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Any chef who appreciates and loves street food in Asia, is my kind of a chef. A big plus is he did not turned his nose up on durian; I thought he rather enjoyed it.

Feeding frenzy Clockwise from top left: Anthony Bourdain and Kf Seetoh eye the main course, shark head steamed with ginger and garlic, at Tian Jin Hai seafood; Laksa soup, with cockles and chilies, is a breakfast treat at sungei road laksa. At Haji Kadir-m Baharudeen, sup tulang (bone soup) is best enjoyed with a straw; char kway teow, a heap of noodles, cockles, sausage and pork cracklings, at Hill Street fried kway teow.

Off the Eatin’ Path
By ANTHONY BOURDAIN
September 24, 2006
nytimes

One of the joys of my life is that I am published in Singapore and televised there. This requires me to make frequent visits. The first time, I went for business. By the second time, I’d made friends. Now? I go for the food. Since I’m known as the American guy who likes to eat both the everyday food of Asia and some of its more extreme varieties, people there like to show me a good time. I’m fortunate that one of the first people I met was KF Seetoh, the editor and founder of Makansutra, a guide to the city’s street food and restaurants. Experience has taught me that when Seetoh, an enthusiastic Chinese Singaporean with a weathered face and a Gilligan hat, says that a place is good, it is in fact great. He has fed me some of the best meals of my life — and I rely on him and his guidebook without question. Not that I need the guy. Everyone in Singapore is an expert on food.

There’s a fever-dream quality to Singapore, particularly if you’re a foodie. Outdoors, the heat is smothering. In the ubiquitous megamalls, the air-conditioning could frost a bottle of beer. Everyone, it seems, when not shopping for Prada or Armani, is feeding their faces. Yet unlike in other modern centers of conspicuous consumption, in Singapore, the local obsession with food focuses on “hawker stands” and “eating houses,” which are clustered in open-to-the-street food courts. They offer a nearly unlimited variety of Malaysian, Chinese and Indian mom-and-pop operations, each of them specializing in one or two dishes.

Centuries ago, when Chinese merchants immigrated south and were encouraged to intermarry — and when Indian entrepreneurs and planters joined the mix — a fantastic process of natural fusion began. Not the fusion of trendy restaurants of the West, where after a trip to Thailand a chef begins to toss around lemongrass with abandon, but a long, slow process of culinary mutation, born of people from three distinct cultures living and eating together. It is not unusual for a Singaporean or a Malaysian to grow up cooking three cuisines.

For budding gastro-tourists and first-time visitors to Asia, Singapore is the perfect city to avail oneself of a broad spectrum of culinary delights without straying too far from the familiar. English is an official language. Mass transit and taxis are cleaner and more efficient than in most places. Crime and annoyances are virtually, and rather notoriously, nonexistent. Even proficiency with chopsticks is unnecessary.

Hawker stands were once unregulated street vendors that sold dishes from carts, but some years back they were absorbed into official malls with electricity, running water and health-department-regulated work areas. There are about 115 of these centers throughout the city, each containing dozens of stalls, often separated by ethnicity. These gastronomic amusement parks are so popular that hotels like the Grand Hyatt have co-opted their simple, straightforward charms, and in some cases their chefs, and set up stands in their lobbies and dining areas. But for the real culinary delights of Singapore, you have to hit the streets.

On a recent trip back, and inspired by a previous culinary epiphany in Borneo, I hit Sungei Road Laksa my first morning in town. Once you’ve had laksa — a spicy Peranakan (Chinese/Malaysian) noodle soup — for breakfast, bacon and eggs become completely inadequate. It usually consists of seafood, rice noodles, fried bean curd, coconut milk and lots of chilies. The word “laksa” is said to have come from the Sanskrit word for “many,” referring to its many ingredients, but it might as well have referred to its many versions. The one at Sungei Road, though less fiery than the Borneo variety, is still a spicy hellbroth of fresh cockles, slices of fish cake and beehoon noodles in coconut milk, seasoned with garlic, red chilies, belacan (dried shrimp paste), lemongrass, galangal root and turmeric. It’s a classic “hurt so good” experience, requiring only a spoon — and a towel to mop the sweat from your face. For some time, I sat alone enjoying the sweet, relative coolness of the coconut milk against the sting of the chilies, with hearty bass notes of seafood and shrimp paste, while happily watching the morning commuters and fellow devotees slurping their breakfasts around me. Pure pleasure at around $2.

Since I have a passionate devotion to bone marrow, my next culinary destination was a foregone conclusion. (When asked my death-row meal of choice, my answer has always been a few lengths of roasted veal bone, with a slice or two of toasted baguette and some sea salt.) Seetoh’s guide pointed me to Haji Kadir-M. Baharudeen’s stand in the Golden Mile Food Centre as being the apex of sup tulang (bone soup), an Indian Muslim dish popular at the end of Ramadan fasting. For lunch, I found myself clumsily manhandling a sticky, slippery yet utterly wonderful heap of sauce-dripping bones, all the while wishing I’d wrapped myself in a dropcloth. The red mutton bones, stewed in a spicy sweet chili, tomato and mutton stock, arrived with a useless fork, a spoon, a little cabbage and some fried bread slices to mop up the sauce. The idea, apparently, was to pick up the bones with your fingers and tap them repeatedly until the buttery marrow slid out. Naturally, this didn’t happen. I tapped and banged in vain. I gnawed on the shreds of exterior meat. I dropped my bones, splattering myself, finally settling on spooning a little soup forlornly into my mouth. The proprietors, taking pity on the ang moh (foreigner — literally, “red head”), presented me with a straw, to the amusement of my fellow patrons. I jammed it in and sucked, striking the good stuff immediately. I came away with red-stained fingers, a ruined shirt and a feeling of happy, somewhat guilty stickiness.

While there is a real pride in the glorious mix of ethnicities here, there is also a fierce clinging to roots. My mentor Seetoh, for instance, never forgets that he is Chinese first. So when we eat together, it’s almost invariably at some new Chinese find that excites him. Tian Jin Hai Seafood in the Jackson Centre Kopitiam was his latest passion. We sat down at a sidewalk table in front of a long display counter with open crates of wriggling Sri Lankan and Australian crabs. We began with some freshly steamed gong-gong (whelks) and prawns. But we weren’t there for the famous chili crab or pepper crab, Seetoh explained.

Ten years ago the chef-proprietor of Tian Jin Hai had made a remarkable discovery. “Every day he goes to the fish market. And every day he sees shark,” Seetoh said. “For the Chinese, shark is very popular. But where are the heads? So he asks them: ‘You sell fins. You sell the meat. You sell the eggs. Where are the heads?”’ This simple question led, as so often happens in the annals of gastronomy, to discovery: that the typically discarded head of the reef shark, when steamed with ginger, red pepper and garlic and served with soy sauce and spring onions, is in fact a divine mosaic of tender, subtly flavored fat, skin and cartilage. Since introduced at Tian Jin Hai, what was once considered trash has become a rare treat.

Just as I’ve come to believe that in the heart of every great chef is a Chinese cook, I also believe that all great cuisines emanate from conditions of poverty, scarcity and difficulty. The best cooks, whether in Brazil or Thailand or France, for that matter, seem to come from those countries’ poorest regions, where cooks free of “the crippling handicap of affluence” (as A.J. Liebling put it) are compelled to make the most of things. Seetoh, unsurprisingly, shares this worldview. The next day, he took me out to a hawker center near the airport for a Chinese-based comfort-food classic: char kway teow (fried flat rice noodles). Originally a poor-man’s lunch thrown together by fishermen, the dish has become a guilty pleasure for Singaporeans unafraid of its high-cholesterol charms. Hill Street Fried Kway Teow, Seetoh insisted, offered the best char kway teow in Singapore. A superior frying technique was of paramount importance — one must not burn the noodles. “Watch the master!” Seetoh urged, as an old gentleman tossed Chinese sausage, cockles, flat noodles and crispy pork cracklings into a sizzling wok and then poured in some dark soy. A minute or so before being unceremoniously dumped onto plates, a beaten egg was added, and it was still cooking when the steaming orders hit our table. It was an unlovely-looking brown heap, but I felt myself slowly seduced as I spooned on some chili sauce, my hangover from the previous evening’s festivities fading quickly. As with so much of the best of Asian cooking, this gooey mess was in fact a complex combination of distinct flavors and textures: sweet and savory, spicy and rich, gluey and crunchy. I needed a nap immediately after, but I went for tofu instead.

“Every time Michelle Yeoh comes to Singapore, she makes me take her here,” my friend the photographer Russel Wong said over a bowl of tofu fa, a hot bean-curd custard with sugar syrup that is chased with a glass of soy milk. It was late at night, and we were sitting at Rochor Original Bean Curd, a busy storefront. Frankly, I didn’t get it. Soy milk and tofu (unless it’s fried in animal fat) just don’t do it for me. But Wong, like a typical Singaporean, knows everything about food, and though I was not loving my tofu, I trusted that he could serve as my culinary Sherpa for tomorrow’s breakfast.

The next morning we went to Thasevi, an Indian spot featuring halal food located in a row of colonial-era “shop houses.” I sampled roti prata kosong (plain Indian flatbread) and roti prata telur (stuffed with egg). Wong also insisted that I try some chicken and mutton curries, which we washed down with teh tarik, or “pulled” tea, since alcohol is forbidden here. This Indian tea is brewed from leaves, dosed with condensed milk and then pulled, meaning poured back and forth between pitchers from increasing heights until it is frothy. After, Wong suggested that we meet the next day for the single dish most beloved in Singapore.

Ask any group of strangers here where to get the best chicken rice, and you will surely start an argument. If there is a national dish, it is this. An adaptation of a Chinese version from the island of Hainan, it’s deceptively simple looking, but locals passionately discuss the virtues and deficiencies of a particular rendition. Wong says the best version is at Tian Tian, in the Maxwell Road Food Centre. “It has to be a good chicken,” he explained as we sit down. “These come from Malaysia,” he continued, digging into a platter of plain-looking boiled chicken atop a heap of white rice. “The chicken must never be served hot.” It is boiled whole, on the bone, then (this is very important) dunked into ice water to separate the skin slightly from the meat. The chicken is then hacked into pieces and served on boiled rice. Chicken broth, chili sauce, pounded ginger purée and dark soy sauce are served in separate bowls on the side. You eat the dish with a fork and a spoon. To an aficionado, chicken rice is a dish with infinite possibilities. Drizzle the soy in a thin stream over it, or not. Dip each bite in broth, then brush lightly with chili sauce or soy, or dip in garlic, or all of the above. Or simply add all the condiments at once and mash the whole business together. As we were eating from the same platter, Wong and I dipped in sequence. It is a light and beautiful thing, chicken rice. Part comfort food, part Zen ritual, yet finally just a darned good lunch. And as I sat there, gazing at stalls with signs promising Big Scissors Curry Rice, Foo Zhou Oyster Cakes, Kway Chap Seafood Soup, Zhen Zhen Porridge, Fresh Prawn Won Ton and Fish Ball Noodle, I felt as if I were inside an edible pinball machine, one in which I could happily career forever. But not today. I had one more meal in Singapore.

Chicken rice may serve as the national dish, but bak kut teh, literally pork-rib tea, was a dish about which I was constantly nagged. That I had yet to try it had long since become an embarrassment to my friends, who were well aware of my predilection for all things porcine. This time, I was not leaving without putting this important notch on my gastronomic belt. I consulted Seetoh’s guide and headed out to Rong Chen. The stand is made up of a few tables on a concrete porch on the Sin Ming Road. I had just sat down when a group of businessmen invited me to join them at a nearby table. I had intended to eat my last meal in Singapore alone, but the sight of a lone ang moh, struggling to understand the handwritten signs, and the possibility that I might fail to fully appreciate what I was about to eat, was apparently too much for them.

Bak kut teh is essentially a heap of pork, usually ribs, cooked in broth. Said to have been created as food for Chinese laborers in early-20th-century Malaysia, it has become a beloved ritual for Chinese businessmen, a weekly or even daily combination of working lunch, social gathering and lengthy discussion of its many versions. “I don’t play golf,” one man announced proudly. “I eat bak kut teh. Every day. Sometimes twice a day.” He and his friends meet at a revolving number of places serving the dish and spend hours doing pretty much what they were doing at that moment: eating, drinking tea, talking business, welcoming friends and pausing now and then to chatter into cellphones. After introductions, my new friend explained that Rong Chen serves a “white version” of bak kut — basic pork ribs and broth, flavored with pepper (as opposed to herbs) and whole cloves of garlic, the pork free of the darkening effects of soy. The herbal (darker, usually soy-infused) dish tends to be more tender, he said. After a few cups of tea, some salted vegetables and fried bread came the main event: huge, steaming bowls of meaty pork ribs in a translucent broth. Chili dipping sauce was served on the side. As we gnawed on bones, tearing off peppery strips and drinking spoonfuls of the cooking liquid, our waiter continued to replenish our broth.

So it was another day in foodie paradise. And that is Singapore’s singular danger. It is easy to get sucked in, to get used to the little things on your daily table — the tiny dishes of sambal or chopped red chili peppers, the soy sauce, even the moist towelettes. You begin quickly to expect them, to take them for granted. And once you get used to the sights, sounds, smells and tastes, there is no going back. Western food becomes eerily bland and flat. You find your soul kidnapped by the memory of condiments. And, of course, of the people who introduced you to them. If you like the idea of getting lost in Asia, Singapore is the perfect place to start.


The Maxwell Road Food Centre dishes out all kinds of delicacies, like oyster pancakes and deep-fried fish meat soup as well as the Singaporean favorite, chicken rice.