The Bizarre Truth (19 page)

Hawker Centers are government run in the sense that the government owns the space and leases the stalls. This allows them to keep the place clean and well-managed. Fortunately, the government understands that they have no business cooking food. Let the artists, the chefs, come in there and do their thing, and let them do it in an environment—the physical space—that the government maintains. The centers have tables as well as lovely little gardens where you can sit down and enjoy your food. But first you have to decide what to eat. You claim a numbered table, then walk around to the stalls that stretch for half a mile in a series of indoor and outdoor courtyards in People’s Park. You order, and let the hawkers know your table number. Once your grub is ready, a runner will ferry the food to you. Pretty sweet, huh?

I was fortunate enough to dine at People’s Park the first time with Violet Oon, the Julia Child of Singapore. She was an absolutely fabulous host, and she knew her way around the Singapore food scene and was game for trying everything. I immediately developed a serious food crush on her. We ate fantastic frog porridge and slurped pig soup filled with all the different parts of the pig: liver, heart, lungs, and so on. Grandma is in the back of the stall, stirring ten-gallon pots filled with a generations-old family recipe. I know it sounds overly romantic, but that’s truly what it is. The pig soup broth base was top-heavy with sweet spices like cinnamon and star anise, ginger, lovely braised greens, and a hint of fresh lime juice to lighten it up. The soup also incorporated melting bits of braised pork rib, shoulder, and paper-thin slices of the pig heart, tongue, liver, and other effluvia. I know that might not be up everyone’s alley, but don’t knock it ’til you try it. We picked some dishes from a duck stall where you can get wings, tongues, split roasted heads, and sliced duck breast. We devoured the classic Hainan chicken, which is a steamed bird that tastes like no other chicken you’ve placed in your mouth. It’s the way chicken used to taste everywhere, I imagine, and the better hawkers purge and then gorge their birds on a diet designed to increase the
brittle nature of the skin and the meat’s fat content. They drizzle the cooked poultry with an aged, thickened, sweet soy sauce and serve it with classic Singaporean-style fried rice. People’s Park was just a phenomenal experience.

Violet turned us on to a place called Tian Jin Hai Seafood Restaurant. Tian Jin Hai is the brainchild of Francis Yeo, who ran a successful seafood hawker stall at the Jackson Center for ten years. When the center closed a few years ago, he went on a long holiday and decided to open in another hawker center when he came back. However, when he returned he discovered his space wouldn’t be ready for a while. This is one of the drawbacks of the government owning all the hawker centers, and it’s a fairly common story in Singapore. On one hand, they are clean and organized. On the other, bribes or cash don’t speak as loudly as connections do. And sometimes vice versa. Yeo sought out another option, stumbling upon a place at the edge of town in Punggol’s Marina Country Club. A Taiwanese chef had recently closed down his restaurant at the marina and the space was vacant. Yeo took it over and opened his restaurant a few months later. Unlike the cramped and hot Jackson Center, this dockside restaurant sprawls over a series of patios, some covered, some open-aired, with thirty or forty tables, a bar, a semi-open kitchen, and a beautiful view of the water. Instead of little stools and tables, there are lazy Susans and fancy chairs. Obviously, prices have gone up, but Yeo offers the best seafood I tried in Singapore.

Yeo earned the reputation for incredible chili crab at his former hawker stall. Chili crab, the Singaporean national dish, features giant mud crabs with thick shells and stout claws. He offers eight or nine different varieties on his menu: black pepper, rice wine, black bean, the traditional sweet chili, just to name a few. The crab is broken apart and lightly steamed so it just holds together. It’s cooked again in Chef Yeo’s killer sweet chili sauce. It’s a great dish to pick through, spending some quality time cracking and working
the meat out of the crab’s nooks and crannies. You suck on the thick, sweet chili paste that gets all over your fingers and your face. It’s probably the only time that making a huge mess is encouraged in Singapore. After I tried chili crab a couple different ways, I cleaned up with some hot towels and moved on to Yeo’s newest creation: steamed shark’s head.

This is a dish that Yeo claims he invented and, interestingly, it’s a dish that has no meat on it at all. Singaporeans, like the rest of the world outside of our country, eat from snout to tail, using every part of the animal, because they have never lost connection with the idea that they should never waste a thing. Finances dictate it, as does culinary ideology. Yeo noticed this was not the case with shark—the heads always went to waste. He experimented with the shark’s heads and ended up with a novel dish you’re not going to find anywhere else. He starts by stripping down the skin, trimming the head, and cutting out the gills. You’re left with a pointy, triangular piece of bone with thick slabs of what look like gelatinous, pale, white tendons hanging from it. These are the connective tissues that make the jaws of the animal move up and down with such mind-boggling strength. Yeo makes lateral incisions perpendicular to the bone so that all these big flaps of tendons protrude like little fingers. He steams the shark’s head in light sweet soy sauce and rice wine, which removes the pungent (and often nasty) off flavors typically present in fish heads. After four hours of steaming, those gelatinous pieces of cartilage melt in your mouth. Next, he puts this head on a platter, drizzles it with a sturdier soy sauce, and finishes it with shaved ginger and scallion. You pull off these little bits of cartilage from the head and eat them. The texture reminds me of perfectly cooked sea cucumber, yielding a slight crunch as you sink your teeth in but melting away after just a hint of pressure. It reminds me of bone marrow’s rich, buttery flavor. This is one of the most unusual dishes I’ve ever had, but trust me, it’s absolutely addictive; it sounds straight out of a
sci-fi movie, but the flavor, texture, and novelty simply blew me away. It’s certainly not the type of thing anyone would ever order on their own, but it’s worth a try if you get the opportunity.

Just across the city is a completely different food experience. I toured Little India with Anita Kapoor, a local Indian woman who works as food writer and a local TV host. She is superbly knowledgeable and understands the food scene in Singapore, especially in her neighborhood. The highlight for me was the Banana Leaf Apollo. This is an Indian restaurant that, though not responsible for inventing fish head curry, takes credit for making it globally famous. We sat down in this cafeteria-style eatery where you dine on banana leaves in the traditional style, ordering rice, some condiments, and bowls of curried fish heads. These aren’t tiny fish heads, either, but taken from giant red snapper with enough of the neck in place to provide ample meaty benefits in addition to little tasty treasures like the cheeks, eyes, tongue, and bits of skin. When cooked correctly, a fish head offers so much tender and delicious meat. Frankly, I get bored with mildly flavored, everyday fillets, so every once in a while a more aggressive fish concoction just hits the spot. The spicy curried broth loaded with root vegetables, greens, onions, and tomatoes is the perfect partner to a fish head. You scoop up bits of the fish head and the broth onto your rice and eat everything by hand. Never use your left hand at the table! Indian culture reserves this hand for more personal bodily functions.

My food crush, Violet, and I met up for a second date later in the week. She introduced me to one of the most interesting approaches to cuisine I’ve ever experienced. The Imperial Herbal Sin Chi Café and Restaurant in Vivo City, located on the beautiful harborfront walk, specializes in TCM, or traditional Chinese medicine. The restaurant sets out to not only nourish, but cure whatever ails your body. The menu is chock-full of exotic ingredients: antelope horn, dried sea horse and cordyceps, deer penis—nothing illegal, mind you. Once we arrived, we sat down with Dr. Fu, a TCM physician.
He took my pulse, examined my tongue, and checked my body by prodding and poking me all over with his fingers. He did a lot of staring at me. The consultation ended with a prescription for particular foods to cool down my body parts that had gotten overheated, warm up my parts that had gotten too cold, tone down my yang, replenish my ying … You know the drill. You aren’t required to undergo the medical examination in order to eat at this remarkable eatery, but I don’t understand why you wouldn’t. I suppose many customers, especially locals, already have an herbalist prescribing food for their health, so they just go in and eat the fabulous cuisine. If you’re currently in between herbalists, check out Dr. Fu, who thought some scallops with egg white, deer penis soup, crocodile soup, and a bracing eucalyptus tonic was just the thing I needed. I’m not certain I felt much different afterward, but it was easily the best-tasting medicine I’ve ever had.

No trip to Singapore would be complete without eating at a Peranakan restaurant. This was the stuff I was most eager to try. Peranakans are also known as Straits Chinese, named after the Straits Settlement, a group of territories created by the British in Southeast Asia in 1826. Basically, the term refers to people in the region of Chinese descent. I learned there are all sorts of names for the different types of Chinese in the region. Once Violet and I were comfortable with each other, she gave me the rundown on the lingo. The whole concept was fascinating given the obsession with political correctness in our own country, but there are two terms I will never forget. The first came up in conversation as Violet and her best friend spoke over lunch one day about flying to Los Angeles, where her best friend’s daughter was getting married. I said, “Congratulations.” Both women gave me a happy but not completely thrilled look.

I said, “What’s wrong?”

They replied, “Well, he’s ABC.” I had no idea what they were talking about. They explained, with a healthy dose of humor, that ABC is the acronym for “American-born Chinese,” which I inferred
to mean not completely ideal. They also refer to ABCs as bananas: yellow on the outside and white on the inside. It’s pretty humorous. Friends of mine here at home have heard the term “Twinkie”—yellow outside, white inside—but mostly from the mouths of other Twinkies. Maybe I’m crazy, but I can’t tell if it’s offensive or not. I can tell you that during the conversation I was frozen in my chair, smiling, hoping not to laugh too hard, or even laugh at all.

Peranakan is old-school Singapore and refers to the earliest Chinese who immigrated there and intermarried with Malays, spawning a culture and cuisine unique in its own right. Singapore’s Katong District is the place to see and experience this culture in action. The historic neighborhood houses a famous spice garden containing more than 100 different spices that grow abundantly in Singapore. It was there that I met up with a young chef named Ben Seck who comes from a family that specializes in Peranakan cooking. He introduced me to one of the strangest fruits I’ve ever encountered. The fruit, which grows on giant Buwakala trees, contains a black nut called a Bualkeluak. What’s bizarre about this nut is not its flavor necessarily, but the fact that it is extremely poisonous. Detoxifying the nut is a tedious process (which I am baffled that someone ever managed to figure out in the first place), beginning with breaking the fruit open and picking out only the seeds. Next, the seeds get buried in volcanic ash for 100 days. After the nuts are dug out of the ground, they are soaked in water for three days to wash away the ashes. After all this, each nut must be smelled before it is chopped up to ensure it hasn’t gone bad. Just one bad nut will spoil an entire dish, making it toxic to consume. Once you’ve culled the good nuts from the bad, you can begin to work with them.

The Seck family restaurant, True Blue, is an extremely popular restaurant in Singapore. Ben shares the cooking duties with his mother, Daisy Seah, who is arguably the most famous Peranakan chef in the country. The restaurant is located in a restored two-story town house, and walking through the front door is like stepping
back 100 years. What’s special about the food is that the recipes are not written down. Rather, they’ve been passed from generation to generation. Mother and son created some of the most interesting, authentic dishes using the Bualkeluak nuts, including a duck soup that was just absolutely glorious with the cooked fruit. The paste from the nut smells like coffee and dark chocolate, almost like a fermented mocha taste with elements of burnt caramel and bitters. The paste works on the plate much like a condiment, and once you crack open the cooked nuts, you can spread the paste on anything. It enhances everything it touches, sort of like a naturally occurring Pernakan version of Vegemite. I sampled a braised-chicken dish with fermented shrimp paste and rice. Somehow, when mixed with rice, the Bualkeluak lost some of that coffee and chocolate flavor and instead offered a light, citrusy finish. The nut can change flavors depending on what it’s cooked with, making it the Zelig of the food world. This is a very complex and interesting ingredient, but it’s not the quintessential Peranakan dish I’d been dying to try.

No one is exactly sure how Laksa earned its name. One group claims it stems from the Hindi Persian word
Lakhshah
, which refers to a type of noodle. Some say it’s derived from the Chinese word
Lasha
, pronounced “lots-a,” and means “spicy sand,” due to the ground, dried shrimp that typically goes into the soup. Another theory is that it’s a Hokien term, where it literally means “dirty” because of its messy appearance. But regardless of how it came to be, Laksa generally describes two different types of noodle soup dishes, Curried Laksa and Assam Laksa. Assam Laksa is something that I’ve seen more often in northern Southeast Asian countries, especially in the upper half of Thailand, where the base for the soup typically is a sweet-and-sour fish soup. In Singapore, Laksa is usually built around a curried coconut soup. Most of them are yellowish red in appearance, with dried prawns that give them a shrimpy flavor, complete with a curry gravy or soup. Thick rice noodles, called Laksa noodles, are typically used in this dish.
However, sometimes a thin rice vermicelli is used, and these are called
bee hoon
or
mee hoon
. Foodaholics will argue that one noodle or the other makes a Laksa more or less of an authentic experience, but I’m not sure it’s as easy as that.