Sunday bloody Sundays

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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