Butterfly Tea: Thailand’s Magical Color-Changing Drink

I almost walked past it. I’d been looking for the old triangular building, the red-and-white one you see in every photo of Keong Saik, the one that made Tong Ah feel like a landmark before you’d even ordered anything. But that’s not where it lives anymore. It’s a few doors down now, at 35 Keong…

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,…

The oil is already hot when she reaches for the leaves. It’s late morning in a kitchen off a quiet lane, and a woman I’ve been watching stands over a blackened wok, tearing bitter gourd leaves by hand into a small heap. The garlic hits the oil first, sharp and loud. Then the leaves go…

I’ve been eating sushi in this city for years now, from S$1.50 plates rolling past on a belt to omakase counters where the bill made me sit up straight. Somewhere along the way I stopped chasing “the best” and started noticing something else — that good sushi answers a mood, not a ranking. Some nights…

It was close to eleven at night when I finally sat down. The kind of hour when you’re not really hungry so much as unsettled, when you want something warm in front of you more than you want a proper meal. Al Mubin’s food court at Block 407, Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10, was still…

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…

By Dio Asahi for Eat Drink Asia. The lid comes off, and the steam rises first. It’s a warm afternoon in Chiang Mai, and on the table sits a small woven bamboo basket, still holding the heat of the pot it came from. Someone’s grandmother lifts the top and sets it aside without looking. Inside,…

I used to add the rice too early. The oil would be hot, the sambal barely a minute in, and I’d tip in the cold rice because I was hungry and impatient. Every time, the same result: rice stained red but tasting of nothing much. Sharp. Raw. Flat where it should have been deep. It…

The bowl arrives before anything else does. Steam lifts off it in slow ribbons, carrying the smell of ginger and something warmer underneath: the round, boozy note of hua tiao wine settling into fish. I lean in before I even pick up my spoon. The broth is pale gold and cloudy, thick enough that it…

I didn’t grow up eating raw fish. For years, sashimi felt like something you learned to appreciate rather than something you loved. Cold, foreign, a little intimidating. Then one afternoon, at a quiet counter, a chef placed a single slice of chutoro in front of me and said nothing. I ate it. And I understood….