I have seen the light, and it is glorious

Having never lived anywhere in Singapore but the East side of town, I naturally maintain an irrational allegiance to the foods that can be found here. For the longest time I thought myself backed up by fact, for it’s hard to argue with the assorted wonders of Geylang, Katong, Joo Chiat, East Coast, Eunos – I could go on. But this past week my eyes were opened to some of the hawker foods found in other parts of town, and I humbly stand corrected. It is not just the East – you can find good food in any neighbourhood.


Foong Kee
6 Keong Saik Road

I had heard about this famous wanton mee and roast meats stall for the longest time but never had the opportunity to try it, for my allegiance to all things East resulted in a rather insular pattern of eating. But since I found myself in the neighbourhood of this institution, I decided to give it a go. I arrived as the lunch hour was winding down, so street parking was easy to find, and a seat miraculously opened up exactly as I stepped into the store.

It’s become cliché by now to refer to hawker stalls as “no-frills”, but there is really no better descriptor. The lack of frills is evident not just in the décor, but also in the whole setup of the establishment. This is eating at its most efficient: you come in, you place your order, take a drink from the cooler if you fancy one, then find your own seat and wait. Sometimes you share a table with complete strangers. Communal mugs of chopsticks and other utensils are whisked from table to table and you take what you need. Unless you’re a fan of peeling wallpaper, there is nothing about your surroundings to inspire aesthetic appreciation. If you’re lucky, your food arrives in five to ten minutes, and you scarf it down wordlessly. There is no room for sentimentality, no need for conversation or pause. It feels almost wrong to dally or take a photo of the food. For someone that enjoys dinner table conversation and post-dessert lingering almost as much as the food itself, it’s strange that I enjoy this mode of dining so much.

And boy have I been missing out. The noodles here are springy and alive, coated generously in a black sauce more savoury than sweet. The char siew is the piece de resistance – marbled with fat and charred to a crisp on the edges. The other components leave much to be desired – wantons are nothing to write home about, and the soup is purely utilitarian – but it all makes for a rather satisfying meal nonetheless.


Siang Hee
Blk 89 Zion Road, #01-137

It is imperative to find and maintain a group of people – amongst your network of serious foodies – with whom you can eat tze char. This mode of dining is best with more people – 5 or 6, or more – since you can order many dishes. Unfortunately, a bigger group means more scheduling difficulties, more individual dietary restrictions or preferences to cater to. It’s hard to find a group of people who you can count on to always be there for good tze char, and are always game to try anything.

I met up with my tze char buddies the other night at Siang Hee after discovering that Bernard had never tried it. It had been a while since I’d been there too, so I was curious to see if it had changed. It had not. It was the same dingy corner in the same block of flats along Zion Road. The clientele was exactly the same – a group of taxi drivers meeting for dinner, either at the end of their day shift or the start of their night one; assorted couples and families. The menu was still the same, and the famous dishes – I am glad to report – have not lost their lustre.

Siang Hee is famous mainly for two things – their roasted pork knuckle (or ter kah) and the deep fried prawns in pumpkin sauce. Both had not changed a lick, although the pork knuckle was a little dry on this occasion. We also had the French beans and a dish of their house-made toufu, but while passable they were not as transcendent as the two star dishes. We also ordered a plate of hor fun with fish slices, which was a little disappointing.

In any case, as long as they keep making their two specialties, I will continue to come here. Parking is cheap and easy, the breeze makes outdoor dining bearable, the auntie who runs the place is friendly and the food is cheap. That last factor is the true winner, I think.


Sungei Road Laksa
27 Jalan Berseh (Top 33 Kopitiam)

For someone who has grown up in the East, I guess it was complacent to think that versions other than Katong laksa could never compare. I had heard of the famous Sungei Road laksa, but I must have sampled an inferior knock-off once and written it off since. So when two of my colleagues, whose love of laksa and appreciation of quality are beyond reproach, both chose this as their favourite laksa, it was time for a re-evaluation. After ascertaining the location of the true Sungei Road laksa, I was off.

I was told that two things would guide me to the true Sungei Road laksa – the long queue, and the huge pots of gravy warmed by charcoal fires. I reached the place mid-afternoon, so there was no queue, but the sight of the huge pots and the smell of the coal fire were unmistakable.

The Sungei Road laksa has adopted a different business model – to sell cheaply to many – from the Katong laksa franchises – which practice product-price differentiation. The Katong stalls, whichever the original one may be, price their product higher and in fairness, do give you more quantity and better quality ingredients like prawns and thicker, better slices of fishcake. The Sungei Road version comes in small bowls and is priced at a ridiculous $2, but has no prawns, and only a few measly thin slices of fishcake. That is no matter, though, because the true star here is the gravy. Less lemak, and more oily than Katong, it is nevertheless better balanced and delivers a more powerful kick of umami. The noodles here, too, edge it slightly – the ones used here retain flavour better and are cooked to the perfect texture.


As a lifelong Eastie it pains me to say this, but I think I might prefer this version to the Katong laksa.

The fabric of community

Restoran Oversea
No. 100 Beach Road, #01-27 to #01-37,
Shaw Leisure Gallery, Shaw Tower
Singapore 189702
Tel: +65 6294 2638

I have begun to feel more and more that doing business, as it were, is about so much more than just dollars and cents. It’s about, among other things, making an imprint on the fabric of society – about bettering the lives of others through your product or service. The best business ideas come out of making someone’s life just that bit easier, efficient or enjoyable. It sounds trite, but it is, I think, rather apt especially in the restaurant world, or small business in general. You don't just go to a restaurant because you want to take it easy and not have to cook or wash up; you go because you want to enjoy yourself and have a good time eating out. The best restaurants, in my view, are the ones that transform their local community and become an indelible part of it. They become – slowly, bit by bit – part of the lives of their customers, until a community coalesces around them. Families trooping to a particular restaurant for regular Sunday dinners, or couples going back to a place because it’s the restaurant they went to on their first date – a restaurant is often so much more than just a place to eat.

So when restaurants close, the loss is not just the loss of a place to eat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a fan of regeneration as anyone else, because it also means that a new set of folks are pursuing their dreams, making their own imprint on the landscape and community. I can only hope that the ones who were there before have moved on to bigger, better dreams. In any case, the ground floor restaurant space at Shaw Leisure Gallery – for so long Ah Yat Seafood Palace – was recently opened again as the first Singapore branch of Restoran Oversea (海外天), the famous Jalan Imbi restaurant in KL renowned for its char siew.

I met Winnie for dinner there last night, and the new owners had definitely spruced it up a little bit. A sleek if somewhat overwrought bar counter defined the room, and the fish tanks that had housed Ah Yat’s live seafood were replaced by booths. A ceiling to floor screen marked out what was for all intents and purposes a private room. There was a reasonable crowd for a restaurant that had only been open for a month, but it was by no means packed.

You have to pre-order the char siew, as you do with their 功夫汤 – a soup specialty of theirs, which Winnie had done. When the char siew came it glistened under the bright white lights of the restaurants, and it was all we could do to hold off attacking it while we took a photo for posterity. I’ve met people who are religious about taking photos of their food and I always wonder what they do with the photos, and why they take photo-taking to the extents that they do. Some don’t even consider the aesthetic quality of their subject. I’ve seen people take photos of green bean soup, which looks – even if you do it well – like an unidentifiable green mush. Why do they do it? I can never understand. For me the enjoyment of the meal comes first, and sometimes I am so overwhelmed by the urge to eat that photos be damned. And if the photo-taking puts off what happens to be perfectly charming conversation and the mood of the moment, then I often think better of it. In this case I had promised my colleague that I would take a photo of the char siew just to show him the quantity you get, which isn’t a lot for twenty bucks.


But I suppose you do pay that sort of money for quality, which the Oversea char siew definitely is. Fatty, succulent and carved into substantial enough cubes to be a gloriously meaty bite, it compared very well with the version in KL and indeed other versions elsewhere. It was a little sweet at first taste, but then I found that eating it together with the Chinese parsley added tartness and improved the experience.

The 功夫汤 – gongfu soup – was a cheesy take on gongfu tea: medicinal soup double boiled in clay teapots. What this meant was that by pouring the soup out into miniature teacups, you could drink the soup on its own without the ingredients. Of course, you could also open up the teapot to get at the various pork cubes, dried scallops and all other manner of goodness hidden within. It was certainly a very interesting presentation and it didn’t hurt that the soup was delicious – intensely flavoured, yet light and refreshing.

I think that since it is early days for the restaurant, they are still working out what their popular dishes are, and the right quantities of ingredients to stock. As a result, they had run out of several of the things I had wanted to try. The XO duck tongues, claypot pork ribs and roast duck were all out. We wound up ordering a couple of other "second choice" dishes to round out our meal, but they didn’t hit the heights of the char siew and the soup. The sambal eggplant could have been great, but they hadn’t salted the eggplant enough beforehand so it was still a little bitter; and they hadn’t cooked it long enough, for the skin on the eggplant was a tad too firm for my liking. I like my eggplant mushier. The teppanyaki beef rib was well flavoured and tender, but alas, nothing out of the ordinary.

Expanding overseas (pardon the pun) is never an easy thing, especially for restaurant chains. Setting up a whole new supply chain, sourcing and procuring ingredients, hiring, dealing with a whole new set of regulations, approvals, permits – it is a significant investment of time and resources. So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not planning to stay. I hope Restoran Oversea is here to stay; from what I have seen I have no doubt that they do good work and can become a local institution. For their sake I look forward to many more families trooping there for their Sunday dinners and couples headed there for first dates or anniversaries.

Adventures in China, part 1 of hopefully many to come

Bing Sheng Restaurant
广州市东晓路33号
33 Dongxiao Lu, Guangzhou, China
+86(20) 3428 6910

I’ve recently been reading Calvin Trillin’s Tummy Trilogy, which should be required reading for any serious foodie. I believe the person who first told me of the books some four or five years ago may have used the same words, but for some reason I have only now gotten around to it. Now that I have, I am likely to repeat those words to anyone who will listen. No matter, because the books hold up remarkably well despite the years, and the joy that Trillin experiences in travelling and eating around much of America is just as heartwarming in the seventies as it is today, perhaps even more so.

I honestly believe that there is a lot of good food in America and most of it does not get much acclaim beyond local or regional press, or word-of-mouth. I myself have spent a lot of time chasing the regional specialties that America has to offer, from barbecue in Texas (and Kansas), through Creole/Cajun cuisine in New Orleans, or the Low Country fare in Charleston. Today, as much as around the time Trillin wrote his books, there are many kitchens, diners and restaurants dotting the US of A which do good and honest work. I have been fortunate enough to taste the specialties of many of these places but I am sure there are many more I have missed out on.

For America in the seventies, consider China today and you have worlds upon worlds of similar possibility. So many regional cuisines, so many places to eat in, so many things to try, and only one stomach, only one lifetime in which to try as much as you can. I think the Chinese are one of the most inventive when it comes to food. Much of this may be bred by necessity, but often it results in some rather spectacular dining. I was in Guangzhou recently and had a chance to experience the highs and lows of travel eating.

One of the problems described by Trillin in his travels across America is the finding of the best places to eat. You're on unfamiliar ground both literally and figuratively, and while it may be easy to corner a random stranger for a recommendation you can never be quite sure if it's going to be a good one in the end. Some people are, horror of horrors, most decidedly not as particular about food as you are. It’s all very different now, of course, with the Internet and with mobile telephony and the wealth of information we have at our fingertips these days - which was demonstrated wonderfully when it came time for lunch. One of my companions whipped out his Blackberry, texted his friend in Hong Kong and instantaneously got a recommendation on where to eat. After spending a few minutes online locating the restaurant and how to get there – we were off. The recommendation in question turned out to be one Bing Sheng Restaurant, which in itself meant nothing to us at the time. It was only after I’d gotten back and Googled the place a little more did I realize that it was a rather well-regarded restaurant with lots of history (and several branches). Good on them.

If you travel much in China (and especially coming from a small dot of a country like Singapore), one thing you will be hit by constantly is the scale of things – everything is often very much bigger. Bing Sheng itself is one of those banquet restaurants housed in its own building (with a separate cottage in the yard for supplies – imagine that!). I didn’t walk around, but from the three storeys of seating space it looked like it could seat at least 400-500 people at full capacity. That, to me, is mind boggling. That would mean feeding a thousand people every night if they did just two turns, and to do that requires a platoon of cooks and a battalion of waiters and runners and dishwashers, not to mention enough bulbs of garlic to fill a small apartment. The sheer logistics involved in running a restaurant of that size was all I could think about as we sat down to order.

There were a couple of dishes that had been recommended to us so that left us less room to maneuver around the menu, even given our capacity to stuff ourselves. Given the standard of living in China and its currency position, eating out is still insanely affordable for tourists, so we had no hesitation in over-ordering. The captain rolled her eyes at us more than once while taking our order, though that might have been due either to the staggering amount of food we ordered, or the equally staggering and infinitely maddening indecision we displayed in ordering it. We had arrived at the tail end of lunch hour, so while the fortunate thing was that the restaurant was emptying, they had unfortunately run out of several dishes we wanted to try. In particular the roast goose.

One of the implications of having such a large restaurant is that your kitchen must be designed accordingly, to be as efficient as possible. This means dividing responsibilities into stations, it means cooking several orders at once to save time. What this means to the customer is that food can come out at very different timings. (Obviously the kitchen is not going to hold your food while the rest of your order is being finished, there would be no space on the pass to keep every table’s order.) It is something you have to deal with at all Chinese restaurants. If you are not particular, it is not much of a big deal. But if you are particular about having your food available at timings reasonably close to one another, or even about the order in which you eat things (I like to drink my soup first, then eat my animal protein before vegetable; starch is always the last before dessert) – then it is cause for despair.

In any case, Bing Sheng does serve up some pretty tasty food, so I couldn’t complain too much. The very first dish we got was one of goose intestine in black bean sauce, which was spectacular. Other special mentions included a dish of char siew done two ways – one more traditionally roasted and the other deep fried. The deep fried version used unimaginably fatty cubes of pork, and was done such that each cube exploded upon contact into a mouthful of pork fat flooding the tongue. Let’s get this straight, this was sinful as hell. But god damn was it ever worth it.

My favourite dish of the meal, however, came as a bit of a surprise. We had ordered a random tofu dish (the requisite vegetable protein) just by looking at the pictures on the menu and pointing, and it turned out to be pieces of tofu fried first to give the skin texture, then braised in superior stock together with wild mushrooms and wantons. For some reason they called this 水鬼重豆腐, which literally translates into “tofu as heavy as water ghosts”. I think the rationale was that the pieces of tofu in stock looked like corpses floating in water. I don’t know what marketing genius came up with that idea. The tofu I suppose was smooth enough and had good flavour, but the real winner here was the stock, which was bursting with umami yet light enough to slurp by the bowlful.

When you travel to an unfamiliar place and you don’t have the time to do the hard yards and research your meals beforehand, stumbling as we did upon Bing Sheng was a godsend. Not everything was great there, of course – a dish of watercress fell way short of expectations – but as a whole it had been very, very good indeed. I just can’t imagine that place at full capacity. What chaos that must be!