Well, here we are, safe and sound in Singapore. The flight out here was long, but passed fairly quickly. I did a crossword puzzle, read a book, watched Pirates 3 and ate about five meals. On Singapore Air, they have purple seats and they feed you, oh, every hour or so. My kind of airline.
On the subject of food, I don’t know about you, but eating is pretty important to me. Now, I understand that getting the necessary nutrients to survive is important for, well, all humans. But for some of us, food is a serious priority. I don’t particularly like the term “foodie” — to me, it connotes being a snob about food and being obsessed with eating out, which is entirely different than what I am talking about, which is being obsessive about food no matter what it is and where it comes from — but I guess that’s what I am.
Good food makes me happy. Conversely, I get annoyed / frustrated / and in general pissy when not fully satisfied with a meal. Food makes or breaks my day. And it can definitely make or break a vacation.
Yet I don’t think I was fully conscious of the food element when I picked Singapore as our first destination on this adventure. It must have been lurking in the back of my mind. There was something about this place, which, as every travel article or guidebook will tell you, is a) sort of boring and b) known for caning gum-chewers. Something about this place made me want to go there. It wasn’t the caning. Of course it was the food.
So I set out to plan a three-day sampling of the best that Singapore eateries have to offer, both at restaurants and from the city’s famous hawkers — street vendors who tend to specialize in one particular dish and serve them up in government-run (and thus spotless and sanitary) centers. It seemed that, with proper planning and guidance, this would be a reasonable undertaking. My Lonely Planet guidebook didn’t seem to disagree with me. Then I read Calvin Trillin’s recent New Yorker article about his few days spent eating in Singapore and I realized I had no idea what I was getting myself — and my stomach — into.
What most intrigues me about Singapore’s food culture is its focus on individual dishes, versus styles or categories of food. Most vendors — or at least the truly good ones, it seems — devote their entire lives to a single dish. That just thrills me. It must thrill Trillin, too, for he wrote a whole article about it and based his Singapore itinerary around sampling nine chosen dishes. Apparently, Trillin’s guide — The Expert on Singapore street food — felt this list was insufficient and added so many dishes that, despite eating their way through much of it, the list at the end of the trip was about as long as when he first landed.
Now Trillin is around 72 years old today. So I think that despite weighing in at 98 pounds, I could almost go dish-for-dish with him at the hawker center table. But he had Singapore’s street-food guru jetting him around to all the best spots. I do not have that. Plus, Taylor is a non-foodie who doesn’t eat fish. While excited by some of Singapore’s culinary possibilities (NOT the fish-head curry or fish-ball noodles), he isn’t going to obsess about it and will want to do other things. So my lineup will not quite rival the Trillin list, though it does borrow heavily from it. Here is what I’ve ended up with; I hope to post updates as I go.
Chili crab
Fish-head curry
Char kway teow
Laksa
Roti prata
Rojak
Carrot cake
