Eda Wong
By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The pot has been going for a while now, and the whole kitchen knows it. Steam curls up from the surface, carrying that sharp-sour smell that reaches you before anything else. It’s not a gentle aroma. It pricks at the back of your throat a little, makes your…
The escalator carries me down to Basement 3, past the lunch noise of 313 Somerset, and the air changes somewhere along the way. Less mall, more kitchen. The smell finds me first — chilli, vinegar, something warm and sharp that cuts through the perfume of the shops above. Hi Noodle sits there, plain and bright.…
I didn’t grow up eating eel. But I grew up watching my grandmother turn one thing into another — gluten into “duck,” beancurd skin into “fish,” mushrooms into something that tasted of the sea without ever touching it. Buddhist vegetarian cooking does that. It doesn’t pretend so much as it remembers, building familiar shapes out…
The wok is already off the heat. The greens sit glossy and dark, steam still curling off them. My mother lifts a small bottle, tilts it, and lets a thin line of sesame oil fall across the top. It hisses faintly against the warm leaves, and the smell rises all at once — toasted, nutty,…
I came in from the rain on a Tuesday, somewhere past 8pm, hungry and a little defeated by the day. The fan was clacking. A queue of three or four people stood near the doorway, dripping. Someone shouted an order toward the kitchen in Vietnamese, and a bowl of pho slid onto a nearby table…
Steam lifts from a bowl of clear pork broth, and a spoonful of chopped pickled greens slides in. The broth shifts at once, its richness suddenly cut by a sharp, clean sourness that sits high and bright on the tongue. The greens have softened in the heat but keep a faint, springy crunch. Someone leans…
The first time I made aloo curry on my own, I burned the cumin. I remember standing in my tiny HDB kitchen, watching those little seeds go from golden to black in what felt like one breath, and thinking: this is harder than it looks. But here’s what that bitter, smoky disaster taught me, the…
Steam rises from the pot, and a woman lifts a banana leaf over the open flame, turning it once, twice, until its stiff green softens and the surface goes glossy and pliant. She wipes it down with a damp cloth, then spoons hot rice into its center while the grains still steam. The leaf releases…
I ordered from Tambuah Mas on a rainy Sunday at around 6:15pm, mostly because I wasn’t in the mood to dress up and head into town, but I still wanted a proper meal. Not a sad one-bowl lunch. A real spread. That’s the thing about Tambuah Mas. It’s been around since 1981, serving Indonesian home-style…
By Eda Wong for Eat Drink Asia. The wok station is already hot when the cook lowers the flame. In the narrow back of a Singapore zi char kitchen, the air smells of butter, curry leaves, and the faint mineral edge of salted duck egg. A metal spatula presses cooked yolks through oil until they…