Healthy Signage

Here's a photo one of our mates snapped while walking by Freshness Burger on the ground floor of the Central mall at Clarke Quay here in Singapore. An establishment that promotes its "healthy meals" will sell you a "Butter & Sugar Burger" plus coffee for less than S$2 (1.63 USD/1.00 GBP).

This is the Singapore outlet of the Japanese burger chain that is currently promoting a vinegar drink. I will have to stop in and compare their wares with their Nipponese competitors Mos Burger. If I bring a ten-dollar note to Freshness, I might be able to sample breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

(Sustainable) Fishy Advice

Dining advice along the Atlantic seaboards.

Here's an amusing collection of silhouettes I received with my order from The Book Depository. Charming, informative, and green, the two bookmarks indicate fishes and marine life that should or should not be eaten according to the Marine Conservation Societies. Unsustainable fishing practices have threatened a number of species with extinction, but numerous tasty morsels still swim in our oceans or can be farmed. Bring on the mackerels and winkles. The Atlantic species are above (beware the Kraken!). The Pacific/Worldwide examples are below (beware the Kraken still!).

This is also my endorsement of the Book Depository, a great site for those looking to buy academic or literary material in Singapore. Free shipping.

What to eat when on the Pacific Rim.

Japanese Cookies

Couque D'asses cookies on the shelf in Singapore.

Spotted this box of cookies at a Japanese food specialty store underneath MBFC a few months back. The double entendre is probably most quickly apparent to Americans, but I think everyone can join the fun, really. I have no ability to read Japanese so I couldn't possibly comment on the ingredients.

Jolly Glee Pizza (from Pizza Hut)

Roast chicken, turkey bacon, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce make the Jolly Glee a festive pizza. Notice the cherry, too.

Pizza Hut has a new gimmick for Singaporean customers. Previous gimmick here. Instead of actually making tasty products, Pizza Hut now offers a Jolly Glee pizza. It has all the ingredients you might expect from a Christmas dinner – poultry, pseudo-pork, potatoes, cranberries – plus some you didn't know you wanted. Click the picture to see a larger image and guess what else lurks beneath the lattice of crust. I can spy red peppers and onions, but I am unable to swear that the yellow items are simply yellow peppers. The website says it's pineapple. Not satisfied? Apparently there is also cheese in the crust... and a glacé cherry! I knew this was missing something.

Penang Market

The shophouses along the market streets of Georgetown, Pulau Pinang.

The Passengers have just returned from a weekend in Penang. We spent two days exploring with friends the multicultural Malaysian trading island in the Andaman Sea. The place has been a stopover point for traders from Southeast Asia, India, and China for many years, and it all combines into a potent mix.

Local coffeeshops sell food during the Saturday morning market.

For a bit of local flavor we spent Friday night sampling the hawker stalls along Gurney Drive. On Saturday morning we joined a batch of our traveling companions on a wander through the morning market in Georgetown, the island's main city. Here's a few photos from the day. We started at 8:00 AM, before the sun became nearly unbearable in the afternoon.

 Credit Passenger H with many of these photos. I was too busy looking at the Straits architecture. I'll try to do a separate post on that later in the week. There are more photos after the jump break. Click the link below left to see more of market life.

Long Beach Seafood

Mmmmm. Seafood.

 A couple of weeks ago the Passengers accompanied some out-of-town visitors to Long Beach, a seafood restaurant known especially for good chili crab. The dishes did not disappoint us, and the staff at the Dempsey location were very kind to the ten-year-old member of our party. He didn't much like seafood, but he was fascinated by the fish, crabs, and bivalves awaiting their fate in bubbling fish tanks. On the way out we were handed a brochure. Click on the image to see some of the delicacies served here. Some of you might find the dishes tempting; others might think them disturbing.

Fearless beauty queen: the logical accompaniment to fresh seafood.

The front of the brochure features an award-winning spokesmodel. I am not sure how Long Beach found a person who holds fresh shellfish with such poise, but I am certain that is why she was selected. She is listed as Ms Intercontinental and Ms Kimberly Anne Byers. Wikipedia says she won that title in 1994. It remains unclear how America's pageant winner landed a gig with Long Beach, but for some reason, the restaurant has not updated their promotional material since then, despite having opened several additional locations in the last fifteen years. Some of you might find their advertising tempting; others might think it disturbing.

Tokyo Food

A snack package of what appears to be hazelnuts in a Tokyo mini-mart.

The Passengers ate all sorts of goodness in Tokyo.  The Japanese take their food seriously in the same manner as do the French with serious refinement of standardized age-old recipes.  We didn't suffer a bad meal once during our travels. Here are some highlights, though they exclude our early morning sushi adventure.  That will be a separate post.

Ramen noodles with all the fixings.

We had ramen one evening at a small restaurant not far from our ryokan.  Diners are supposed to choose their dishes from a vending machine outside the front door.  After the customer pays money in, the machine spits out a ticket for his order, and he brings it inside the restaurant.  We tried our very best to match the Japanese labels on the selection buttons with the pictures in the window.  Finally we gave up, and we were kindly greeted inside with an English menu.  This bowl of ramen was as big as my head.  I could barely get through half of it.  Passenger H unwisely had her own bowl, too, which by the time she quit looked like she only managed to pick out the seaweed, the half-boild egg, and two pieces of scrumptious fatty pork.  The yummy noodles are underneath a big pile of extras that also includes corn, bamboo shoots, and bean sprouts.  I think we paid JPY 950 per bowl (USD 11.25/GBP 7.10).  More dishes after the jump.  Click below left to keep reading.

Sushi-Dai, Tokyo

Early morning bustle around the Tsukiji Market in Tokyo.

Against our preferences for a leisurely holiday, the Passengers awoke early one morning in Tokyo to make the trip down the Hibiya line on almost the first train of the day to visit the huge Tsukiji Market, the wholesale outlet for fresh fish in Tokyo.  We wanted to see the market in action, but our prime motivation was to find ourselves the freshest sushi breakfast imaginable.

Patrons lining up for a seat at Sushi-Dai along a row of restaurants at Tsukiji Market.

Activity at the market begins in the wee hours of the morning so by the time we arrived in Ginza at 6:00 AM, a number of labors were already searching out lunch.  The rest of the city comes to Tsukiji for breakfast. Based on a friend's recommendation we headed straight for Sushi-Dai a fourteen-seat sushi counter with reportedly the best fish at the complex.  The place opens at 5:00 AM, and its reputation meant we found ourselves in a two-hour queue.

Come early; bring cash.

Once we got inside Passenger J opted for the full Omakase selection at JPY 3,900 (USD 46.25/GBP 29.25) for 11 pieces of sushi, miso soup, maki rolls, and a bit of omelet.  Passenger H decided that as the smaller member in the pair she needed the smaller option at JPY 2,500 (USD 29.65/GBP 18.75).  We did not go away hungry.

Marinated tuna with a dollop of wasabi.  Pickled ginger sits on the right.

We took our seats at the counter on a rainy August morning with the air-conditioner steaming up the view of the hopeful customers waiting outside.  After our early start to the day we were ready to eat.  All the sushi pieces were impeccably chosen and brilliantly crafted.  The three sushi chefs placed their offerings directly on the top-shelf counter.  Patrons ate using both their fingers and chopsticks.

Passenger H's set included mackerel braided over rice.  The omelet and the fish-based miso soup appear in the background. 

More pictures of sushi after the jump.  Click the link below left to keep reading.

Chicken!

The signboard for an eatery in the basement of our local mall.

Part of the love of food here in Singapore includes a somewhat overly enthusiastic demand for chicken, preferably fried.  In the mall around the corner from our flat, Novena Square/Velocity, there are several imported imported chicken outlets.  This is in addition to multiple mom-and-pop chicken rice stalls.

KFC has prospered in Asia.  The image of the venerable and inscrutable colonel welcomes diners to a KFC outlet on the ground floor.

The big American fast-food brands can really thrive here, but the affection for mass produced poultry means that even obscure or regional American franchises can do well in Singapore.  Our mall is soon to add a Popeyes.  Most confusingly, there sits upstairs at the mall a Kenny Rogers Roasters restaurant.  I thought that corporate venture went bust and disappeared sometime in the 1990's.

I am counting down to savoury biscuits coming to our neighborhood.  Popeyes already has at least two other locations in Singapore.  This one will open along the street-level shops of Novena Square.

Somehow the Gambler he broke even here in Singapore.  The third floor of Velocity.

Of course, these chicken locations are in addition to the Burger King and Long John Silver's fast-food outlets in the mall.

Monkey Business - Langkawi

Enjoying the waters on Pulau Beras Basah.

More pictures from our holiday time in Langkawi... and the islands nearby.  We took a boat trip on one of our afternoons to a secluded beach on Pulau Beras Basah. The adventures included watching sea eagles and Brahmin kites and a beachside barbecue.

Tasty flower crabs fresh off the grill.

The island hosts a private beach club used by a few Langkawi resorts and families.  The breezy, wooden buildings on site look as if they are barely keeping the jungle back from reclaiming the shoreline.  Much of the natural habitats surrounding nearby islands have tangled mangroves growing far out into the tidewaters.

Visitors arriving and enjoying the sands on Pulau Beras Basah.

Even as the owners keep the jungle at bay, the wildlife has already decided that tourists make for rich pickings.  Wild boars and their piglets snuffle at the forest's edge.  Macaque monkeys show up to welcome every arriving group in hopes of a handout.  You can see pictures of the troop after the jump.  Click on the link below left.

Easy on the Turkey

President Harry S Truman admiring a Thanksgiving turkey in 1950. Presidents have annually "pardoned" one of the delicious fowls since JFK. The Guardian has a slideshow of past presidents getting the bird.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The Passengers wish we could be close to our nearest and dearest Americans to enjoy the holiday. Instead it's a normal working day in Singapore. We do get the gift of a public holiday tomorrow but not because of any navigationally challenged religious dissidents. It's the time for pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims, Hari Raya Haji in Malay. The Passengers will do Thanksgiving with a number of expatriates and sympathetic Singaporeans on Sunday evening.

The Thanksgiving holiday in America provides a number of benefits. Firstly, the occasion is secular and can be enjoyed by anyone willing to participate. It seems especially fitting as a reminder of the immigrant beginnings of our national experiment. Along with the absence of creedal partisanship, Thanksgiving celebrations are hardly commercial, mostly an excuse to eat as much food as possible while spending time with family or friends. There is, of course, NFL football and a parade with marching bands to watch. Yes, Americans can only go so long without shopping. The day after Thanksgiving, also a public holiday, marks the opening of the Christmas shopping season ("Black Friday") with "doorbuster (link to this year's Wal-Mart circular)" offers to those who can wait in the cold for a big-box retailer to open at 5:00 AM. It's a rather crass coda to a national tradition, but Thanksgiving continues to play an important role in keeping the Christmas decorations and holiday jingles off the cultural landscape at least until December is a reasonable possibility. In Singapore the Christmas decorations went up before November, in part because of all the visiting dignitaries for the APEC Summit earlier this month.

Mouth Watering Prose

The dining room at A Voce Columbus. Image from Joonbug. More pictures from Sam Sifton's review here.

I recommend reading Sam Sifton's review of the Manhattan restaurant A Voce in the New York Times. The piece demonstrates how great and descriptive food writing can be. The author's standards for every category of the dining experience are clear, and he can be surprisingly generous, as exemplified by his straightforward acceptance of the restaurant's corporate remit to produce top fare with calibrated regularity. Combining flavors creatively and choosing ingredients impeccably earn the reviewer's praise, but he dismisses as callow efforts to meet various NYC menu obligations, like strip steaks even for Italian eateries, without any attempt at culinary invention.

And the sentences Sifton uses for describing the food make for enjoyable reading. He liked the grilled calamari so much that it "could come with yard grass and used tennis balls and still be decent." Wonderful, evocative images are laid out alongside the gastronomic options, and the author does not refrain from punctuating each description with a verdict. The recommendation to enjoy a glass wine and cold cuts while reading the rest of the menu prompts Sifton to write us our own gastronomic tour.

Any two of these [appetizers] will do; there are many courses to go before you sleep. The appetizer list yields a remarkable house-made salt cod, with taggiasca olives, raisins and pine nuts, that is somehow both delicate and brawny — a football player in ballet's fourth position. There are also roasted mushrooms with mâche, hazelnuts and a creamed fontina, rich and earthy, quietly elegant, sensual: it's bedroom fare.

I additionally recommend you have a glass of red wineas a pleasurable accompaniment to such a tour de force review, maybe something Italian and reliable like a Valpolicellia, .

Sin Huat Seafood: More Crabs

Geylang hosts Singapore's wild side, unless the APEC Summit is in town, like last weekend.

Though we are in Bangkok this week, we thought we should share our extreme gastronomic experience from Saturday. A birthday dinner was organized for a new friend at Sin Huat Eating House, one of Singapore's most revered food institutions (follow this link for a great 2003 article highlighting almost all of Singapore's food traditions). Revered should not be taken to mean refined. Sin Huat is really a streetside cafe with plastic chairs and poor service perched hard against the traffic of Geylang, the artery of Singapore's red-light district. But chef Danny Lee keeps up the coffeeshop's reputation with outstanding seafood of all sorts.

No white tablecloths or starched napkins here. Bring your own package of tissues.

The meal involved a progression of platters served up according to the whim of the chef and/or the stall aunty, staring with a perfunctory vegetable platter of kailan. After eating some greens, it was a serious seafood derby.

We had fresh scallops, pulled out of the bubbling fish tanks by Chef Danny himself and heartily slathered in a dark garlicky black-bean sauce, but bigger adventures awaited with the gung gung lala.

Gung Gung lala with spicy dipping sauce. The garlic scallops appear in the foreground.

Gung gung come steamed in the shell with a fistful of wooden skewers by which diners can spear and drag out the meat. The dipping sauce provided was a sinus busting combination of chilies, spring onion, coriander, and salty soy sauce, plus a number of other additions. Gung gung are only a little bit chewy and taste slightly of the sea, as might be expected when uncoiling the body of an animal from tidal waters.

Prawns. Prawns. Prawns.

The prawns in garlic presented one of the real standouts from the night. Again the seafood was fresh and the garlic was generous, and everyone was ecstatic to find the motherlode of flavorful buttery drippings pooled underneath the rows of shrimp tails. Just about any edible item on the table got dredged through that nectar, including the al dente squid rings that followed.

Three-crab pile-up on the east end of Geylang.

However, the crab bee hoon was the real piece-de-resistance of the evening, and THE reason visitors flock to Sin Huat. Big Sri-Lankan crabs are served with vermicelli that soaks up all sorts of essence from the shellfish. The combination is wet and salty and flavorful. Seasoned diners, like the generous chap directing the evening, ask specifically for female crabs because they include potent dry roe that mixes in with the ginger, chili, and stock sauce and hides itself amongst the noodles. Divine. Of course, female crabs do have one drawback: no claws. Not that I let this detail stop me. I think I was full for the rest of the weekend.

York Beer & Cider Festival

Today was my first full day in York. Fortunately, my time in the North coincides with the York Food and Drink Festival. This weekend CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) held a gathering at the racecourse. A serious crowd gathered around the grounds and inside the tents to taste beers and ciders from all over Britain.

My samplings from this afternoon from Yorkshire outfits included Ryedale Best by Cropton brewery, Sabbatic Ale from Great Heck, and Muston Scarecrow made by East Coast Brewing Co. in Filey. Another personal highlight was the Copy Lane Stout offered by Stables in County Durham. Plus, the festival featured a choice handful of food vendors to explore.

The three words every man longs to hear, "Fresh Pork Scratchings."

Then, up from among the carnival rides next door came six hot-air balloons in time for a sunset voyage.

Another high-flying venture from Sir Richard Branson.

Hard to beat.

Pub Lunch in Farringdon

The Passengers took H's parents for an enjoyable outing in London last week. We wandered the streets around Farringdon Station and Smithfield Market. I'll provide more photos later of the area's architectural delights. The highlight of the day was lunch at the Fox & Anchor, an impeccably equipped gastropub off Charterhouse Square run by the boutique hoteliers responsible for the nearby Malmaison Hotel. The snug dining nooks inside the pub have been clad in dark wood and warm lights glint off the pewter beer tankards. Add oysters, homemade pork pies, and a syllabub dessert and you have a classic of British hospitality and cuisine. Also I love the historic art deco building.

The Fox & Anchor is also an inn with six rooms available.

Drinkers have long benches and all the day's papers at the bar.

Diners sit in the back rooms and contemplate the pie of the day.

Saturday in East Singapore

This 328 location, in a traditional Peranakan shophouse building, attracts diners hungry for Laksa.

Saturday featured a very successful outing. The Passengers ventured out with a few Americans to Katong, a neighborhood in East Singapore traditionally home to Peranakans (Chinese families who have long dwelled in the Straits region). These streets gave birth to a spicy noodle and coconut soup called Laksa. We perched atop small plastic stools facing onto East Coast Road and ate at one of the areas's best known stalls (above). We also strolled by the Sri Senpaga Vinayagar temple (below). Chinese have lived around here for centuries, but this Hindu monument on Ceylon Road was built in 1875.

Three military helicopters cross the sky on exercises for the National Day parade 9 August.

Next, we hopped in a cab and made for the East Coast Lagoon Food Village where we sat at seaside picnic tables with pitchers of Tiger beer and a great view of the current maritime parking lot (below). The Food Village is another of the open-air clusters of food stalls, or hawker centres, found throughout Singapore. We heaped up plates of satay, stingray, and carrot cake. I took pictures of a couple interesting signs. Good food. Good chat. Good views.

Chili Crabs, Pepper Crabs

Eng Seng coffeeshop only has a limited number of crabs each night. Anxious diners routinely queue on weekends.

It has been another stirring weekend for the Passengers in Singapore. I want to put up a post before the week takes off again at full tilt. We recently took an outing to a small, open-air diner known as a coffeeshop, or kopitiam. No one went for coffee. Instead, Eng Seng on Joo Chiat Place specializes in chili crab and pepper crab, two of Singapore’s signature dishes. Pieces of Sri Lankan crab are fried up in thick, savory blends of spices and served up with pieces of bread for mopping up the sauce. The sweet meat of the crab flesh nicely balances the piquancy of the spices. This dining establishment attracts a very local crowd; our party was the only collection of Angmos (white folks) all night. The bill for eight crabs, drinks, plates of noodles and vegetables, and bowls of fried rice totted up to less than S$200 (about 138 USD today). Hard to argue.

Pepper crab was my personal favorite. Eng Seng will also serve steamed crabs for those who demand purity or lack a sense of adventure.

Chili crabs come with lots of tasty sauce. The Tiger bottle (back left) is the flavorful local lager.

The Joo Chiat area features preserved shop houses built with store fronts below and living space above. This stall sold overwhelmingly fragrant durians, definitely a subject for a future post.