A Food Lover’s Guide to the Taiwanese Oyster Omelet

The duck arrived and made a sound before I’d even touched it. Not the plate, the skin. When my fork pressed against it, there was a small, dry crackle, the kind you feel in your fingers before you hear it. That’s when I understood I wasn’t eating a soft meal. This was something with edges….

By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. Steam curls up from a tray in the back of the kitchen, and the whole room smells green. Pandan, crushed and knotted, pushed through wet cloth until the leaves give up their colour. An auntie leans over the tray with a spoon carved from coconut shell, dark and…

There’s a container of rice at the back of my fridge most weeks. Cold, a little hard, forgotten from a dinner two nights ago. Some people see that and think of waste. I see the start of something better. Because leftover rice doesn’t want to be reheated. It wants to be fried. And when it…

By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The shop is barely wider than a hallway. Seven stools, a counter worn smooth, and behind it a woman ladling soup into small ceramic bowls before anyone has ordered it. Steam lifts off the surface and fogs the window against the cold morning. The bowl reaches me warm…

There’s a specific kind of hunger that a chirashi don answers. It’s not the hunger for a full sushi omakase, with its slow ceremony and its quiet counter watching. And it’s not the hunger for something thrown together and forgotten by three o’clock. It sits somewhere in between — fish and rice in one bowl,…

By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. It is not yet seven, and the uncle at Heap Seng Leong has the pot going. He works the sock strainer over the tin cup with both hands, dipping and lifting, dipping and lifting, coaxing the coffee through the worn cloth. Steam rises between his fingers. The smell…

It was raining the afternoon I went. Not the polite kind, the sort that drums against the glass of Guoco Tower and makes you glad you’re already underground. I hadn’t planned on soondubu. I’d planned on something quick, something I could eat between the errands piling up in my head. But the rain does something…

By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The lift doors open on a floor of Cuppage Plaza that has seen better decades. Peeling signage. A corridor that smells faintly of old carpet and cigarette smoke drifting from somewhere. Then a door slides shut behind me, and the noise falls away. Inside Hanashizuku Japanese Cuisine, the…

It was close to nine on a Friday when I finally found the door. Tanjong Pagar was doing its usual thing, full tables spilling onto five-foot ways, soju bottles catching the light, someone laughing too loudly two doors down. I almost walked past Todamgol. Then the smell reached me. Fermented, smoky, a little sharp. The…

By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The lift opens on the fourth floor of Cuppage Plaza and the smoke finds me before the door does. Charcoal, dark and earthy, threaded through with something richer — fat meeting fire. I follow it down a narrow corridor, past shuttered shops and flickering signage, until I reach…