Posts tagged "chai"

A unifying theory of Singapore food that ends in a dream

1. 'Singapore food' is a difficult term. It's hard to put national wrappers around a smorgasbord of different culinary influences. This is why we keep getting into fights about appropriating others' food. Singapore food is Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Hokchiu, Teochew, Malay, Javanese, Sumatran, Tamil, Kerala, Mamak, Punjabi, Bengali, Kristang, Peranakan, Chetty, and many more.

2. We simply consume some of them more than others, in public; and some are more widely available commercially. Others are largely consumed at home.

3. The Singapore food popularized by the tourism board, that appears in movies like Crazy Rich Asians, is only one of many types of Singapore food.

4. When Malaysians say 'it's better in Malaysia', they are usually right, except for when they are referring to dishes that exist in both northern and southern Malaysia. In that case, the Singapore version, usually held up to be the inferior one, is usually only a mirror of the southern Malaysian, usually Teochew, version of that dish. It is not better or worse, it is just different.

5. As Singapore / Malaysia food gets more popular abroad, especially in the US, we're going to have to be prepared to see it transform in ways that we may not always appreciate. Like ube, kaya and pandan is going to go on a similar journey. I'm no longer personally invested in the idea of everyone eating exactly the same version of the food that I like; it's fine to let kaya and pandan become its own thing elsewhere.

6. Gula Melaka (obviously not Singapore food, but used extensively in Singapore) is god tier and will become the next big thing in global pastries and dessert, especially in sweet/salty applications like salted caramel.

7. One of the best aspects of food in Singapore is that many of the world's top food brands already, or will soon, have an outpost here. Some better than others.

8. The breadth of vegan and meat alternatives in Singapore currently is breathtaking. It's certainly changed in this department since I left home. While I'm not vegan, and likely will never be, I appreciate the options that are available. While one might need to go to a midrange restaurant in San Francisco to have Impossible burgers, there are Impossible burgers in convenience stores here. There are vegan options in a lot of local food now, a lot more than I remember. Pretty much every major plant-based or meat alternative or lab grown company is here with a product out on the market. Way more than in the US. And all in one tiny city. I'm excited to try the vegan sashimi that I just saw, and the vat-grown chicken. This is definitely related to the next section on 'how come I can get all of my favorite food in one city now?'

Burgers: Shake Shack, Five Guys, Carne

South Indian: Murugan, Anjappar, Junior Kuppanna, Ponnusamy, Dindigul Thalappakati

Malaysian Chinese: Go Noodle House, Super chilli pan mee, various Malaysian hawkers at Malaysia Boleh

Taiwan: Sushiro, Mu:, many many boba / bubble tea chains (most of them in fact)

China: too many to name, other than Hai Di Lao there are also Chinese chains for specific regional dishes, like more than two famous chains for say, suancai

Way too many Japanese and Korean chains to list.

Sure, chain food isn't all that exciting and many of them arrive here in a completely bastardized form especially when they are run by a local F&B group that is less good at running franchises. But the ones run by the owners, like most of the Indian and Malaysian chains, make me very glad to have something I love so much all in once place especially in times like these when I don't think I'll be able to travel to those places for longer than I'd like.

So why are there so many chains setting up shop here? I suspect capital flight, and the precarious political situation in Hong Kong as a traditional financial hub. It's also incredibly easy to setup a business in Singapore. While there are some problems with that model, you can definitely draw a direct line from the ease of setting up shop to why we have all of these restaurants.

I love that I can get biryani with seeraga samba rice (the clearly superior rice for biryani) in not just one style, but several: Kongunadu style at Junior Kuppanna, Thalappakati style at Dindugl Thalappakati. I love that I have many, many types of boba to choose from, from hand-brewed tea-forward teas like at Chicha San Sen to black sugar boba abominations with cheese like at Black Sugar or Xing Fu Wang. I love that the noodles I love so much when I lived in KL are mostly here.

Not forgetting individual chefs or restaurant owners who don't have chains, who have simply moved here and are doing what they do best here. I've had very decent Ipoh horfun and Sarawak kolo mee. I'm really liking the boom in Henghua (xing hua) food, after Putien's success. You find these at tiny restaurants (like Yun Heng) and at food courts (like at Malaysia Boleh). We've also recently found a very-close-to-Village-Park style nasi lemak at Uptown Nasi Lemak, Telok Ayer (which is totally different from Singapore nasi lemak).

I hate it when food writers spend too much time talking about how you can get gasp high end food at low end prices. That, I think, is unique to Singapore in some ways because we have a large number of trained chefs and cooks at the many, many hotels and restaurants; and many of them, like chefs and cooks anywhere, want to do their own thing. Our inventory of non-restaurant space, like at hawker stalls or food courts or commercial shop space below public housing, has made it possible. You have always had things like 'Austrian man sets up sausage stand in Chinatown' or 'Japanese couple selling Singaporean Teochew noodles in hawker centre' in the first wave of that. We've also always had stories of 'hotel chef sets up shop in hawker stall'. So I am not, as a food-obsessed Singaporean, surprised by this sort of thing.

What this means in daily life, though, now that I live somewhere with with a well-known but very different food scene, is that you can get fancy dimsum in a place like Yishun. You get French-trained chefs cooking Hokkien mee.

I love that. However, I love more when a new generation of Singaporeans take over, or start, hawker food businesses. It leads to innovations that take the best of our traditions and blends it with our exposure to new things, and makes it entirely new. As a Teochew person, I love braised duck more than.. nearly anything else in the world. A place like Jin Ji where a younger person has started to get involved can now do things like dry duck ramen and still be distinct from when a Japanese ramen master does it. I have never seen duck ramen anywhere else outside of Japan and Singapore and I feel like more people should know that you can have many types of duck ramen in Singapore, including one that is Teochew-inspired.

Does this mean that food in Singapore is not authentic? First, I'd like to banish the idea of authenticity. Nothing is authentic, even in the sourcelands. India, China, and other places we draw inspiration from, have all had food that has come from somewhere else, and no food exists in a vacuum.

But even in the 'authenticity' department we are no slouch. You can get old school Teochew food, you can get traditional East Javanese food (Bebek Goreng Pak Ndut), you can get authentic Kongunadu food (Junior Kuppanna), you can get authentic Chennai style idlis (Murugan). You can get extremely high levels of 'authentic' high end Japanese food for nearly every region, and dish.

When I think about what I miss most about eating in Singapore, especially when I'm cold and hungry at midnight in San Francisco, it looks a little like this:

In my eating-in-Singapore dreams, it is always midnight. I am at Mustafa in June fighting over mangoes with aunties. The cashier asks me what's the big deal anyway about these mangoes. I say it's not just a mango, it's dasheri. After losing at mangoes (the aunties always jab me and they get the best ones), I walk to Desker Road for hot garlic cheese naan, dal fry, palak paneer and kadai chicken. Javid offers me a cigarette. I tell him I don't smoke anymore. He says good, have some elaichi chai. In the morning, my mother has made me a tub of Hokkien chicken wings that her mother used to make, for breakfast. There's at least 2 kilos. I love chicken wings. Love is an understatement. When I've had Filipino food, I can see the Hokkien influence in all of the dark soy sauce and garlic. My Hokkien half is satisfied. Later, for lunch, I want a light Teochew porridge with all of the trimmings: steamed pomfret or rabbit fish. Taucheo. Preserved mustard leaves with olives. I walk around in the heat and sweat it all off. For dinner, I can have great sushi or I can have biryani. With seeraga samba, the clearly superior biryani rice. Then I remember a cocktail costs $25 in this city and I wake up.

So whenever someone not from a major food city moves to San Francisco and says to me, the food scene is so good! I hold my tongue and say... yes, it is, but. I could also be eating in Singapore. In my dreams.

A Bus and Chai Story

Reposting stuff I like from my archives. This is from 2006.

Rajasthan, at the peak of summer. There are no tourists around for miles, except the two of us. For a good reason too. Tell any Indian you were in Rajasthan in May, and he is bound to exclaim, “Vhat? It’s… hot!” And when an Indian says it’s hot, believe me, it’s hot. I believed them. I just didn’t care. Some people like it hot. Rajasthani “hot” means 48 degrees Celsius, or 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I went because nobody being around meant I got 75% off hotel rates, at whatever hotel I wanted to be in. I can’t help it — I’m Asian. The name of this region, Marwar, came from the Sanskrit root word, “Maruwat”. “Maru” means ‘desert’, while “Maruwat” roughly translates to ‘region of death’.

By this time I had a way around the Indian public transportation system, in any city and town I chanced to be in. I also knew this far out in the desert, air-conditioned Rajasthani state buses were non-existent. Besides, proper travellers took non-airconditioned buses everywhere, didn’t they? We were proper travellers. But even the Third World has its own sub-divisions. Where we were, was moderately more difficult than some other parts of the Third World we’d been in.

As our bus ticket was written entirely in Hindi, my nascent grasp of the language had not yet developed from “attempts at letter identification” to “actually useful application of language”, so with no knowledge of my bus other than where it was going (Jodhpur) and the time it was to be expected (6.45am), I had to depend on my auto driver to take me to it. He took us to the side of an empty road which seemed to stretch into the desert as far as the eyes could see.

We stood by the side of the road for what seemed like hours. We flagged down each bus which came by — none of them were marked in English, nor had as much as an indicator of where they were going. Jodhpur? We asked, hopefully, each time. After countless cups of tea and nimki for breakfast (there was a little dhaba near where we were waiting), someone frantically screamed at us: “Jodhpur! Jodhpur!” Together with what was probably “you’re going to have to sit among those chickens if you don’t scramble up fast enough!” We got up, and got a seat each, miraculously, at the back of the bus. The only acceptable time for bus travel in Rajasthan in the summer is between 5am and 7am, and you’d better pray that you get to your destination before it starts the daily heatwave by noon. At 10am, we were well on our way, and happy about it. Perhaps complacently so.

The bus stopped by a dhaba for a break, or so I thought. I dipped out to go to the toilet (or the hole in the ground), toilet roll in hand. Toilet rolls are bound to cause stares here; they are believed to be unsanitary compared to the far superior system of water. My embrace of the country had not yet translated to a full embrace of its toilet habits, I still needed my toilet paper. On the way back to the bus I saw fit to order myself two cups of tea, special (costing more at 2 rupees instead of 1; where 1 INR=US$0.02). As the chai-wallah pushed the two cups of tea into my hands, I saw the bus which was supposed to take me to Jodhpur — and it was leaving. Leaving with my partner, my luggage, my passport and my money. I was there with my two cups of tea, and 10 rupees in my pocket, thinking for a split second that if I didn’t catch this bus I might be stuck out there on a Rajasthani highway dhaba with no mobile phone and no identification papers. I ran — I sprinted as fast as a girl with two cups of chai in her hands could sprint. My partner’s attempts to stop the bus was futile, all she could do was shout “stop! stop!” from her seat at the back of the bus. The bus was so packed that even if she managed to make her way to the driver, I might have been married to a Rajput already.

My travels have assured me of the certainty of determinism, a higher being, and my place in the world as someone whose every step is, quite literally, an act of faith, guided by the divine. Because I actually managed to catch the bus, and when I got on I was relieved I had my two cups of chai intact. Now at the front of the impossibly packed bus, I faced the arduous task of getting my chai through the bus, led by the sole vision of myself sitting by my window, looking at the desert and sipping a cup of tea. As I made my way through the bus, people made way reluctantly for me, all the while shouting to each other in Hindi and Rajasthani: look out! Mad china-woman has tea that can kill! And indeed my tea could kill — I had two of them, and they were, in line with our geographic position at that point in time, the Rajasthani kind of hot. The Rajasthani kind of hot tea which threatened to scald anyone who was in my way, and also burned my hands as I held them.

I made it to the back of the bus, two cups of chai intact, after 5 minutes of mad chai-balancing kungfu. When I got there, Z seemed capable of snapping my head off at that moment.

All I could do was smile with relief: “Chai, baby?”

Before she could strangle me, the bus jolted while avoiding a truck, and I spilled tea all over her shirt.