Where have all the flowers gone...?

Perhaps I should be more specific. Where have all the tomyam goong gone?

Gone were the traditional looking stalls manned by older Thai folks who cook a mean tomyam goong.

I only had two bowls in Thailand, one in the Platinum Shopping Centre (C)opposite where I stayed, and one in the Airport Departure Lounge (F). Both did not make the mark and I am honestly disappointed.

I need my fix at Old Airport Road soon.

Another thing I missed as good Phad Thai.

These days, street hawkers have pre-fried, pre-coloured, pre-flavoured rice noodles - they are really stained appalling pink - and when you order, the noodles are tossed in a hot skiller with some other ingredients and hey presto! You get your "fart Thai". Tastes really bad.

I missed my mango salad.

The weather was incredibly warm and the lack of crowds meant that if you were to buy food off the hawkers in the street, you risk getting stuff that is lying around there for quite some time already. If the local Thais won't buy it, then tourists had better not buy it too.

I also had a very lousy lunch at a restaurant serving Hong Kong tim sum near the Asok BTS station. While the tim sum buffet went at 159 baht ++ per head, I decided to go a la carte. It was bad. The only saving grace was the roasted duck slices that came with the noodles. The tim sum and noodles were oodles of evil. Trust me, a Hong Konger would probably prefer to eat his/her own socks than that meal!

Despite the misses, there were a few gems. I had a lovely coagulated blood soup from one of the backlane stalls in the Pratunam area.

I had some nice noodles at Damnernsaduak Floating Market. Yes, Uncle Anthony Bourdain went there when he filmed one of his travel/food shows. I also had a great coconut ice cream there and some excellent Thai pancakes.

On the same trip but prior to visiting the floating market, I also had some nice noodles at Maeklong Market. Bourdain had gone there too. And it is true that the market is set up alongside the railway tracks and when the train runs, market vendors rush to remove their wares, only to restitute them to the original position right after the train passed. The Maeklong Station is located just next to the canal. Amazing sights.

And then I freaked out eating Thai noodles for the rest of the trip, at least fish ball noodles!

Verdict: Culinary Misadventure

I think he'll have you beheaded

Ate at Emperor Q (Q for Qianlong) at the revamped West Coast Plaza (formerly Ginza Plaza) at West Coast Road.

I didn't think Q would have eaten Peranakan achar (pickled fruits and vegetables) and icing sugar frosted peanuts. Neither do I think the imperial kitchen would have the balls to serve Hui Guo Rou (or Twice Cooked Pork), presumably a peasant dish. I didn't even think Q would eat pot stickers wrapped in skins the texture of semi-dehydrated chewed gum!

While Q is known for his magnanimity, I'm pretty certain that he'll have the chefs and wait staff of the Emperor Q restaurant decapitated without batting an eyelid.

What a flagrant abuse of Q's good name and a terrible transgression of culinary faith!

Details

There were 38 dishes on the buffet menu but 1 was not available. As we don't eat beef, there wasn't much left to choose.

Appetisers - Boiled pork hock with ginger sauce (C), pickled jellyfish (D), drunken chicken (D),

Dim sum - pot stickers (F), siew mai aka meat dumplings (D), prawns wrapped in beancurd skin (D - more skin than prawns), ngoh hiang aka prawn and meat rolls (F)

Soup - Steam minced pork soup in bamboo cup (B)

Mains - Double cooked pork (D), deep fried prawn balls with crispy sauce (B), fried prawn paste chicken (B - waited half an hour for 2 pieces), fried fish in ginger and spring onions (B)

Carbo - Szechuan minced pork noodles (C)

Dessert - Soft serve ice cream with mango sauce topping (C), black sesame paste with glutinous rice dumplings (F - considering EQ is a sister restaurant of MOF!), barley with beancurd sheets and gingko nuts (F), honey dew sago (F)

Service - F (You are nobody nobody... NOBODY NOBODY! No one came even once to check if I needed a top up for my water.)

It's time: Someone can deliver the imperial edict to have the entire staff CHOPPED.

China Stakes Claim on Santa

Lavender Food Court, SINGAPORE - A China-born Singapore-based foreign talent explains today the genesis of Santa Claus.

According to the Chinese legend, "Sheng Dan Lao Ren", or old man Santa as we know him today, was a homeless old man in China who was so overcome by the cold one winter that every thing on him shrank, except (his) "eggs" (sheng dan).

- Fishy Slippery (Xin Hua) News Agency

So Awful!

After banning So Expensive food court, a few days later, we decided to try out the Singapore Food eating outlets at the end of Downtown East, near the Costa Sands Resort.

Between the two shops, we chose to eat at the outlet closer to So Expensive. It was definitely an AWE-some experience. (Actually, morphologically awful and awesome both come from awe. In other words, awful and awesome ought to carry the similar meaning, i.e. goodness of some sort. For some reason, awful and awesome drifted apart and one became the bad twin (like the Harley-riding, Metro-taking, kid-terro... Oops, I went into too much details now!) and the other the good.)

So, we had coffee and lemon tea, fried kway teow (flat rice noodles) and fried rice. When the drinks came, the coffee was the worst I have ever had. Even good ol' America's worst coffee wins this particular cup by twenty thousand leagues (under the sea or otherwise!). Even Tibet's worst coffee (usually found at hotels' breakfast buffets) wins by the widest possible margin. Or for that matter, I'm not sure if hot water run through a coffee sock deviod of ground coffee beans can be considered coffee.

When I complained that the coffee was awful, the server said, oh, that's our coffee. Too weak? We can give you a little more. She grabbed my cup and replaced some of the contents with more sock water. It is now neither sweet enough nor rich enough. I'm already turning in my stomach.

The lemon tea was awful. I could make better lemon tea from sweaty, rancid T-shirts.

The fried kway teow was nothing like what a Singaporean would eat. It was... all wrong. The sauce was wrong, the ingredients were wrong, the cooking method was wrong. The correct way of cooking does not coat the noodles with a thick layer of grime, the sauce is slightly sweet, slightly spicy, and there is a good "smoky" feel from the hot wok. This version is yucky. You can't avoid the hard work of frying a good plate of noodles by using Chinese bean paste. I'm not born yesterday, you know! There weren't even cockles, a char kway teow essential ingredient, to go with the noodles. For $4, it was entirely unacceptable.

The fried rice was barely passable. But at $4, it is borderline rip-off.

In all, we were slapped with a bill of $10.90. That is a completely reprehensible rip off. I left my coffee undrunk, my noodles uneaten.

And before I left, I congratulated the wait staff. She was surprised until I immediately told it was for serving the worst coffee in the world.

I hope they go out of business soon.

So Expensive!

The last time we met when she came "home" (it's a difficult concept to explain here), Marlina complained that I am brutal with restaurants that fail to meet my exacting standards. I tried to explain that I'm about as objective as I can be. Still she held her ground. Fair enough. I may be harsh but I am fair.

So, this time, I want to hit out at "Hao Kou Wei" (Good Taste) in Downtown East. It is a foodcourt but man, everything inside there was so expensive (Hao Gui). For those who know how to speak Mandarin, saying hao kouwei quickly will get you hao gui.

From the rice stall, the kung pao chicken had more pieces of chicken skin than chicken meat, the sweet and sour pork had more pork rind and fats than pork; the vegetables were not washed clean and the portions were awfully small.

From the Korean food stall, the uncle is a lascivious scrooge. When he gives side dishes to go with your meal, he believes that giving you one additional anchovy will cause you gout, he believes that an additional kimchi piece will lead you to be unkissable for the entire night.

From the pig organ soup stall, the organ pieces are so small you can floss your teeth with them, the soup is heavily seasoned with MSG so you feel as though the soup is chockful of goodness, the pre-packed food stuff (e.g. meatballs) are boiled to death in the soups to coax every single ounce of articifical flavour out from the ball to the soup.

From the Japanese food stall, what you see is twice what you get. Enough said. From the handmade noodles stall, be thankful for what you can see, cos you almost can't eat anything. From...

Almost every stall exaggerates their portion sizes; the promise is never delivered. After your meal, you just wonder if you have actually eaten. In this regard, that food court has joined the "List of Banned Eating Places".

Chinese New Year Wet Blanket

There is no such thing as a celebration without good food. Good food, by commonsense definition, is food that is neither good for your heart (or for that matter, all your organs, except for taste) nor waistline. So here is what the newspaper supplement has to tell us about the goodies that we stuff our faces with during Chinese New Year. Of course, I'll tell you what I think!

Fried battered nian gao (55 g) - 224 Cal, 5.4 g fat.
Nian gao, the gooey, glutinous mass of sugared flour cake, is a must have for Chinese New Year. It signifies "progress with every step". If you love to eat it, go ahead and eat it. Otherwise, do what I do - I buy it, display it, mould it and dump it.

Roast duck 3 (paper thin) slices (60 g) - 143 Cal, 10 g fat.
I think this is a conspiracy. All other times, I bet you the whole roast duck is 143 Cal! Unfortunately, roast duck is a perennial favourite year round and if your waistline doesn't seem to be shrinking despite your trillion crunches a day, perhaps it is time to reconsider to duck the duck.

Braised dried oysters with mixed vegetables and fatt choy (60 g) - 50 Cal, 4 g fat.
Dietiticians of the world ought to be shot! And then shot and shot and shot and shot... you get the message. Can you imagine how small a 60 g portion of this delicacy is? I cannot imagine that this is... ok, 50 Cal. It's not as bad a 3 paper thin slices of roast duck. But still!

Tossed fish salad (100 g) - 145 Cal, 11 g fat.
The tossed fish salad represents brisk business and many people go through at least a good handful of meals featuring this Cantonese favourite. One way of reducing the fat and calorie content is to avoid adding all the oil into the salad. Ask for half or a third of the bowl of oil to be added. Each gram of fat less could help reduce the calorie count a little. Trust me, it ain't that bad with less oil.

Chicken curry with coconut milk (220 g) - 342 Cal, 28 g fat.
I have yet to figure why anyone would eat chicken curry (a dish typically served to visitors at wakes) during Chinese New Year. It is as though the "heat" and the overly rich foods aren't enough to overload your poor stomach that you need to add to its burden by drinking copious coconut milk! I mean, aren't we happier eating pineapple tarts, bak kwa, kueh lapis, love letters and other artery clogging items?

Pineapple tarts (20 g) - 82 Cal, 4 g fat.
Kueh lapis (50 g) - 247 Cal, 19 g fat.
Bak kwa aka jerky 3 coin pieces (45 g) - 180 Cal, 6 g fat.
Love letters 3 pieces (40 g) - 172 Cal, 5 g fat.
One cannot help but need to place these four items together because almost each household one visits during the Chinese New Year will bombard guests with versions of these. It is hard to accept that a pop a mouthful goodies can be so chockful of calories. 82 calories for a pineapple tart! My goodness you tart! What hedonistic abandon! A slice of two bite kueh lapis makes you go for another and before you know it, you probably have eaten three slices. That's about the calorific equivalent of a place of wanton noodles! The other culprit for the grow in your hips moment is bak kwa aka jerky. Trust me - there is absolutely no f**king way to stop at 45 g. I confess I could polish off five times of that without breaking into a sweat! Melt in your mouth love letters are another of your worst enemies. Many friends can easily clean out half a tin - that's a whopping 30 pieces! Now, with these wonderful food friends, who needs enemies?

Other food items to add more dampener to your already dripping wet blanket:
Peanuts (20 g, about 15 or a handful) - 120 Cal, 10 g fat.
Melon seeds (8 g, about 1 tbs) - 30 Cal, 3 g fat.
Mandarin orange (116 g, 1 whole) - 51 Cal, 0.3 g fat.
Kueh bangkit (18 g or 3 pieces) - 69 Cal, 2 g fat.
Sharksfin with crabmeat (295 g, half a bowl or better known as two mouthfuls) - 162 Cal, 7 g fat.

I wonder why our bodies NEVER adapt to the better world we are in and learn to burn more energy with less activity. I am sure there must be a genetic flaw.

Meanwhile, Happy Chinese New Year. I hear the new wardrobe calling.

Errant Employees

Was at an outlet of a restaurant chain I frequent. Usually, I would not order the same dishes as my dining partner because I like to have variety. However, today, I decided to go for the same dishes because I was craving the same food.

The dishes arrived and both of us ordered rice topped with tonkatsu (deep fried breaded pork loin). We both removed the pork pieces and placed them on a dish. When I looked at the two portions, mine was at most half of what my friend got. This was unacceptable because this suggests poor quality control in the kitchen.

We called the waitress and impressed on her the situation. Not long later, the manager came, saw the portions and then said she would speak with the kitchen. She even had to take both portions into the kitchen to show them.

After a long while, a new, roughly equivalent portion was served. We actually had to remind them to serve. This time, the meat was way overdone. The bread crumbs were nearly burnt. The meat was tough as rubber.

I could have kicked up another fuss but I simply told the manager that I won't make her life hard. Anyway, it was just feedback that if they do not get their kitchen in order, their business was going to suffer.

Only then did I find out that the kitchen manager was on leave today and the kitchen crew had run amok.

What luck to have such errant employees.

Boing! Boing!

The food fair at Singapore Expo Hall 5 was jam packed with mindless, brainless, motionless bodies.

Mindless because they should have planned how they wanted to navigate the simple labyrinth of stalls (hey, it is just 6 rows of them, so what is a mentally trivial exercise).

Brainless because they should know better than to bring their prams and wet market shopping carts that are so bloody obstrusive. And why the heck would anyone think of bringing young kids to a shove-fest like this? Hey, this is not a Proposition 8 Demonstration! At least, over there, I'd get my fill of good looking people in their leather and gear. Oops. Have I revealed too much? But heck, it was so depressing looking around that my friend pointed out to me a girl whom he christened "A human Cabbage Patch Kid" after I came out of the toilet. It was a rather mean remark; I saw her earlier as I exited the washroom but from the place he stood, she was indeed one! She'd put the CPKs to shame, goddammit!

Motionless because many of these people wanted to sample food at the various stalls. Fine! Get the food and move aside. You don't need to eat in front of those stall holders! They already half guessed, ok, nine-tenths confirmed that you are just a cheapskate glutton who will eat and not buy anything. No need to pretend. Take the thing, MOVE ASIDE and eat. Then you can f--- off quietly since the next crowd would have engaged the stallholders and they wouldn't have time to care if you indeed wanted to buy anything. If people simply stood in front of these stalls to demonstrate how food should be eaten to the people who have cooked those samples, then how the f--- do you expect the rest of the crowd to move along? Hey, many of those food samples are that - samples. You taste, show a face and find the nearest dustbin. I even wonder why they come and peddle their wares. What we liked were mostly sold out.

So, after traversing the various corridors, I am really heaving my spoils and trying to make my way out of that progressively crowded place. If the place was 65% filled when I first went in, it was approaching 95% now. And so with people doing particulate brownian motion, it was not long before a gaseous, high mass, high energy molecule like me is going to whack into someone.

She moved right into my right shoulder as I broke out of the two man blockade. And she bounced right off me, took two steps back as I zoomed past her to the next roadblock.

It felt good. I should go to such fairs more often. In future, I'll just bump into and bounce people off for the fun of it. Shopping? That can wait.

Oh, there was another who went "Hey!" after she knocked into me. Hey what? Like I care, babe! Move along and eat my dust, you hopeless lethargic low life.

Overcrowded Buffet

Went to a buffet last Saturday. Ok, I know this is dated but you can see that I've given it a long enough cool-down time so that I do not seem writing like a ranting lunatic.

The buffet was handling more diners than its only chef can manage. At no time were all the trays filled and more often than not, when a new tray of food came out, you'd better be hawk-eyed and home in on the tray because the food will be wiped out by the time the fifth diner in the queue hits the tray. This is no surprise as people who manage to get to the food has to take for their group or the rest would not get any. And given that the food put out was of such small quantities (how could two braised ducks feed 100, for example), there is more certainty that the food would run out!

After a good half-an-hour, I decided to speak with the manager over the unacceptable food situation. I've hardly managed to get anything! I had had to scrape the bottom of the porridge pot to get the porridge trapped in the corners so that I can get anything at all to eat.

The waitress told me the manager does not work evenings. After that, she came back and asked if I had anything to speak with the manager, since I asked to see him. So I told her that the food situation was not ideal. I also asked if the supervisor was around. She said she would get him.

We waited for the supervisor but to no avail. A couple trays of food came and were emptied out even before I manage to reach them. I made many trips to the buffet line, only to be greeted by empty trays. Soon, some soy sauce braised chicken appeared. I was third in line and so I took a number of pieces of chicken with blood oozing out back to the table.

I sliced the pieces and let the blood spill over the plate. Raw chicken is unfit to serve because it poses a salmonella risk. So this time, I called for the bill. When the bill arrived, I said I would pay after I speak with the supervisor.

Over I outlined my unhappiness over the situation to the supervisor; I told him of my other wonderful visits and how that night, they over-stretched themselves. I suggested that they should either turn away walk-ins, since they are already unable to cater to those who are there on group meals, or place a note at the entrance to say that they will be slow in replenishing food (though they hadn't been fast, anyway). I also complained about the "raw" chicken. The supervisor had the cheek to tell me that the raw chicken issue was a perennial one and the chef is aware. He then asked me to tell the chef about the complaint myself.

"This is your admin matter and it is not for the guest to tell the chef!" I retorted. "Anyway, what can you do to make up for the evening?"

"I can give you a discount of 10%."

"What can a discount of 10% do? I hardly got food to eat and I spent almost two hours on a simple 45 minute meal!"

"I can't do anything else. At my level, that's the most I can do. I'll call the chef."

"Please."

The table of 5 beside ours watched intently for sparks and fireworks. They were expecting to see what would happen in the end. But I had guts and gumption. They don't even have half as much brain as one hair on my leg!

Before long, the chef came out and after another round of the same discussion points, the chef went, "So, did the supervisor offer you anything?"

"Yeah. 10%, but what is 10%?" I really questioned the sincerity of the offer.

"So you want me to sign on your bill? I can sign on your bill. You want me to sign on your bill? I can do that..."

"That'll be nice. Thank you."

Knowing that he had erred in his judgement, he stormed off and took care of the bill with us as his "guests".

Moral of story: Having only one chef spoils the entire buffet.

The curse of Good Food

A moment on your lips, a lifetime on your hips!

Indulge!