Eda Wong
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…
I used to think lunch in the CBD was a lost cause. You get an hour, maybe less. The lift takes ten minutes just to reach the ground floor. By the time you’ve queued, ordered, and found a corner to eat in, you’re already checking the clock. For a while, I gave up and just…
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…