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.