Green brunch

Singapore as a whole really surprised me. I was I guess expecting this anonymous, big city, full of tall buildings, very clean, and not a lot else. I certainly did get all of this, but it was so much greener and comfortable and full of air than I had expected. I'm definitely going back again. And another great surprise was when Eunice took us out for brunch, it was to a place that would not have been out of place in London.

One of the big frustrations with living in Hong Kong is that I feel that cafes and restaurants here are all so identikit, it's almost like there is a manual for making nice, shiny, anonymous places with absolutely no character or design about them. When I went back to London for Christmas, the thing I loved most was walking around Soho, seeing little cafes like Flat White, the fact that Banksy had just done a pop up gallery next to a bunch of sex shops, still spotting new graffiti by Invader, getting annoyed that Koya was closed... How surprised I was then when something in Singapore really embodied the spirit of this, albeit in somewhere that looks like a strip mall on first site.

House on Dempsey Hill is an ambitious project that seems to encompass a restaurant, a spa, a retail shop, and a corporate conference centre in some space by the trees. You could call the place completely design over function, as the dining room features an over-sized table that patrons eat under, arm chairs which are too low to sit in and eat, drinks served in jam jars, but the place really won me over. It also helps that their house slogan/poem made me wonder whether they had stolen lyrics from the Manics, but that's another story...

I read in their funky over-designed newspaper menu that one of the chefs is a graduate from Peter Gordon, and the fusion influences are clear to see, although in some ways the menu is play-it-safe with more brunch classics like eggs, asparagus and hollandaise and French toast. What is innovative though is their presentation. I did love their choice of crockery, all so deliberately mismatched and shabby chic. Although I still think any chef putting sauce in a shot glass should just be shot:

After our massive amounts of pigging out, I went for their Ahi Taki Salad, which was really very good. We were all debating on how to recreate this at home, the tuna having been marinated in what we guess is soy, chilli, fish sauce, tamarind, peppercorns.

They are also very famous for their thin crust pizzas, which are enormous. This is a English breakfast version of it, easily would have fed a family of four:

Their dessert and cakes menu allows their strength in food design to shine. Everything is again impeccably presented, but potentially at the expense of flavour. For example, their grapefruit tart with green tea pastry was stunning visually, but the actual taste was way too tart, with both grapefruit and lemon, and the huge blob of solid meringue didn't really belong.

The spa and retail shop upstairs has equally the same amounts of attitude, with a browbar, someone making cakes live, and lots of too expensive toiletries. They also managed to steal $2 from me for a Sylvia Plath pencil, but I loved the fact that they sell Sylvia Plath pencils! Oh what I would give for a place like this in Hong Kong!

Singaporean street food

Despite our excesses in fine dining in Singapore, the thing I had looked forward to most about our little trip was the street food. In fact, when Eugene and Eunice asked me what I wanted to eat, I said the only thing that was compulsory was laksa. Only we never quite managed it, nor did we eat any chicken rice!!! I think this is just their attempt to lure me back to their country, my friends are super cunning you know.

We landed into Singapore at nearly half past midnight, but Eugene knew us too well, and immediately whisked us off for some 宵夜. Roti prata is a classic showing of the mixed-up-goodness of Singapore. I'd actually never eaten it before, and Eugene took us to reputedly the best place, conveniently close to his house.

It wasn't quite what I expected actually, basically a thin pancake stuffed with whatever you want, served with a big bowl of curry sauce. Mine was stuffed with onions and mushrooms:

Although I preferred the paper thin version with a small sprinkling of sugar. For some reason I get a bit sugar addicted in Asia, they do the savoury/sweet thing so well after all:

All washed down with my first genuine teh tarik. In fact, I just looked up teh tarik on wiki, and the picture looks suspiciously like the place we went to! Subtlely different to the Hong Kong milk tea, this tasted maltier to my taste buds, although I'm still not 100% certain where the difference lies (apparently teh tarik is condensed milk, and HK milk tea is evaporated milk, again, not that I really understand what the difference is!):

We somehow also managed a bowl of tofu pudding each after this! And the morning after, the feeding only continued. We went to one of the hawker markets near Eunice's place, and I was pleasantly surprised at how clean it was (then I remembered I was in Singapore!). Apparently this one has just been rebuilt, and this was just so civilised!

E&E soon disappeared off to buy a selection of the best goodies in the market, but honestly I think you can come here more than 10 times and still find interesting new things to eat. The best thing we had was something called shui kueh in Singlish, or 水粿 in Chinese. It's hard to described really, a kind of soft rice cake, which reminded me of cheung fun and 粉粿. But the thing you are really eating is the preserved radish mix which goes on top. This stuff is dangerous!! So morish!! In fact, we made Eugene return to the same stall the next day to smuggle two pots of the stuff back to Hong Kong.

This is where it's from!!

Upon getting the radish back to Hong Kong, we put it into our mega-cold fridge, and it is so congealed that it only leads me to conclude that the major ingredient in the thing is pork fat. No wonder if it's so good. I also smuggled some back to the UK for my parents to have a try, thankfully I just look too innocent for those customs officers.

Some other interesting stuff we ate included a variety of steamed 糕 type stuff, with savoury and sweet fillings. All these were reminiscent of something Chinese, but with a bit of a Singaporean twist. The red ones were filled with peanut or red bean, and the pink and white ones were savoury iirc.

And we also indulged in some fish cakes, Asia's favourite street snack of all time! So F.A.T.!

You will also see that there is a blue plastic bag in the corner of some of the photos. Eugene also bought something else, but just could not fit it in, so we never even opened that bag, and instead just carried it around with us for the rest of the day. Yes, we are bad people. I blame Eugene's influence, he always manages to convince me to do things I don't want to do :p

18 courses in a day - yes, it has to be Singapore

As grumpy as I have been about moving back to Asia, one of the best things is to be nearer to two of my dearest friends. Eugene in particular has been a very big part of my foodie life in recent years, and probably the person who talked me into switching jobs to work in the industry (with many many subtle hints of 'hire me! hire me!'). It is a small crime that I have never been to his home country of Singapore. And I start my Singaporean posts with a tribute to my dear friend Eugene, showing him doing what he does best :D

Now, I knew I would need to bring an extra stomach or two if I was going to go visit Eugene in Singapore, especially as Eunice was also in town, but I certainly did not expect the AVALANCHE of food that was coming my way. They had kindly booked us a kaiseki lunch at Goto on Ann Siang Road , which has a tremendously good value 6-course set lunch at around £30 iirc. However, quite unexpectedly half way through the afternoon, Eunice received a call that Iggy's, apparently the 28th best restaurant in the world, had a last minute cancellation, and asking would we want to come? It was rude to say no, but that did mean we were on for 18 courses in one day. And this is not including the street food we had for breakfast that morning!

I won't bore you with my narrative and will mainly let you enjoy the food porn of this post. All I will say about Goto is that the only thing that niggled me was the unnecessary kimonos that they make all the waitresses wear, including the Filipino waitress who just looks plainly odd. The food and the surroudings were clean, great quality, and you are wondering how they do it for so little money. My favourites was the salmon roe with yuzu and sake in the first course, and the matcha swiss roll in the dessert.

My other dear friend Sen managed to join us for our tremendous meal at Iggy's. Situated inside the Hilton hotel on Orchard Road, there was a noisy wedding party next door, and the whole decor is just a little hotel for me. It reminded me of how bland the room at Hibiscus is. Nevertheless, the food and the company soon made me forgot all of this, and this was genuinely one of the best meals I ate in 2010, and probably in the noughties. Each course was unfailingly interesting, with many highlights including the scallop with bacon foam (the only time I have ever understood the use of foam), the deep fried quinoa, and the combination of strawberry and gorgonzola.

Also a special mention on the butter, so good that I scoffed two pieces of mini baguette on top of my 12 courses!! Whipped butter with a little shaving of parmesan on top, oh my god, work of genius:

And I will end with this ominous picture - someone has already mentioned that it looks like a pile of cocaine on a bag of malteasers:

This was 'Winter', a combination of coconut, coffee, lemon, and chestnut, and probably the best dessert I have ever tasted. Sneaking chestnuts into desserts generally gets my vote, but it was light, it was Christmassy, it was clever, it was well balanced, and it was snow! Also helped by the fact that the dishy pastry chef kept coming out and talking to Eunice :) Genius, genius, very much worth the 10lbs I probably gained in that one day.

Addiction

It was probably the time when I worked in Hong Kong for 6 months that I developed my tea habit. I really did miss the comforts of Britain at times, and I found myself making lots of cups of tea in the afternoon at work, even though I wasn't really a heavy tea drinker at the time. Ever since then though, the addiction has just gotten worse. I get through an average of 8 large buckets of Earl Grey or PG Tips during a workday, delivered in my trusty Guardian thermos mug, and often supplement that with more Chinese or rooibos tea along the way. In fact, one of the things I miss most about living in China is the availability of hot water everywhere, from corner shops to airports, and the little vacuum flask lined with some tea leaves which I took everywhere.

The journey to Nepal started very well, where the Costa in Bahrain airport served me a small swimming pool of Earl Grey, so big it needed two handles!:

But it all was downhill from there. Nepal is a tea-drinking country, and their chiya is just like my much-liked massala chai from India, but I couldn't get over the overwhelming milkiness of it. I'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to milk, and Nepali milk is all a bit rich for me. Similarly, when they offer you a cup of 'milk tea', it is literally a mug of hot milk with a weak tea bag dunked in it. Ming ming ming! Whilst in Naranghat, I had to content myself with one teeny cup of black tea in the morning and one in the evening, it's a miracle I wasn't more grumpy that week.

In Pokhara, I did manage to find a substitute. Lemongrass tea was everywhere here, taking me back to lovely Busaba. Their lemongrass is not like the tough stalks we have in England though, but lovely green and leafy, turning the tea into a nice green tinge:

I didn't feel very well in the last few days in Pokhara though, and I do suspect that it was the lack of caffeine. I do have a funny relationship with caffeine - I can hardly drink a cup of coffee without feeling a bit 'weird', yet the vast amounts of tea must mean I am constantly on a caffeine drip. In any case, it wasn't until our last meal in Kathmandu that I found Earl Grey tea in Nepal. Again, it was at my favourite Roadhouse Cafe, it was probably the tea rather than the food that made me like it so much.

Bliss!

This post was brought to you with the help of a cup of Xiamen jasmine tea.

Lentils and rice, rice and lentils

Now finally, onto the food! But unfortunately, there really isn't much to write home about Nepali food, which has to be one of the uninspired cuisines I've ever had. Being sandwiched between two of the greatest cuisine nations, I was quite taken aback in how little variety there was in Nepali food. Their national dish is dal bhat, so reverred to the extent that every meal is literally just lentils and rice.

Dal bhat is actually very pleasant, and probably very healthy. The lentils are cooked into a soupy texture and spooned over the rice, and very often it comes with tarkari, or vegetable curry of some kind. We had some wonderful dal bhat in Aaptari, cooked by a team of village ladies:



The problem is, dal bhat day in day out is bland to the extreme, and I am truly curried out. During my little yogaing retreat in Pokhara, where I was essentially staying at a family's house, the monotony of dal bhat became all the more apparent. The yogi there believed in some mumbo-jumbo Ayurvedic cuisine, which basically entailed eating the same breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. It was actually some very beautiful food, but I was only there for 3 days and already got thorougly bored. Breakfast everyday was a very pretty muesli and yoghurt and fruit concoction:

Dal bhat for lunch:

And vegetable soup for dinner:

It was no wonder then that I did, to my shame, find much relief when the places we were staying in attempted to feed us 'continental' food, even if it doesn't really resemble what we would eat at home. They seem to think that us Westerners are obsessed with 'sizzlers', slabs of meat with chips and veg served on hotplates, no wonder there are no smoke alarms in Nepal:

Our resort in Chitwan National Park also humoured us with some barbequed chicken on our last night, which was actually very yum:


The place we stayed in Naranghat actually seemed quite ashamed of its Nepali offerings, and tried to serve us Chinese food almost every night. I suppose it must be the proximity to Tibet which has led to the popularity of Chinese food in the country, but unfortunately it is very Chinese takeaway in standards. The only saving grace is the momo, which is basically the traditional dumpling 餃子 but normally made with chicken rather than pork, and often served with some hot sauce (of course, curry has to be somehow incorporated):


Apart from the momos though, it was all sweet and sour with fried rice and fried noodles. I think I ate more sweet and sour in that week than I have had in my entire lifetime, bleurgh, bleurgh!:

And once we got back to Kathmandu civilisation, I have to admit I was happy to luxuriate in more Western options. The Thamel backpacker area has a lovely selection of roof-top terraces which are lovely both morning and night. We had lunch at Le Bistro bang in the middle of Thamel, with some hilarious consequences. This was their attempt at garlic bread:

But I have to admit that their creamy carbonara with mushroom was exactly what I wanted as comfort food:

My big recommendation for Thamel, however, is the more unassuming Roadhouse Cafe. A glance at the accurate English and variety on the menu will immediately tell you the place is owned by foreigners, and the quality of the food is as good as any bistro in London. There is a real wood-fire oven for their pizzas, and the menu has a nice Mediterranean selection from pasta to tzatziki and hummus to chicken caesar wraps, and Joe and I rejoiced at being able to have gorgeous fresh tomatoes in their bruschetta, which was the first time we saw bread which wasn't in the form of cardboard squares:

It was our last meal in Nepal before we left, so I really pushed the boat out and had a glass of wine with my vodka penne with shrimp. This was probably the best plate of food I had the entire time I was in Nepal, and just what I wanted - simple, light, delicious:

And as with all these Habitat trips, I end up craving home comforts like spag bol and shepherd's pie, but I got really lucky this time as my parents were round mine when I got home, and they fed me crab and roast pork and homemade soup :) Can't think of a better meal to go home to!