Eat Drink Asia Team
I wasn’t hungry when I walked into 313@somerset. I’d come for something else entirely; an errand, a shop I needed, the usual Orchard rush of people moving faster than the escalators. But somewhere on the first floor, past the noise, I caught the smell of star anise and beef bone, and my feet slowed down…
I didn’t set out to write about steak. It started with a bad day and a craving for something that pushed back when I bit into it. One dinner turned into a habit, and over a couple of years I found myself at counters, coffeeshops, and dining rooms all over this island, chasing the same…
The first time I ate breakfast in Chinatown, I got it wrong. I arrived at eleven, hungry and hopeful, and found the kopi stalls already turning toward lunch. The porridge uncle was packing up. The toast man had switched to slicing char siew. I ate a rushed plate of noodles standing near a pillar, sweating,…
I ordered the sambal fried rice first, before I’d even properly read the menu. That’s usually a mistake at a place like this. Yassin Kampung @ Admiralty is the kind of restaurant that keeps trying to pull your attention elsewhere — toward stingray, toward crab, toward hotplates that arrive still hissing. But I’d come with…
The rice came down first. A plain bowl, warm and steaming, set in the middle of the table before anything else. Then the green curry, in a bowl wide enough for four spoons to reach at once. And within a minute the table stopped being a set of individual meals and became one shared thing,…
I built this list around a very specific feeling: that first bite where the room goes quiet for a second. I’ve tried enough Japanese restaurants in Singapore over the years to know that “best” does not always mean the most expensive, the rarest, or the hardest to book. Sometimes it is the warmth of the…
Japanese cuisine has long been admired for its attention to seasonality, precision, and respect for ingredients. However, behind every piece of sashimi or carefully prepared seafood dish lies a story that begins far away from the dining table, often with fishermen, coastal communities, and generations of knowledge passed down through time. At Araya Shouten, seafood…
There’s a dish I order when I want to know a kitchen quickly. Not the specialty. Not the thing the menu is proud of. I order the fried rice. Because nasi goreng has nowhere to hide. It’s rice, chilli, chicken, egg, a few crackers, some cucumber. Everyone thinks they can make it. Most people can.…
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,…
The first time I ordered kimchi jjigae in Singapore, I made a small mistake. It came bubbling in a stone pot, and I ate it like soup, spoonful after spoonful, straight down, until my mouth was on fire and the bowl was half gone. The auntie across the counter watched me for a moment, then…