2 Days in Singapore: What We're Eating

We've been in Singapore two days now, doing and seeing all kinds of things, but we thought we should report about the most important thing first: the food.

Day 1:

Khir and Terry were kind enough to pick us up from the airport, and take us straight-away to dinner at a Chinese restaurant that was open late. It was hopping with young people, and the outdoor seating was more than welcome since it was still quite hot and humid at 11pm.

We'd had a nice meal on the plane, so we just snacked on a little dim sum: har gow, dumplings with chili crab, and thai-style fried rolls with tofu, all of which were fantastic.

On the way back to the car, Terry had to stop to try some grilled meat from a street vendor.

I stopped a little further along for some otak-otak.

The word 'otak' means brains, but repeated twice it means 'that which looks like brains'--in this case, fish cake barbecued in a banana leaf. (On a similar linguistic note, the word 'layang' is the verb 'to fly', while layang-layang modifies it to mean, literally, 'that which glides'--the word for kite!).


Day 2:

For lunch, Khir brought us to the famous Victory Restaurant on Arab street (which was apparently recently featured in Gourmet magazine) to try murtabak. Just like pizza is called calzone when it's folded over on itself before cooking, murtabak is quite similar to paratha. Here's a shot of Khir ordering for us, as well as a little bit of the preparation.



It's typically eaten with a curry on the side. We had both a chicken and a fish curry for dipping.



To drink, we had a distinctive type of chai tea, called Teh Tarik. Teh, of course, is tea, while 'tarik' means 'stretched' which describes its preparation by pouring it a long distance through the air, from cup to cup, as a means to froth the milk it contains.

Ok, gotta split this one into two posts...