Noodle
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.…
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…
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…
I didn’t expect to find Korean comfort food in an office building near Tai Seng. But there I was, on a Wednesday a little past 7pm, standing outside The Commerze @ Irving wondering if I’d read the address wrong. This isn’t the part of Singapore you go to for dinner. It’s the part you leave…
The first vegetarian laksa I made tasted like coconut soup with chilli, not laksa. I thought I was doing it right, stirring paste into warm coconut milk with tofu puffs. It looked the part but lacked depth. Seafood usually provides that depth, prawn shells, dried shrimp, fish cake sweetness. I learned that depth can’t be…
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…
It was the kind of evening where you don’t want to think too hard about dinner. I’d been walking up East Coast Road, the air still thick from an afternoon shower, when I ducked into a coffeeshop just to sit down. The Bullion Hawker Bar. And tucked among the usual suspects — wanton mee, Hokkien…
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…
Let me clear up the first puzzle right away. The name “Isshin Machi” sounds unmistakably Japanese, and I’ll admit I walked in half-expecting ramen and gyoza. What I found instead was a Taiwanese kitchen, plates of lu rou fan, braised beef noodles, and golden fried chicken that trace straight back to the island’s home cooking.…
I ordered lunch from Co Hai Banh Mi & Phở Vietnamese Restaurant on a Thursday at 12:08pm, which is probably the worst and most honest time to test delivery food. It was raining lightly, the kind of Singapore lunch rain that makes every rider slower and every office worker hungrier. I had been thinking about…