are now looking for participants to compete in the Chili Cookoff. If you think you make a mean chili and have the cojones to prove it in the heat of competition, please email chilicookoffsg(AT)gmail(DOT)com for more information. You can enter individually or as a team of up to 5 members.

We are also looking for judges! If you’re from Texas and enjoy a good, spicy bowl of red, please also get in touch with us at the email address above and tell us exactly why you deserve to be a judge for the event. If you don’t have Lone Star heritage but want to be a judge, by all means write us too, but you should at least know the difference between real Texas chili and the crap that passes for chili in Cincinnati.

Let the trash-talking begin!

A restaurant by any other name...

Chin Lee Restaurant
Block 115 Bedok North Rd, #01-285
Singapore 460115
Tel: +65 6444 5554

What is a restaurant, anyway? Does it have to have white tablecloths, and fancy cutlery? Does it have to have waitstaff? Or bricks and mortar, for that matter? If it is just – a la Janette Desautel in Treme – one chef pushing her large portable grill around, is it any less of a restaurant if it puts out good, honest food that people enjoy and come back for?

I struggled with this question during lunch today at Chin Lee Restaurant. Despite the name, Chin Lee is most decidedly not where you would expect to find a “restaurant” as you understand it. Located at the void deck of a block of flats, it nevertheless has unequivocally modern trappings, even if the décor is a mishmash of garish colours and uncertain influences. (Winnie pointed out what seemed to be a Chinese watercolour ripoff of Monet’s Water Lilies – or “Chinese impressionism” as she put it.) I can only hypothesise that the place had to have grown from humble beginnings in that void deck – expanding and improving to its current, air-conditioned settings.

Karen had recommended this place for its excellent Teochew fare, and we all trooped there for a well-deserved lunch after our tree-top adventure at the nearby Bedok Reservoir. After all that scampering and ziplining we had built up quite an appetite, and I think even the waitress was shocked at the amount of food we ordered.

I will readily admit that I don’t know much about Teochew food, except for the usual ubiquitous dishes – hae zho, steamed pomfret with salted veggies and sour plums, etc. But the Teochews, along with the Hainanese and the Cantonese, qualify as one of those dialect groups who love their food, are fiercely protective of their own cuisine, and know quality when they see it. A good Teochew restaurant – or one that has, like Chin Lee, built up a staunch following – seemed certain to promise much.

We started off with two quite delectable appetisers – pork jelly and fish maw soup. The former was pig trotters boiled down to gelatin, then frozen along with solid pieces of braised pork, into a jelly. This was firmer than some versions I’ve had elsewhere (suggesting the use of lecithin or some other emulsifier) but was nonetheless quite tasty. The fish maw soup – like all soups in Chinese restaurants – came woefully underseasoned, which was invitation enough to douse it with black vinegar and pepper. There wasn’t enough fish maw, and despite a strong (to quite strong) shot of black vinegar, the soup lacked the kick I expected.

The rest of the food arrived thick and fast – and disappeared with similar speed. The pomfret was nice and light (but cooked too long, I felt), and the hae zho, while one of the larger versions I’ve seen and containing large water chestnut pieces, was just this side shy of the version at Joo Hing. The tofu with straw and button mushrooms came in a rich, silky sauce that made my heart ache for some white rice to eat it with.

Special mention must be made of the coffee pork ribs, which were beaten and tenderised to the right point – enough not to present a difficulty eating them, not too much that it lost its chew. They were also flavoured wonderfully, showcasing the smoky, bitter tang of coffee. I tend to shy from ordering this dish because while it can be excellent if done well, the potential for disaster is high and I have had some pretty terrible versions of this dish. Chin Lee gets it right on the money, for my money.

The fried mee sua and luo han zhai were flat notes in an otherwise enjoyable experience, and by the time it came to dessert I was tapping for mercy. I still pulled my shit together to take a bite of orh nee, though. Now, I like orh nee (yam paste), a Teochew dessert classic, and I would venture to say that many others do. But it’s become one of those dishes that I continually taste and reject. I think subconsciously I have built up this idealised notion of the perfect orh nee – I’m not sure based on what, even – and every version I taste now can never come close. Every time I eat orh nee I always wind up pushing the bowl away, often empty, and saying it was good, but not great. I don’t know what it is I’m looking for in orh nee. Hopefully someday I will find it.

The version at Chin Lee is – you guessed it – good but not great.

It is hard not to call Chin Lee a restaurant. What else could you call it? An upscale hawker stall? A swanky coffeeshop? After eating at Chin Lee I am more and more swayed to the belief that if you put out hot, piping food and have people clean their plates and ask for more, then you can call yourself what you damn well please.

A room with a view - wasted

Si Chuan Dou Hua
80 Raffles Place
#60-01 UOB Plaza 1
Singapore 048624
Tel: +65 6535 6006


I believe strongly that the design of any place should incorporate its greatest and most distinct assets. In the case of Si Chuan Dou Hua @ UOB Plaza, this is the spectacular view of downtown Singapore. Along with that is the wondrous natural light that it gets, being at the top of one of Singapore’s tallest skyscrapers and – unlike other restaurants closer to the ground – bathed in sunshine that is unfettered by the collection of other buildings around it.

Unfortunately, the designers of this place chose to hide these assets behind a labyrinth of thick walls. Granted, these walls are of dark, sensual teak, and very good to look at in their own right, but one can’t help feel cheated after travelling 60 floors – via two elevators, three if you come from the basement carpark. I expected a grand view, and I didn’t get it. The windows are aesthetically well designed too, but ultimately not enough to let in the light, and inexplicably fitted with blinds and framed with cross sections.

For the crowd that the restaurant targets, though, it might make the most sense. I imagine that the restaurant serves mostly the business lunch crowd – who want to feel cocooned away in private rooms, with only occasional reminders of the heights they occupy. Indeed, the perimeter of the restaurant – the areas with the most access to the view and the outside light – had largely been set aside for these private rooms, leaving the inner chambers of the restaurant with little natural light and without an inkling of the tremendous view that lay beyond those teak walls.


I was at Si Chuan Dou Hua recently for a workshop, after which they fed us with dim sum. I have to say, the dim sum here is surprisingly very competent. One wouldn’t expect a Sichuan restaurant to be well versed in what is a primarily Cantonese genre, but I found out that the chefs (Malaysian) had trained in Hong Kong, and you can’t get much closer to the source than that.


The pastries that I tried – a pancake of chicken floss and a seafood sesame bun – were exquisite, and the pastry itself was first-rate. Working in my line I have begun to develop an appreciation of the possible highs and lows of texture, of crumb structure and of mouthfeel that bakers can accomplish – and I can say that the chefs at Si Chuan Dou Hua know what they are doing.

Because prawns are an integral ingredient in so many dim sum staples, exercising care in the choice and use of this ingredient is paramount. The ones used at Si Chuan Dou Hua are juicy and succulent – especially in an excellent beancurd skin dish – and if they had ever been frozen, I certainly could not tell.


There were a couple of missteps, though. The dan dan noodles came in a sauce which was all heat and no flavour. Spice is well and good if it accentuates, or imparts flavour, but to numb the tongue and not offer a reward with that shock is just cruel. Another disappointment was the house beancurd. I bought a couple of orders to take away, and – conscious of the importance of consuming them “fresh” – sat down to eat it at the earliest opportunity. But the beancurd was not as smooth as some versions I’ve eaten, and also came in a syrup that was not sweet enough by some distance. It was actively disappointing, and for a restaurant that references beancurd in their name, quite a letdown indeed.

Of pedigree, and tradition

Roland Restaurant
Blk 89 Marine Parade Central, #06-750
Tel: +65 6440 8205


There are people for whom eating is a fad. For these people, it is important to keep up to date on the moving and shaking in the restaurant scene, and try the new restaurants as soon as they pop up. I, however, place myself squarely in the opposite camp. I like to search out the old restaurants – the ones that have been around for ages, the ones with tradition. In the restaurant business, time is the greatest arbiter of quality. You can’t keep customers coming back through good times and bad, if you didn’t put good food on the table. You just can’t. Don’t get me wrong: to suggest that just because a restaurant has been around for a while, their food will necessarily be spectacular is questionable logic at best. But you can’t go very wrong.

Roland Restaurant is one of those restaurants in Singapore that have pedigree up the wazoo – Chef Roland is from the family who used to run the famous Palm Beach Seafood Restaurant along Upper East Coast Road. This was back in the days when Upper East Coast Road was literally along the coast, before they reclaimed some land and built the ECP. Palm Beach was one of the several seafood places along that stretch, which all started from the same humble beginnings – in attap structures with zinc roofs, providing good food in mosquito-infested, “al fresco” settings. You have to drive down that stretch to get to my house, and I remember trundling down that road as a kid in the back of my dad’s beat up Datsun 1207. As I grew up, the restaurants slowly left one by one, to make way for condos and fancy residential developments. (The only one left standing today – Hua Yu Wee – is still going strong, in that beautiful colonial bungalow-on-stilts of theirs. I always mean to go back there, but the word on the street is that the quality has taken a tremendous dip, and so I am afraid of ruining my impression of the place.)

In any case, Palm Beach eventually closed for good, but Chef Roland eventually trained at the famous Sin Leong Restaurant. When Chef Sin Leong decided to hang up his wok, he left the restaurant to his disciple, who renamed it after himself. To this day, they are in the same, quirky location – at the top floor of a multi-storey carpark in Marine Parade.

If being the progeny of two famous franchises isn’t enough, consider these additional titbits: the family that ran Palm Beach Seafood is widely credited with inventing chilli crab – a dish that has now achieved ubiquitous, “national dish” status in Singapore. Also, Chef Sin Leong, Chef Roland’s mentor, was one of the four “heavenly kings” of the culinary world back then who created yusheng – the raw fish dish that is a must at Chinese New Year dinners now. Put all this together, and it is like saying Roland Restaurant is like Man O’War, Citation, Secretariat and Ruffian all rolled into one. I struggle to think of another franchise with as much pedigree as this one.

In any case, we got together for Sophia’s farewell the other day, and it fell to me to suggest a place. I hadn’t come back here in ages and, unsure of the quality, was a little hesitant about recommending it. But after considering the other options for good crabs in the East, there didn’t seem to be many other options: Eng Seng would have sold out by the time we got there, the seafood stretch at East Coast Park was a little difficult for everyone else to get to, and No Signboard at Geylang was in a pretty dodgy area. It was a good thing that Sophia seconded the suggestion, but she also cautioned that the place was sometimes hit-and-miss.

It might literally have been twenty years since I last visited the restaurant, and upon walking in I had no recollection of how it used to look like or how it had changed. What it does look like now is your standard banquet-style Chinese restaurant. For a Friday evening, it was surprisingly empty – apart from us there were only about six or seven other tables, and the restaurant was less than half full. I did a double take – surely this was not a good sign?

I needn’t have worried, because the food that Roland puts out is still – and I hate to use such a cliché but it is rather appropriate while eating crabs – finger-licking good. Roland has amassed a small array of signature dishes – culled from the history of Palm Beach and Sin Leong, and these do not disappoint. The prawns in soy sauce were succulent and flavoured well, while the braised pork ribs melted off the bone. Deep-fried you tiao came crispy and had good volume, without being too oily; and the sambal watercress was strangely addictive. The Peking duck was a little dry, and perhaps the most lacklustre of the dishes, but by then the kitchen had earned a reprieve.

And the crabs – who could forget the crabs? We ordered them two ways: in their signature chilli sauce as well as in a salted egg batter. Now, chilli crab may be a national dish, but it is one of those things that have as many variants as chefs, and nobody can agree on what the truly definitive version is. Some make it sweet, some make it spicy; some add crab roe, others add egg. Roland’s version was very good and had impressive amounts of crab roe – which I liked – but may have been a little too sweet for me, and definitely not spicy enough. The salted egg treatment was also, unfortunately, quite mediocre. The crabs themselves were meaty and fresh, though, so say what you will, but those dishes still disappeared in a flash. Li Jade was thoughtful enough to stop by even though she had eaten already – but she was unfortunate enough to arrive just as the crabs were served, so nobody paid her any attention.

Obviously, the best part of eating crabs is getting to dip mantous into the sauce and slurp it up. Roland’s mantous are bite-sized, which make them easier to handle with chopsticks, and also easier to polish off. I lost count of how many of those little buggers I ate, and by the end of the meal the serving dish with the chilli sauce was absolutely spotless.

The highlight of my night was the fried seafood mee sua at the end of the meal, to fill whatever empty spaces in the stomach you could possibly have after eight or nine courses of protein. It was fried well, had good, understated, nuanced flavour – and the noodles were very tasty.

We were there for quite a while – during what we thought would have been a peak hour – but the crowd never got larger. I felt a little sad for this bastion of the culinary scene. They’re still around, so they can’t be doing too badly, but I can’t help but feel that all the new restaurants popping up are dealing significant blows to the old ones.

My opinion may be coloured by nostalgia and love of tradition, but it isn’t too coloured that I cannot admit – Roland is not amazing. They will, sadly, not blow you away. The signature dishes are very good and very honest, but they are clearly not one of the big boys in the restaurant scene any more. From a subjective standpoint, I like Roland, and would go back in a heartbeat – because the food is satisfying and good value for money. But from an objective, professional standpoint – the place lacks the exquisite treatments of the finer restaurants around, and the oomph of the better tze char places.

As the demography of Singaporeans changes, and their tastes along with it, Roland is slowly but surely becoming outmoded. You and I from a certain generation may still appreciate their signature dishes, and the way they cook these dishes, but sooner or later more and more will beg to differ. It’s like watching Roger Federer play tennis now. He is still a wonderful player, but no longer the best, and try as he might it is only a matter of time before he is surpassed by more and more up-and-coming players. Watching him play is only going to get more and more painful for his fans – maybe not now, but surely in two or three years’ time, if he plays on for that long. The only question is – how much longer can he, and Roland Restaurant, continue to trade on their pedigree?

Walking in the Garden

Au Jardin Les Amis
1 Cluny Road
EJH Corner House, Botanic Gardens
Tel: +65 6466 8812

A very good friend of mine once said about women, “You can’t live with them, and you can’t kill them.” I think that must be how chefs think about events – corporate luncheons or dinners, weddings, rehearsals, what-have-you. For these events. chefs often have to cede some measure of creative control over the menu, and they can be quite taxing on the kitchen because large orders of the same dish have to go out all at the same time. Yet they are a necessary evil, especially for restaurants with little walk-in traffic, and on slow weeknights. You have to do them to survive.

This is especially the case for Au Jardin, at the Botanic Gardens. It is a Les Amis restaurant, which means it comes from pedigree. (To explain, Les Amis at Shaw Tower is the grande dame of Singapore fine dining, akin to a Tour D’Argent in Paris or Le Cirque in New York: it’s been around for ages and by this point is surely more institution than restaurant. Whether or not the food is good is no longer relevant.) But Au Jardin (French for “in the garden”), one of their sister restaurants, is also tucked away in the deep recesses of the Botanic Gardens, in an old colonial bungalow surrounded by lush, well-manicured greenery. Needless to say, there is little to no pedestrian footfall, unless you count joggers and bird-watchers. In a sense it is more a “destination” restaurant than anything – everyone who eats there has made a pre-meditated decision to do so. So since it’s pretty far from likely than a random jogger is going to walk into Au Jardin after his run and ask for the degustation, doing events is an absolute must.

I went for an event at Au Jardin last evening (and in the process turned down an invitation from Karen to eat beef hor fun at Kim Moh, shucks). The whole converted pre-war colonial bungalow in the middle of nowhere concept has been done before (and failed before – see Alkaff Mansion, and that other famous restaurant that was in one of the old black and white bungalows along Scotts Road, but whose name escapes me). Au Jardin hews closely to the successes of these illustrious forebears. Stately teak-on-whitewash, little ornamentation, as much natural light as possible – all great things, and all make for a wonderful setting. It’s a little formulaic, but by no means unenjoyable.

It is always a tough thing organizing events over dinner. Do you have your speeches or presentations before, during or after dinner? If you have them before dinner, people get hungry and restless. If you have them during dinner, nobody pays attention. And people tend to leave once they are fed, so you can’t have them after dinner. It’s a no-win situation. Some people do the events in between courses, but that isn’t optimal either. Unfortunately, I haven’t been to an event where this has been handled gracefully, and I don’t have any ideas. It’s a tough one, this.

The food at Au Jardin was not bad, but ultimately quite disappointing. This was not the French cooking of bars and bistros, with their heavy sauces and their often lengthy, complicated processes. This was supposedly refined French cooking, with light touches and innovative flavour pairings. And one cannot fault them for trying, I suppose. All three courses – two appetizers and a main – were well thought through, not overly complicated, and promised fine ingredients. Lobster salad with vine-ripe tomato. Seared Hokkaido sea scallop with poached egg in a truffle emulsion. Wagyu beef filet. But the thing about cooking like this is that it demands quality, fresh ingredients. I assume the sea scallop was really from Hokkaido. Now I don’t doubt that if you eat sea scallop in Hokkaido, it might be a life-changing experience. But once that sea scallop is chilled, air-freighted, and transported to Singapore – travelling thousands of miles and changing hands several times – it loses a lot of what is good and great about it. The scallop I wound up eating in the Botanic Gardens of Singapore was cooked precisely, and flavoured well, but it paled in comparison to some of the fresh seafood I have had in the past.

(Side note: I don’t know where the Wagyu beef was from. These days the term is bandied about so casually, who knows what you are getting any more? But I do know that it cannot have been from Japan, since Japanese beef imports to Singapore have been suspended since late April, due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease at a cattle farm in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture. In any case the beef that I wound up having was a long way short of Wagyu beef standards, and for some reason looked deceptively blood-red. I think they poured some of the juices on top of the filet to make it look red, but when I actually bit into it, it was a lot less rare than it looked. A very strange phenomenon.)

The other thing I noticed about Au Jardin was the uncannily stealthy, almost ninja-like efficiency of the waitstaff. Plates were whisked away, drinks refilled, cutlery replaced – all wordlessly and unnoticeably. I don’t know if this is a good thing – sometimes I like a little banter with my waitress (especially if she’s cute). At Au Jardin you strangely get none of that – all the waitstaff are trained to remain silent and expressionless, and to go about their duties speedily and with no fuss.

I don’t know if I would go back to Au Jardin (especially after looking at their prices online). I have no doubt of the chef’s talent, and their cuisine is one that I enjoy. It’s just that for their cuisine to work, fresh ingredients are paramount. And in Singapore – that is a little difficult. It’s still a very enjoyable place to sit down and have a meal though, and you really feel cut off from civilization even though Orchard Road is only two minutes away. I suppose it’s a good place to impress someone with, but the more discerning of companions will be able to see that you’re trying too hard.

So long, for now

Pavilion Restaurant
20 Craig Road
#01-02, Craig Place
Tel: +65 6557 2820

There are very few things I am willing to wake up early on Sunday mornings for. One of them is the practice of yum cha – going to restaurants and eating dim sum. I absolutely love doing this. Sometimes it seems that weekends wind up being busier than weekdays are – with one commitment after the other. Going for a nice leisurely dim sum brunch relaxes the mind and body like nothing else, and it is one of my favourite activities.

I got back from Sri Lanka Sunday morning at 8am after a red-eye, and any other reasonable person would have headed straight home for a deserved forty (or eighty) winks. But Victor had organised a brunch – to be his farewell before he leaves for Taiwan for a year – and it was one I could not miss. I headed home to shower and managed to close my eyes for an hour or so before it was time to head out again.

(Besides, he was buying, and I am cheap like that.)

Victor is one of my trusted foodie friends and eating kakis, and can always be counted on for good judgment when it comes to all things gastronomic. Our tastes are also quite similar in that we have an unabashed love of hawker food, and when it comes to restaurant dining we tend to prefer classical Chinese cuisine, with its soups and roasted meats. His departure may have meant just one less person in my network of scouts, but one who was a significant contributor. His presence will be missed.

He deferred to me for a choice of restaurant, and I suggested Pavilion. I had heard about it a little while ago from an acquaintance – and had wanted to wait till it had been open more than four or five months before trying it. Victor’s farewell came at just about the right time, and he was gracious enough to acquiesce to the suggestion – so off we were!

Pavilion is situated in an area with quite a bit of character, the Duxton/Keong Saik area, just a few doors down from Pasta Brava. It is pretty interesting coming here for dim sum on a Sunday because nothing else in the area – littered with bars and shady KTV pubs – is open at the time. Add that to the fact that it is smack on the fringes of the Central Business District – desolated on Sundays – and you have a restaurant that is bathed in an eerie calm as we approach it.


The inside was just as empty as the streets outside were, and for a minute we did a double-take, wondering if we were at the right place. But the restaurant soon filled up, and through our meal we saw a procession of families, groups of foodie friends – young and old alike – come and go. The clientele was decidedly eclectic, and it had the feel of a restaurant that had not come into its own yet, still finding its own gaggle of regulars.

The food surprised and spluttered in equal measure, alternating between the sublime and the shoddy. We started out really strong, with a cold dish of homemade beancurd with red cherry shrimp and century egg completely knocking me off my feet. I didn’t bother taking a photo of this since it was not much to look at, but one taste and I was reminded not to judge a book by its cover. The beancurd was soft and silky, and topped with a sauce made from century egg – so imagine white slabs covered in a gooey greenish-brown sauce. It didn’t look very appetising, but it was quite stellar.


Compared to the version at Victoria Peak, the siu yoke was at least cubed in sizeable portions, and paired with a decent Dijon. We also had a soup of crab meat and fish maw, which was very well executed. I don’t know why, and it may be just me, but restaurants never put enough pepper and vinegar in their soups. You may think it’s a personal taste thing, but I have never seen anyone drink soup from a Chinese restaurant without adding to taste. We all do it. It’s never seasoned enough when it comes out of the kitchen. Why wouldn’t chefs just adjust, and season the soups a little more? Perhaps it has now become a psychological mind-game, and chefs deliberately under-season the soups because they know diners will adjust it themselves anyway.



The dim sum dishes that we ordered were very impressive. I have to say Pavilion goes all out for some of these. Their siew mai was larger than any other version I’ve seen, and had large pieces of scallop in them – an appreciated twist. In contrast, the liu sha bao was tiny – the size of a golf ball – and despite the custard not being runny enough for my liking, was a very creditable effort. The deep fried spring rolls tasted rather ordinary, but at least didn’t taste oily or greasy.



It is right about here that the meal went downhill. We had ordered a set menu – at $78++ a very reasonably priced dim sum set menu for 4 – and rounding out the dim sum was a trio of “normal” dishes. The steamed kailan with beancurd and mei cai (preserved vegetables) was just passable, saved by the burst of umami that the mei cai gave the dish. The belly-rib “Zheng Jiang” style was battered and deep fried well, but somehow the taste just didn’t agree with me. This could be just a personal thing, for Daselin had many good things to say about the dish.



But what was severely disappointing was the wok-fried hor fun with pork and chye poh. Dry, dreary in colour, and lacking in wok hei, it really almost felt like an amateur had cooked it. There was nothing bringing together the dish, no harmony of flavours, no cohesion. By themselves, these are very cheap ingredients – rice flour noodles, strips of pork, and chye poh – and it really felt like it. I could only take two spoonfuls before I had to push the bowl away. Victor polished his bowl and joked that he didn’t like to waste food, but shook his head in disgust when I offered him the rest of my bowl to finish off.

The hor fun reinforced my innate distrust of set menus. Very often, restaurants will offer their star dishes as part of a set menu, but the line-up will invariably be rounded out with other disappointing dishes, or dishes on which they make the highest margins. At Chinese restaurants, you are almost always better off ordering a la carte.

Dessert was similarly uninspiring – two servings of tofu ice cream topped with a sesame and a lychee syrup. This place seems to really like the soybean, by the way.

Despite all that, I actually rather liked Pavilion. It is nice and cosy, and that first beancurd dish won them enough brownie points to forgive one or two misses. (Not the hor fun though, nothing can excuse that.) The service staff was efficient and attentive, and kind enough to let us stay long after the lunch hours – filling our teacups without asking.

So it is goodbye for now for Victor, and as we eventually trudged off from the restaurant there was a little sadness lingering. But we took comfort in two things: knowing that he would be back, and the fact that he could unearth more good eats in Taiwan. Consider this his overseas scouting mission, then!

Floored by fruit

One of the biggest drags for serious foodies in Singapore is the lack of fresh produce. Singapore grows less than 5% of the food it consumes, and land is so scarce that it is typically allocated to other uses than food production. Even though the agricultural parts of Malaysia may only be a few hours' drive away, something like a Blue Hill would still be next to impossible here.

I was reminded of this during a recent trip to Sri Lanka, where I was served a piece of papaya as part of breakfast. The papaya did not look all that appetising: veiny and overripe in parts while underripe in others, and I almost pushed the plate aside before something in me clicked. It may be the guilt from having too little fibre in my diet, but something made me pick up that spoon and carve myself a bite of that papaya.


Boy am I glad I did, because it was juicy, succulent and sweet beyond belief. I realised just how much eating fruit in Singapore had dulled me to the heights that fresh fruit can scale. The fruit we get in Singapore is almost always grown elsewhere, picked before it is ripe and sprayed with chemicals to retard ripening and kill pests, before it is transported here. I had forgotten just how sweet and wonderful a piece of fruit, picked when ripe and eaten within a day or two – or even hours – could be. This piece of papaya was a timely reminder.

The wisdom of crowds

Two Chefs
Blk 116 Commonwealth Crescent #01-129
Tel: +65 6472 5361

These days, the ease of expressing one’s opinion via a variety of media online has made the views of crowds instantly accessible. There is just one thing wrong with this: the crowds may not always be right. There is a site called hungrygowhere.com which serves as an aggregator of reviews on eating places in Singapore. Now, there are many good things about this site which I like. It is very comprehensive, and can normally be counted on to provide good, up-to-date information on all manner of establishments – from the one-man-operated kiosks to the hundred-seater banquet halls. I have to say that I post my reviews there sometimes (I want to be heard too you know, I believe I am entitled to that conceit). Yet I have found myself disagreeing many times with the collective opinions of certain places, and so when push comes to shove I am inclined not to trust this site.

I still believe in the masses’ general tendency towards accuracy – as in, the collective opinion more often than not points in the right direction, good or bad. But it is a blunt instrument, and cannot provide the level of precision serious foodies need. There is a world of difference between great and good, between divine and satisfactory, and that precision is lost when truly discerning opinions get mixed in with a whole bunch of others that are not so.

One of the dangers of this “crowdsourcing” is the tendency for aggregation to amplify certain attributes. It is human nature to want to know the opinion of others, and human nature for those opinions to subtly influence our own. If we read other reviews that echo our own opinions, we subliminally reinforce, and in some cases intensify, our own impressions of the place. In that way, what was maybe a decent-to-good, two-star restaurant at best, suddenly gets elevated to a three-star.

But as the saying goes, two heads are better than one, and that may be the rationale behind this stalwart of the tze char scene in Singapore. Two Chefs is actually opened by a pair of brothers, who have come together to bring you this no-frills, salt-of-the-earth eating place in the Commonwealth area. So far, and to my knowledge at least, they have not gone the way of countless other family businesses or hawker dynasties, and the two brothers look to be doing quite well together. I’ve heard that lines start forming by 6pm for dinner, and the wait for a place can hit the 45-minute or 1-hour mark. For good, simple, tze char comfort food – that is a long wait.

Two Chefs is an undisputed media and blogosphere darling. Almost every online review of it is generous to a fault, and the place was lauded by the Sunday Times as one of the best tze char places in Singapore. I rarely venture out of the East for food, so until recently had not had the good fortune to try it. But it was recently suggested as a venue for a midweek get-together, and despite there being other, more familiar names tossed in the hat – I plumped for this one just to check it out.

I was quite disappointed, for the food was very average. The one dish that everyone goes there for is the butter pork ribs, which are cutlets of pork breaded and deep-fried, and then coated with a powdery mixture that looks like grated parmesan cheese but is actually a secret formulation made from butter and sugar. This was not bad, I have to say, for the meat was tender and moist, and the buttery powder neither overly sweet nor cloying. But while it won high marks from me for innovation, it didn’t quite deserve the unadulterated adulation of the blogging community.

Other dishes were downright disappointing. The kailan hadn’t been blanched before wok-frying, and so retained a bitter pang. The tofu with golden mushroom wasn’t top-grade tofu, and the sauce tasted a little off. The drunken “dang gui” prawns were large and succulent, granted, but the Shaoxing broth it was in lacked oomph, and could perhaps have been rounded out with a fuller ingredient base.

We were so unimpressed by the quality (and quantity) of the food that we had to order a couple more dishes. To satisfy someone’s craving we got another treatment of pork ribs – this time a coffee pork ribs which was surprisingly good. But the three-egg vegetables that we got on the waitress’ recommendation only served to confirm that either this place was terrible, or the kitchen was having an off day. There is an art to cooking vegetables, for most leafy greens have little, or in some cases even unpleasant, flavour. Many cooks – in addition to their other seasonings – typically add a little sugar to the wok as the vegetables are cooking, which helps them to caramelize and adds both flavour and texture. This did not seem to have been done for the three-egg vegetables.

I do have to mention that the food came unbelievably fast. It felt as though we had only just finished ordering when the first dish came out the pass and was placed on our table. My hypothesis is that the kitchen – used to dealing with a full house on weekends – is such a well-oiled machine that cooking for a crowd of 60-or-70-percent capacity is a piece of cake for them. If that is true, then it is cause for admiration.

I really wanted to like this place. The heartland location, the utilitarian setup. The lack of pretensions, the honest fare. These are all good things, and true things. I tried to disassociate my appreciation of the place from what I had heard about it, to ensure objectivity and while true objectivity is perhaps impossible, I honestly did not think this place was all that great. It is not that it is bad, and I would be happy to go back there again since it is relatively affordable. But it is just not praise-worthy. I am sorry to say, the wisdom of the masses got it wrong on this one.

Easy peasy Japanesy

If there is one thing the Japanese are impossibly good at, it is exporting their food. Japanese, I believe, is as ubiquitous around the world as Italian or French cuisine – and the words “sushi” or “ramen” have become as well-known as “pasta”, or “confit”. The assault takes place on many fronts – first it comes in the form of products: Japanese crackers, or instant ramen, etc. Then the food service wave starts – first the “locally-adapted” restaurants start popping up. At the onset these are typically modified to suit the local palate, and will make concessions in taste or any other component to secure a local following. At the same time, if there are any Japanese expatriates at all in the area, you’ll also see the smaller, sole-proprietor shops popping up – with food that is typically more authentic – to cater to the Japanese diaspora. But once Japanese cuisine has entered the consciousness of the locals, the mainstream quest for authenticity starts. At this point the Japanese chains come in, and since they already have the brand equity they can afford to insist on product quality and consistency of the experience they sell. So you’ll see ramen chains abroad insisting on bringing the noodles, or even other ingredients, in from Japan; and refusing to use local substitutes. More Japanese food products get imported, people get more and more exposed to Japanese food, they get more and more curious about it, and it becomes a virtuous cycle.

It is interesting to appreciate this phenomenon in Singapore – from the point of view of someone who was away for a long time. To me, it seems that there are thousands more Japanese restaurants in Singapore these days as compared to before I left for the States. And the palate of Singaporeans is changing. There has always been a local fascination with Japanese food – and indeed, all things Japanese – aided no doubt by that bastion of television programming, Japan Hour. But while before, that fascination stemmed from a curiosity for the foreign and exotic, these days there is a subtle shift beginning. Locals no longer view Japanese as an exotic “other” but increasingly accept it as part and parcel of the local dining scene. How you can tell this is very simple. When you are planning a dinner out for a sizeable group, it is invariably difficult to pick a cuisine, much less a restaurant, that satisfies everyone. Someone might not like the spice of Indian food, for example. Or another might shun the carbo-rich Italian diet. Others view even more exotic cuisines like Mediterranean or Greek with a healthy dollop of mistrust. Yet almost nobody will complain when you suggest Japanese – and while that may be a result of this wonderfully diverse and amazingly agreeable cuisine, it is also testament to how assimilated it has become.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with all of this, of course, and I will be the first to raise my hand and say that I am quite the fool for Japanese myself. This past week I went on a bender of sorts – four days of Japanese food in a row – and lived to tell the tale.

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Tuesday – Aoba Hokkaido Ramen
2 Orchard Turn
#B3-25 ION Orchard
Te: +65 6509 9394

Nowhere is this proliferation of Japanese cuisine more evident than in the spread of ramen. If you mentioned ramen to anyone ten years ago, they’d probably be able to tell you what they knew – that it was noodles in broth, typically served with a slice of belly pork and an egg, and sometimes topped with seaweed or other garnishing. Some might even be able to describe that famous scene in the movie ‘Tampopo’. But these days, mention ramen to the man on the street and more likely than not he or she will be able to expound on the various types of broth – shio, shoyu, miso or tonkotsu – and the various regional noodle variants. He or she will be able to tell you that tonkotsu broth is made at a rolling boil for up to 10 hours or more, because the vigorous boil helps to emulsify the fat and water, creating an ultra-tasty, milky-looking broth. Knowledge of ramen has increased exponentially, as has the availability of different styles in Singapore.

Aoba is a franchise from the northern island of Hokkaido, supposedly where ramen is most revered. I believe this is due to the suitability of a hot bowl of noodles and broth to the harsh winters there. They have opened a couple of franchises here in Singapore – one of them at Ion Orchard – and after seeing the queue at Watami we decided to come here instead.

There are people who may not understand what all the fuss about ramen is. After all – it is just noodles in broth. These are the people that do not truly understand the Japanese approach to food and life. To the Japanese, simplicity is sacred, and perfection is a goal to be accomplished at all costs. When the Japanese put out a product, every single component of that product must be perfect. The Japanese do not subscribe to the 80/20 rule. They do not cut corners. To them, everything is a craft, and mastery of that craft is the highest ideal. Each product that they put out should be a work of art – so even if they are doing something simple, they do it well and they do it with pride. That is why ramen holds so much allure to the Japanese. It is simple, sure, but to take something simple and make it into a life-changing experience is anything but. And to be able to replicate that process over and over again is also far from simple. That is what the Japanese live for, and that is why they are obsessed with ramen.

By those lofty standards, Aoba falls a little short. I had the Shoyu ramen and while the broth had good flavour – the chashu was limp and uninspiring. The noodles were good taste-wise but lacked a little springiness. I did like the egg though – it had that mushy quality of the not-quite-hard-boiled eggs you typically get in ramen. As an overall product the ramen was above average, but a long way short of life-changing.

Wednesday – Itacho Sushi
2 Orchard Turn
#B2-18 ION Orchard
Tel: +65 6509 8911

By some quirk of fate, I found myself back at Ion Orchard the next day, and we decided on sushi this time. What’s odd about Itacho is that it is not a Japanese franchise, but instead originated in Hong Kong. The chain has since expanded to China, Taiwan and Singapore (they probably know better than to enter the Japanese market). Itacho @ Ion exhibits many of what is bad about chain restaurants – cookie-cutter décor being one of them – and some other faults not specific to chain restaurants. In an effort to maximize revenue, tables are jam-packed into the restaurant space – at times I almost felt as though the table next to us was participating in our conversation. Service is rushed and impersonal – understandably given the crowds and the turnover during the dinner rush – and when I cracked a joke to our waitress she seemed a little taken aback and did not know how to respond.

But it also exhibits what is so good about chain restaurants. They clearly have their processes in place – and have a very interesting cha chaan teng style of noting the table’s orders on a mini clipboard, which is kept on the back of one of the chairs at the table. More importantly, they must have great purchasing power, for their product is pitched at a very affordable price given its quality. The sushi is fresh enough, the quality surprisingly good, and each piece goes for around $2 or $3. It is not cheap, seeing as how I need about 20 of the little buggers to feel full, and some of the more expensive pieces can go up to $7 or more; but it is not ridiculous either. I’m not sure how they pull this off – especially since they only have the one Singapore outlet (for now), so there are less economies of scale compared to their network in Hong Kong.

Itacho smartly stays away from sashimi because the truly transcendent sashimi demands absolute freshness, which is often difficult and expensive. The focus here is on sushi, and the results of that focus are clear to see. The sushi with cooked seafood at Itacho is actually very good – what they do is they roast the piece of seafood gently so that only one side is cooked through, and when you do eat the piece of sushi you get the contrasting textures of cooked and raw at the same time. Overall the restaurant’s offering is far from exquisite stuff, and it is clearly a product for the masses. But the people at Itacho do not see the need to dumb down that product. A restaurant with lesser ambition would limit the menu to the cheaper products, or those easy to source, and wind up with the same six types of sushi you could get anywhere else. But Itacho understands that the average consumer demands much more than that. That’s why the wagyu beef is on the menu. That’s why you can get three grades of fatty salmon – with more or less tendon. Itacho cuts the right corners in order to strike a good balance between quality and cost, and the result is an impressive selection of decent sushi at affordable prices.

Thursday – Saboten
9 Raffles Boulevard
#P3-01 Parco Marina Bay, Millenia Walk
Tel: +65 6333 3432

Laura had told me earlier about this hidden enclave of Japanese restaurants at Parco Millenia Walk, and I had been meaning to try it out. So when the crowd consensus – not for the first time – fell to Japanese, I suggested going to this place to check it out. It is really hidden away, on the third floor of the department store, and since the shopping crowd had thinned by the time we got there, it was eerily quiet. But it gave us a chance to view the several Japanese restaurants – and one lone Italian place. Each of them had a different focus – there was a sushi place, two ramen places and of course, Saboten, which specializes in tonkatsu.

On hindsight I felt this was the standout meal of the week. Saboten does one thing and does it very well. The panko was crispy and flavourful, and the pork cutlet inside tender and juicy. The other breaded meats were uniformly excellent. You could gripe about the miso soup (standard-issue) or the rice (plain, when I expected vinegared) but both of those items are free flow, so it is hard to gripe about them.

But the most enjoyable thing about Saboten is the hand-chopped cabbage that they serve before the meal. They provide two dressings to eat the cabbage with – one a yuzu-flavoured soy sauce, and the other a sesame oil vinaigrette – the latter of which was quite amazing. ZJ commented that she had never been so eager to eat cabbage, and it was a sentiment echoed by everyone at the table.

What I also liked about Saboten was its attention to the little things. The salad bowls that they gave us came chilled. The tonkatsu came on a mini-grill, which meant that any residual oil would drip onto the plate below rather than cling to the pieces of meat. (For the record the tonkatsu at Saboten wasn’t very oily in the first place.) It’s the little things that separate the great from the good, and it was pleasing to see a restaurant take the time to give all things their due.

Friday – Waraku
6 Eu Tong Sen Street
#03-89/97/98 The Central @ Clarke Quay
Tel: +65 6327 8860

There are three so-called enclaves of Japanese food in Singapore that I can think of. First and foremost is the Cuppage Plaza area – the original Japanese expatriate hangout and the most authentic. Then you have the Parco Millenia Walk space where Saboten is. Finally you have the Central, right next to Clarke Quay. Here you have the generalist chain restaurants Ma Maison, Sun With Moon, Waraku and the ramen-yas Marutama and Santouka.

The Japanese chain restaurants all have the same formula: a little bit of everything food-wise, oversized bowls, glitzy menus with many photos and generally a greater emphasis on presentation. You’re not really going to these places for the quality, so it’s really a crapshoot picking between them. Waraku has booths with a nice quayside view, so that was where we headed. (Unfortunately the group wound up too big to sit at the booths, so we wound up without a view after all.)

It was a good thing I had already eaten ramen, sushi and tonkatsu earlier in the week because these aren’t very good at Waraku. I had a curry chicken udon which, I have to say, made me very happy. Unfortunately nothing else I tasted that night was impressive, or even any good. Michelle’s tuna tartare came smothered in an overly salty soy sauce, which destroyed the dish. The smoked salmon, avocado and asparagus roll had too little avocado, and the salmon wasn’t smoked, but raw. The soft-shell crab roll came in a tamago wrap which was rubbery to the bite. The agedashi tofu was bland and uninspiring. After a while I gave up trying to sample other people’s food. What was the point? It was all bad. I must have lucked out with the only decent dish on the menu.

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If there was one thing consistent about the Japanese places that I went to this week, it was that they were all doing brisk business. Singaporeans, it seems, just cannot get enough of Japanese food. It is all very well and good, but the day after my Japanese bender I ate some good old mee pok tar, and realized that when the rubber meets the road I would really rather eat Singaporean hawker food. Call me crazy, but it looks like I won't be moving to Japan anytime soon.

Real men of genius

Chu Fa (Pu Tian) Restaurant
楚发莆田（兴华）本地菜

In this era of ours where cooking as a profession, and food in general, has been slowly but surely fetishized – you get 24-hour networks dedicated to culinary shows, you get chefs enjoying a level of celebrity hitherto unseen, you get a million and one food blogs trumpeting the strengths and weaknesses of every new restaurant that opens. Don’t get me wrong, there are positive effects to this – chief among them being that, compared to generations past, the general populace is better informed and able to make healthy, sustainable choices in what they eat. But it can all get a little much for what is a pretty basic endeavour – feeding people.

It is easy to find reviews of the fashionable restaurants in almost any media these days – ranging from the pithy to the protracted. Almost everybody who has a camera or can string several words together is suddenly the next Fisher, or Liebling, or Reichl. And who am I to begrudge them their opinion? (I am, after all, one of those hacks.) But I have to say a large majority of the stuff you read is, unfortunately, noise. You can tell by the number of exclamation marks that are used, or the inability to describe anything beyond ‘good’ or ‘nice’ or ‘delicious’. Thankfully, there is still quality out there, the healthy smattering of blog posts that are able to provide one or more of the following: an honest-to-goodness opinion, a compelling narrative, engaging prose, and useful information – and the rare few blogs who can do so on a consistent basis.

I was thinking about this the other day and got to wondering about the restaurants that nobody likes to blog. Sure, everyone blogs the good restaurants. Some people blog the bad restaurants. And the new restaurants, especially those opened by famous chefs. But who blogs the middling restaurants – the ones that just get by with marginally decent food at affordable prices, tucked away in the heartlands with minimal publicity? These are the places just down the block that command the loyalty of your average Joe Sixpack, who takes his wife and two kids there on a Saturday night as a reward for the week’s labours. You don’t get fancy ingredients at these places. You don’t get elaborate preparations. You just get a hot meal, marginally better than what you could throw together yourself, in simple surroundings and at very reasonable prices. Who blogs those restaurants?

My mother took my brother and me to just one such place the other day, when none of us wanted to cook, or had an opinion where to eat. In her mind this place was cheap and decent, and if there is one thing my mother is a sucker for, it is value. She also loves Heng Hwa (Xinghua) cuisine, and had tried this place’s take on Heng Hwa lor mee, mee sua and beehoon. It wasn’t great, she cautioned, but it was good enough.

It was a little on the late side when we went, I suppose. Especially compared to New York, people in Singapore tend to eat dinner earlier, and 7pm is considered prime-time. By the time we got there it was nearing 9pm and the crowd at the restaurant – if there ever was one – had thinned to a couple of tables. This is not a place you go to for the décor, unless you are a fan of whitewashed walls and industrial tiling. One thing I wished they would change was their fluorescent lighting, which was bright, white and unforgiving. No restaurant should have fluorescent lighting. It kills the mood for eating.

Although this place puts out some Heng Hwa dishes, and is advertised as having Putian roots, they have expanded their repertoire to include all manner of Singaporean tze char staples (the ubiquitous yam ring, sambal kang kong, etc). In truth their cuisine was probably more akin to a foreign cuisine adapted to suit the local palate, and could not be called one or the other.

My mother, having been here multiple times, ordered two of her favourite dishes here – the spicy la-la, and the drunken prawns cooked in bamboo. Neither was very impressive, with the la-la particularly disappointing, but at least the prawns were large and fresh and the broth in which they came had the good, strong heft of Shaoxing wine. The Heng Hwa lor mee was poor – it had hints of the flavours that the dish was known for, but the overall taste profile was not a rounded one, and it felt a little uneven.

There was one thing here that surprised me greatly though. They did a wonderful preparation of deep-fried snapper. At least, I think it is a snapper – I’ve never known the English name, only the Cantonese one (马友鱼 ma yau yu). What they do is they slice the fish cross-sectionally instead of filleting it, so you wind up with oval-shaped pieces with a T-section of the spine in the middle. Then they dust it with flour and deep fry it. It’s a pretty standard treatment but difficult to do well, since the skin of the fish and the exterior have to remain crisp while the inside has got to cook through without drying out. The version here was flavoured just enough not to mask the natural flavour of the fish, and also deep fried to perfection. Also decent was the Heng Hwa mee sua – the noodles were springy and generously coated with the clam-based sauce.

I gave my mother a little stick for taking us here – and “wasting” a perfectly good meal on barely average food, but it was all in good fun, of course. As we left I mused to myself that this was a self-respecting business, with people doing good, honest work. There was no reason to let their limitations, real or imagined, diminish the dignity that they so rightly deserved. The family at the table across from us lingered for about half an hour after the last pair of chopsticks had been laid on the table, so they must have enjoyed it. And the enthusiastic goodbye of the waitress that showed us out could only have come from someone who felt a healthy dose of pride in her establishment and its offerings. Chu Fa may not be the next hawker made good, or the next blogosphere darling. But it is what it is, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise – so while criticism may be justified, it should be accorded nothing but the utmost respect.

Epic fail

Everyone needs one of those days to remind them that they are not invincible, that there is work yet to be done and hours yet to be put in. I think I know a fair bit about food. I think I can cook. But you wouldn't have known it today.

I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed with a meal that I put out. I over-salted the potatoes. My vinaigrette broke after I had tossed the salad in it. But most disappointing of all, I committed the kitchen's cardinal sin.

I over-cooked the steak.

Steak is one of those things that is pretty forgiving to cook. It's best when kept simple - salt, pepper, a nice pat of butter, grill. If you want to be fancy you can introduce garlic, or rosemary. In any case, you don't have to be Tom Keller to cook steak. The only thing that you absolutely cannot do is to over-cook it. Words cannot express the disappointment at carving through a piece of well-done meat and seeing brown instead of red or pink. Or gnawing through what could have been a tender juicy steak, but instead - for all intents and purposes - became nothing more than a dry piece of rubber.

That's what gets me the most when I eat a well-done steak - whether or not I was the one who cooked it. It's the fact that the cook abused the potential of that piece of meat. There is only so much good beef around, so really, every well done steak is one less steak that could have been done medium rare. So today I wasted three pieces of Australian striploin.

No point making excuses. I shat the bed, plain and simple.

A couple of photos from the meal:

(None of the said steaks, of course - that would just be offensive.)



Probably the only thing to come out right of the entire meal, because it required so little work. Asparagus, wrapped in some Spanish jamon that my sister had brought back from her travels, drizzled in olive oil, salted and peppered.


Salad of arugula, roasted red pepper, portabello mushrooms, red onion and leftover asparagus.

Goodness in a clay pot

I must admit that for someone as crazy about food as myself, I am rather indifferent when it comes to considering what I actually put in my body. I have friends who are continually curious about the origins of their food and what was done to it, and scrutinise every nutrition label thoroughly keeping a sharp lookout for artificial preservatives or other undesirable ingredients. I know people who treat their bodies as temples, and try not to pollute it with artificial colourings, sweeteners, or other flavour enhancers. I know people who insist on organic – even though that label has come to carry less and less meaning these days. In any case, I must say this mentality is highly commendable. Unfortunately I have always been of the “eat first, think later” persuasion, and to me pleasure has always trumped principle – if something is delicious, I’ll eat it regardless of what nasty ingredients are in it or what unspeakable processes took place before it got to my table.

One of the chief reasons I think the way I do is my weakness for Singaporean hawker food. From a purist’s point of view, hawker food is sin visited upon sin. It is unhealthy – meals are unbalanced, and food is typically oily, fatty, and high in calories. It is not organic – there is widespread use of MSG and other artificial flavour enhancers. Very little thought, if any, is given to processing methods when selecting ingredients – cost is the primary criteria. This means that if you are concerned about your chickens being free-range rather than battery-raised, your flour being unbleached rather than bleached, your sugar being natural rather than refined, then you probably should steer clear of hawker food. But, and to me this is a huge but, the good shit just tastes so fucking good.

This was weighing on my mind the other day as I returned to one of my perennial faves – Yew Chuan claypot rice at the Golden Mile hawker centre on Beach Road. To explain – claypot cooking refers to the cooking of food in clay pots (duh) over high heat. The pots are usually doused in water prior to use so that they release steam during the cooking process and create a steam wall around the food that locks in its moisture, ensuring a tender, flavourful dish. It’s basically one-pot cooking, with a clay pot. These clay pots also absorb flavour, so if you go to those hawkers who have been using the same pots for decades, the food is likely to be very tasty.

Claypot rice refers to a one-dish meal where rice is steamed in the clay pot, with the subsequent addition of ingredients like salted fish, chicken slices, sausage, and a few leafy greens to satisfy the Health Promotion Board. When served it is then typically topped with a generous serving of sweet soy sauce and drizzled with sesame oil, then tossed to coat the rice with the condiments.

For some reason I don’t remember eating claypot rice before my teenage years – I must have, but I just don’t remember it. What I do remember is eating at the Food Junction at Junction 8 after school, where my two go-tos were the claypot rice and the beef noodles. This was before food courts became even more corporatised and sanitised than they already were back then, so the food was actually decent. The best part about the claypot rice was the burnt bits of rice at the bottom, which I dutifully scraped off at the end of the meal and ate. Carcinogens be damned!

The version at Yew Chuan was introduced to me by my mother, bless her heart, and quickly became one of my favourites. Different people have different methods of introducing food to others – my dad always started with the basic premise that quality was not subjective, so if you didn’t appreciate anything he recommended then there was nothing wrong with the food, but instead it had everything to do with your standards. As a result he treated everything he shared with his children as an education of sorts. There was nothing high-handed or snobbish about it – far from it, in fact – but food for him was an induction into the possibilities of pleasure, so that was how he couched every recommendation. Everything was an announcement, something to be pointed out in a matter-of-fact way. You should eat this – it is good. End of discussion. My mother had a different tack, and always took on a conspiratorial tone when recommending something, as if each of her recommendations were some precious secret to be passed on only to those who can be trusted to use the information for good. Psst – I found this stall selling X, see if you like it. As for me, I try as much as possible to curb myself, but when I find something that I like I tend to beat people about the head to get them to try it. Some call it being a food Nazi, I prefer to think of it as exuberance. Maybe, just maybe, this exuberance sometimes takes on an almost indignant tone. Why for the love of all that is holy have you not tried this yet? You need to go there. And try it. Now.

The claypot rice at Yew Chuan has tremendous flavour, for several reasons. One, they add a healthy portion of salted fish, an unbelievable source of umami. Two, the pots look like they have been in use for ages, and I am sure that contributes to the flavour. Three, they give you the soy sauce (home-brewed, I assume) and sesame oil so you can add however much of it as you want. In addition to all this, the rice is always perfectly cooked (save for the layer of burnt rice at the bottom), the chicken chunks always succulent and tender (they use thigh meat, which is juicier).

This time, as I ate the claypot rice I thought a little harder about the various processes and ingredients that went into the pot of food before me. So many ingredients – each with their own little story, and each story with their own twists and turns. Take the soy sauce, for example. Was it brewed naturally by fermenting soybeans, or was it made chemically from hydrolyzed soy protein? What levels of sodium did it have? If it was sweetened, how was this accomplished – through the addition of refined sugar, cane sugar, or molasses? The soy sauce at Yew Chuan comes in a nondescript squeezy bottle, which completely belies the number of choices made prior to it appearing – as if magically – on your table together with your claypot rice.

But once the smell of the claypot rice hit my nostrils, with that insistent aroma of salted fish, the steam escaping as the lid was removed – all was forgotten. In that instant I could only think of how quickly I could stuff as much of that claypot rice into my mouth as possible. As I was wolfing it down (much too quickly, I might add) I felt my body temperature rise due to the ingesting of the still-hot rice, and beads of sweat starting to form around my temples. And yet I still kept reaching for more, more of this sweet, salty, savoury goodness in a pot – consumed solely by the desire to eat, blissfully oblivious to everything else. Conversation slowed. I gave monosyllabic answers to any questions I was asked, and ceded conversation-making duties to someone else at the table, I didn’t care who.

This is not to say that the claypot rice at Yew Chuan is artificial in any way. I honestly do not know. All I know is that I am a fool for it.

In short, I am a lost cause. In my line of work I am exposed to many processed foods, and am much more aware of the choices made in their production than ever before. I know what manufacturers do to enhance flavour, improve colour, impart aroma – naturally or artificially. I know that almost everything is a choice, and when you buy a finished product you often cede thousands of choices up to the many individuals who have worked to get you that finished product. Many of these choices are not made with your long-term well being in mind. I know all that. But when shit is that good, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Dim sum dollies

Victoria Peak
181 Orchard Road (Orchard Central)
#11-01/02
Tel: +65 6238 7666

My love of dim sum has been well documented in these pages (and well evidenced by my physique), so when Winnie told me about the latest HK import to hit Singapore’s shores – Victoria Peak at Orchard Central – I immediately filed it away for future reference. Now, Winnie is one of my dearest friends and has many strong points – but a discerning palate is sadly not among them. She is also prone to hyperbole, especially when it comes to recommending restaurants, so I normally take what she says with a huge pinch of salt. But when the time rolled around for Winnie to buy us a meal, I suggested this place – so she could put her money where her mouth was.

(I felt a little tinge of guilt at going through with swindling the treat out of her, since the original reason for it was very trivial. But hey – who’s going to pass on a free lunch, right? I admit, I am a shameless person.)

Victoria Peak was brought here by the group that was responsible for Victoria City Restaurant in Hong Kong – apparently a multi-award winning restaurant but sadly, one that I have not tried. It opened atop Orchard Central, amidst a roof garden, about seven or so months ago. Any foodie worth his salt can tell you that you never go to a new restaurant within a month of their opening – instead you wait for them to iron the kinks out in their menu or in the rest of their operations. Then normally you wait a few months for your friends to try it and tell you what the good dishes are (and what to avoid).

Victoria Peak professes to be the only Chinese restaurant in Singapore that also specialises in wine, and indeed the glass columns that you see as you walk in are stacked full of bottles. But while I did not peruse the wine list carefully, my awe soon turned to a minor disappointment, for a different reason. The tea at Victoria Peak is a bit of a letdown – the selection is limited and the quality decidedly second-rate. Might it not have been a good idea to carve out some of the wine budget to get some good Chinese tea?

Now, I concede, it is a common gripe that Chinese restaurants typically shit the bed when it comes to wine – the large majority have laughable selections of undrinkable piss. If you go to the top end restaurants, granted, you can get very extensive winelists, with impressive arrays of premium wines. Most times this is because the best restaurants are typically housed within hotels and have access to the purchasing power and expertise of seasoned hospitality personnel. But I have never been to a Chinese restaurant with a thoughtful winelist, painstakingly crafted to match the restaurant’s cuisine while reflecting the individual character of the sommelier or wine director. Perhaps Victoria Peak’s winelist is just such a winelist, but I did not have the chance to find out.

In any case, it is a Chinese restaurant, and when I go to a Chinese restaurant, I want some good Chinese tea.

My other initial impressions of Victoria Peak, though, are more positive. The décor manages to avoid the cliché of typical Chinese restaurants, and the soothing green motif is complemented well by the natural light let in by the large glass panels facing east. The service personnel are delightful – polite and eager to please, all the while remaining the epitome of professionalism. Throughout the meal they were nothing but a credit to their profession.

The food is a little harder to place. It is not bad – far from it – and I can honestly say that I enjoyed almost everything I had. I cannot say it is spectacular – of all the various dishes we ordered not a single one screamed out at us, begging us to return. Yet it would be a tremendous disservice to the restaurant to pass the food off merely as good. It is more than that. As dim sum goes, it is definitely one of the better places to go in Singapore. Standards taste like they should, dishes are executed well and with care.

(Dishes to try: there is a dish of poached rice in seafood stock that is quite remarkable. Grains of rice are poached till they are partially cooked, then served with a consommé containing scallops, fish slices, prawns and other seafood. You add the grains to the consommé and eat it like you would drink soup or eat porridge. The grains are crunchy and have a tinge of wok fire, while the consommé is light and flavourful, and the freshness of the seafood rounds out what is a rather marvellous dish. Also worth trying is the shark cartilage soup – peppery and not as creamy as versions at other restaurants.

Dishes to avoid: the roasted pork – siu yoke. The slices of pork are cubed for uniformity, which means that the fat is cut away and you’re left with small, dry pieces of meat. The skin doesn’t crackle like it should, and the pieces of pork are paired with a very ordinary dijon mustard. Also not up to scratch was the XO carrot cake – the texture was too mushy and it was a pale shadow of versions that I have enjoyed elsewhere.)

At their prices, I suppose they would be considered a treat for a large majority of Singaporeans. And if they are viewed as such – as a place to go for a special occasion – then Victoria Peak disappoints. It is solid without being spectacular; it comforts without inspiring. But it is not excessively expensive either, and nowhere near the stratospheric prices you pay at your Humble Houses or your Hai Tien Los. If money were no object this would be a great place to become a regular of, to come for Sunday brunch every few weeks. I suppose that in this – as with all things else in life – it all depends on your point of view.

In sum, though, I rather enjoyed my trip to Victoria Peak. Good restaurants are easy to find. Good company – not so much, and I was more than grateful to break bread with a couple of good friends.

If you can't stand the heat...

G7 Sin Ma Live Seafood Restaurant
161 Geylang Lorong 3
Tel: +65 6743 2201

There’s a crying baby at Table 20. The rowdy college students at 31 want their waters topped up. The fussy couple in the corner is sending back a dish. That’s going to piss off the line cooks, who are harried and overworked, drenched in sweat and red-faced from the inexorable heat of the kitchen. The waiters are running to and fro, displaying almost balletic grace to avoid one another while balancing any number of large plates on their forearms. The busboys are out on their cigarette break, so nobody is clearing 15 and 36 even though the customers left ten minutes ago. Meanwhile there’s a group of 8 standing impatiently at the door, tapping their feet to the same beat. The yelling – so much yelling. Now, what would you do?

A restaurant, on any given night, is often an exhibition in controlled chaos. So many people – some of whom want to eat, some of whom want to drink, some of whom just want to make it through the night alive. Nowhere is this pandemonium better observed than in a tze char style restaurant, where anything goes. I was just at one such place the other night, and lived to tell the tale.

I had a craving for frogs’ legs porridge that night, so when the question of restaurant choice came up I immediately ventured the suggestion. To explain, this is a dish of edible frogs, stewed and made with congee. Frogs’ legs are also served in other preparations – stir-fried with ginger and onion, braised in kung pow sauce, and so forth. Now if you’ve eaten this dish in Singapore you will know that there is only one place to get them, and all others pale in comparison. Next to the former Allson Hotel on Victoria St there is a small eating place, and one of the stalls there sells frogs’ legs porridge in the evenings and all the way through to around 3am. If I am not wrong this is a branch or somehow related to the one at Geylang Lorong 9, but in my opinion is just that bit better than the Geylang version.

In any case we did not want the hassle of paying ERP to get to Victoria St (and to hunt for limited parking in the area) and so decided to head to Geylang instead. Now, there are generally a few options that people go to for frogs’ legs in Geylang – in addition to the aforementioned Lorong 9 stall that specialises in frogs’ legs there is also Sin Ma, a larger establishment at Lorong 3 that also serves seafood and other dishes. I had been to Sin Ma once previously and remember thinking that it wasn’t too bad (just nowhere near the Victoria St stall), and so we settled for this place.

The previous time I was there, though, was not a Saturday night at dinner-time, and so in no way prepared me for the chaos that presented itself. One of the more problematic issues at Sin Ma is that they do not have a proper entrance. The dining space only has two of four walls, with the other two opened up to the public, and tables spilling over to the sidewalk. Now, this is a great design solution that ventilates the space naturally, but it also means that the restaurant cannot regulate the inflow of customers. People show up from all directions, walk in and plonk themselves down at any empty table, or mill around until they can find one. Not only does this create a lot of confusion, but it also means that there is a lot of unnecessary human traffic. The captains and waitstaff thus have to have a heightened awareness of their surroundings – of who just left and who just walked in – to ensure that they get to everyone. Of course, they don’t succeed all of the time. It is a recipe for chaos.

Even so, this can be somewhat mitigated by strong processes (and of course, efficient workers). But processes are not the strong point at Sin Ma, or at least they are not observably so. Waiters don’t have a dedicated section, for one. In any case the end result is a lot of people running around and moving a lot more than they have to. It doesn’t help that they probably bit off more than they can chew. In an effort to maximise the revenue-generating space at the restaurant, the tables and chairs are squeezed impossibly close to one another – to the point of discomfort. All those hungry people in a room together – and not enough people to give them what they want, and you get a situation like I described above.

Of course, this is an inconvenience to be gladly suffered if the food is good. Unfortunately, while quite decent and fairly priced, it is not good enough. We ordered the kung pow frogs’ legs with a side of congee, hotplate tofu and stir-fried kai lan. The frogs’ legs came first, and we attacked them with gusto. The frogs they used were nowhere near as succulent as the Victoria St edition, and the kung pow sauce not as spicy or flavourful. But they were decent enough, and at $22 for five – they were quite a good deal. Yet we were almost halfway through them and our other dishes had not arrived.

We realised later that due to a mix-up, our food had been sent to the wrong table – where it had been sitting for 15 minutes as the other table waited for a runner to take the food back. Once the captain realised the mistake, he brought the food over from the other table to ours. There are just so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin. First – and most inconsequential of all – we had ordered a hotplate dish, which is typically served piping hot and sizzling, right off the pass. Needless to say, it was cold and no longer sizzling when served to us. But more importantly – there has to be something either legally or ethically wrong with serving food that has technically already been served to another table. At the very least it is probably a sanitary issue. Who knows what the other table has done to the food? We, of course, sent the food back and requested replacements. Now, I am usually loathe to send food back in any kind of restaurant, but I felt justified in this instance.

I have said it before and I will say it again – the processes are what separate the men from the boys in the restaurant business. The mark of a well-run restaurant, food aside, is a structure in place that regulates workflow, maximises productivity, and – importantly – is simple enough for even idiots to follow. Without structure, work degenerates into chaos. People move around more than they have to, creating motion waste. Mistakes are made, and more people get called in to fix a problem that was avoidable in the first place – creating rework waste.

From the looks of it, though, Sin Ma appears to be doing well despite my criticisms – which shows how much I know. The place was hopping on a Saturday night – it was already crowded when we got there, and people were still coming in when we left. The food is actually not bad, but it is by no means superb. The prices are reasonable – although I’m not sure whether that can be said for their big-ticket seafood items like crab and lobster, since we did not have those. So I am not surprised that Singaporeans – accustomed to terrible service at F&B outlets – continue to come back. I, on the other hand, probably will not.

The Plastics

Chatterbox
5/F Mandarin Orchard
333 Orchard Road
Tel: +65 6831 6288

In my previous job in the States I had to be on the road quite a bit, and probably stayed at one too many Courtyard Marriotts for this lifetime. To explain – Courtyard by Marriott is a brand of hotels in the Marriott Group, with locations across the United States, which is designed for business travelers. By that I mean that it is purely functional, with little to no frills. The rooms are blockish, staid affairs that look as if they were furnished in the 70s, and you’d be lucky to get a pool in the hotel, much less other standard hotel amenities. They are popular with business travelers because they have a wide coverage across the country, and because they get the two most important things to the business traveler right: free high-speed Internet, and a hard but surprisingly comfortable bed.

Anyway, since they are no-frills, and also because some Courtyard locations are in the middle of nowhere – not all Courtyards have in-house restaurants. (Some just have a vending machine or two stocked with pretzels and candy.) The ones that do, often have sad excuses for a full-service restaurant, offering little more beyond a breakfast buffet and a limited, unchanging menu of simple dishes for the rest of the day. The food screams bulk, low-cost, pre-frozen, insta-mix – most of it tastes terrible and is probably worse for your health. (The saddest part is trying to improve the flavour of these terrible meals with the little pre-packaged salt and pepper packets that they provide, which themselves do not have much flavour.)

I mention the Courtyard not because I want to review their food, but because I want to give you an impression of the feeling you get while eating at one of these places – which is standard for breakfast and unfortunately unavoidable for some other meals. The furniture quite often belongs in that pre-fabricated, plastic IKEA category – sturdy, easy to clean, modular and stackable to reduce storage space needed. The crockery and cutlery are the kind that you would get in college cafeterias, and you’d be lucky to get nondescript elevator music piped through at one of these places. In short, the entire dining experience is one that is somewhat like the approach to providing accommodation to these business travelers – purely functional. It creates an impersonal, “plastic” feel, ensuring as unmemorable a dining experience as you are likely to have.

(I want to temper my indictment of Courtyards by acknowledging that sometimes to even have that option is a blessing. If you’ve just arrived at your hotel after a long, harrowing day of work and travel, to be able to have some hot food – regardless of its quality or the setting in which you eat it – is something all travelers are grateful for.)

The in-house dining at hotels in Singapore is vastly different. First, since Singapore is so small and built-up, and because of the abundance of five-star and boutique hotels, there is no market for the business traveler type of mid-range hotels. Second, I think it is a point of cultural pride for hotels to have stellar in-house dining options (this is why most top-end Chinese restaurants are in hotels). So needless to say, the unique Courtyard experience – if I could call it that – is almost non-existent in Singapore.

But that “plastic” feel does exist. Eugene was hosting an overseas guest in Singapore, and wanted to showcase local foods to her, in the comfort of an upscale setting. He chose Chatterbox at the Mandarin Orchard, and invited me along. Now, I suspect that a large majority of people in Singapore have heard of Chatterbox, but the percentage that have actually eaten there is, in reality, very small. Chatterbox is famous (or infamous) for one thing – their chicken rice, which is in turn famous (or infamous) not for its quality, but that it costs upwards of $20. (You can get the same dish in hawker centres anywhere from $2 to $4.) When Eugene invited me along, I was disinclined to go, but in the end curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

The Mandarin Orchard recently underwent a name change (from being the Meritus Mandarin) and significant facelift, but in reality has been around in various guises for a really long time. Chatterbox, too, has similarly been around for a really long time – it used to be on the top floor of the hotel but is now on the fifth. Now if there is one thing I respect restaurants for, it is longevity. Whether you like the place or not, for Chatterbox to weather – just in the last decade or so – the Asian financial crisis, the SARS epidemic and the global financial meltdown (and to come out of it STILL able to charge $20+ for their chicken rice) deserves some praise.

Chatterbox serves a variety of local favourites, at wildly inflated prices. We tried several of them – obviously the chicken rice, but also an upscale laksa (with lobster and large prawns), as well as the nasi lemak. All of those dishes cost more than $20. Now I know to an objective observer, that doesn’t sound like a big deal at all. There are places in Singapore where $20 will only get you your pre-dinner drink, especially the higher-end French places. But the audacity of Chatterbox’s business model is that they are effectively selling what you can get in hawker centres - for almost ten times the prices. I suppose that other hotel restaurants operate at this price point too. But the others take the effort to dress up their offerings, either by adding Continental elements and calling it fusion food, or by calling it a different name to “brand” it differently (eg. charcoal-grilled chicken skewers instead of satay – if you call it the former, you can sell it for $2 a stick; if you call it the latter, the going rate at hawker centres is 30c or 40c a stick.)

In their defence – the portions are huge, and can easily feed two. But huge portions alone do not justify such a price tag. I was hoping for some unique selling point, however inconsequential, to shed some light on why Chatterbox is able to charge such a premium. I found none, and instead came away with active disappointment at their food. The chicken rice is dry and bland. While the ingredients do seem fresh, the laksa is a little salty. The nasi lemak is a major disappointment – the rice is not “lemak” enough, the sambal uninspiring, the chicken rendang sorely lacking in spice.

But what disappointed me the most about the place was the shades of that Courtyard “plastic” feeling that I got from sitting at Chatterbox for close to an hour. I didn’t feel any emotional engagement at all: not from the food, not from the setting, and not from the service – which I have to say was efficient if a little impersonal. Now I hesitate to lump Chatterbox together with the various nameless Courtyard in-house restaurants, for that would be drawing the argument to a seemingly plausible but ultimately false extreme, a leap of logic. Yet sitting in the Chatterbox brought back memories of the Courtyard and my travelling days, eating cookie-cutter meals in cookie-cutter spaces, eating to live instead of living to eat – and I couldn’t help but wonder why.

What gives a restaurant that ability to engage its patrons emotionally? What makes it more than the sum of its parts, gives it personality and character, makes it an institution? I tried to think back to the places I had been to that were great at this – Bayona in New Orleans, CAV in Providence, Coppi’s Organic in DC. You don’t have to have exquisite food to create a great dining experience; apart from the pizzas I thought the rest of the food at Coppi’s was never very good. Yet I still went back there time and time again. Coppi’s had character, and it stemmed from a few things – the racing memorabilia on the walls, the quirky, attractive hipster-lite waitstaff they always seemed to hire, the purity and solidity of their food concept (Ligurian cuisine made with organic produce).

By the end of my meal at Chatterbox I had come to terms with the disappointment of mediocre food. You can’t have truly transcendent meals every day of the week, every week of the month; and part of the bargain in being adventurous and trying out new (or in this case old) places is that some will invariably be disappointing. But what rankled me long after we had left the place was how utterly devoid of personality it had been. I struggled to remember a concept, a unifying theme – something, anything – that typified the place. Sadly, I could not come up with anything.