Luxury at every level in Singapore

My hands are covered in red paste – sticky and still hot from the boiling carcass. Connective tissue and bone matter and shredded muscle collect between my fingers in a gory pulp.

It’s a war zone on my plate. A battle over the best that nature has to offer. Protected beneath a tank-like carapace, flaming red, steeps the delicate white meat of an enormous crab. Claws and legs and sockets – Darwinian underwater armor – I bring the full might of human engineering to bear. With metal claws of my own, I shatter the beautiful red exoskeleton and coax the meat out in dainty mouthfuls, using a combination long metal poker and probing tongue, slurping the softened innards. I construct euphoria in tiny increments. Every bite is a battle won. The shrapnel and slaughter accumulate on a once pristine white plate in a mountain of decimated body parts as I bathe myself in the taste of chili and crab.

Chili Crab is one of the most famous dishes in a city famous for dishes. A large pot is brought to the table. In it: a fiery, soupy mess of disjointed crab. The boiled arachnid is separated into claws and legs, its reinforced bunker of a shell floats along for good measure. In between skirmishes with the beast, you can fill up with the fried Chinese mantou buns. A perfect sponge for the velvety sauce, as you sweep it through the pot, the airy interior is permeated with red. You can watch it change from innocent white fluff to bloody gloop, as little morsels of crabmeat floating in the spicy swamp latch on for the ride before being popped into a waiting mouth.

The dish is a luxury that isn’t. It’s expensive. Two crabs can run upwards of S$100 (close to $80 U.S.). And it tastes like the good life too. Delicate, rich, creamy – live boiled, enormous crabs are one of the finest proteins the sea has to offer. But it’s a dirty eating. A sloppy and embarrassing affair when your chin is covered in red muck and your lips are spice-puffed pillows cradling little fragments of another animal’s flesh in the corners and your nice shirt is sweat-stained and streaked with the bloody evidence of a battle well fought.

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If chili crab represents one end of the spectrum – messy and expensive – the equally iconic Singaporean dish of chicken rice attends to the cheap and easy.

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Boiled chicken. White rice. S$3. A deception. On paper and even in person, it looks like the quick snack for someone unconcerned with taste: colorless and dull. How wrong.

Chicken rice shows how deliciously complex tastes can be constructed in the mundane confines of the everyday. Hidden in the dripping pale flesh, in the unassuming plump grains of rice, concentrated bursts of flavor fold and mix and compound. Served in food courts and street side stalls, on stainless steel tables under fluorescent lights in any neighborhood, there are as many ways to make chicken rice as there are people to make it. The delicately poached chicken remains tender. The fatty layer under the skin is engaged by the heat while remaining intact: a soft, bird-lubricating cream. Rice is fried in even more chicken fat before being cooked in a rich chicken stock. Chicken flavor, that homiest of tastes, steeps into every facet of the dish. Succulence at every layer.

Mix the meat and the rice into a pale blend of fatty flavor. It’s served with an electric garlic-chili sauce. Almost florescent red enlivens the plate while kecap manis, the syrupy black Indonesian soy sauce, splatters cirss-cross over the steaming pile like a Pollock painting.

Everyone enjoys their own condiment combination in this universal Singaporean indulgence. Flavor for the masses.

Bargaining

I was sitting on a tiny plastic stool on a busy corner of Dam market, just off the main drag in the coastal city of Nha Trang. As the stall’s owner moved to hand me another plate of food, I waved my hands. “Oh, no, thank you; very full,” I said, patting my stomach.

We had just polished off four rounds of what I can only describe as squid omelet: A couple hunks of nautical head-piece and tentacles chopped up and fried on a hot griddle. A thin mixture of egg and bean sprout join the picture, twirling on the searing black metal for thirty seconds before two quick flips and the tiny omelet lands next to its twin on a plastic plate.

This is served with a small garden of greens – lettuces and mints and basils and cilantros, as well as a fiery chili-garlic dipping sauce. Delicious, cheap, very alien street food.

We moved to pay, asking “How much?”

She points to both of us, “Foty Touszand Vietnamdong.”

A dollar each for four squid omelets, a steal in any country. We reach into our wallets. Zane pulls out a twenty K note, and she takes his half of the bill with a smile, two hands outstretched. I fumble through my wallet, a collection of huge, 500,000 notes and nearly worthless, pulpy 1 and 2 thousands. I find a ten, and hand it over, ready to count up a bunch of twos and make up the difference.

“Its fine,” she smiles, holds up the total 30,000 dong, and goes back to tending her sizzling squid.

In that singular nonchalant instant, she revealed to us that we had, for lack of any other term, been had. Willingly. “She just admitted to having us,” I vocalized with incredulity.

Bargaining has become the defining facet of my day-to-day life. To feel like you aren’t getting ripped off at every turn you need to engage in a seriously long back and forth to reach a deal that can even be considered legitimate. And even then, you know the locals are getting it at half the price.

In Vietnam, the going wisdom among tourists is that the first price a local quotes a foreigner is generally about 5 times the going rate. With that figure in mind and a (very necessary) smile on my face – after all, the whole back and forth is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of humor – I can pretty reliably get what I think is a fair price.

The thing is, when it comes to food, it’s an entirely different story. Generally there is no upmarking the price when it comes to street stalls. I don’t know if it’s because the motherly pot-stirrers have some inner desire to see everyone well fed, but the plastic stool on the sidewalk is, above all things, fair. You wait your turn; everyone gets the same thing and the price is an acknowledged standard. It’s comforting to know that in a country with such a rich tradition of food, as long as I don’t develop a new penchant for buying lacquered antiques on the street, I should be OK money-wise.

But for now this maker of delicious seafood omelets has thrown all of that in doubt. 

Spice Orgasm

As I ran my tongue over the glistening, bloated interior of my lips I felt the blisters beginning to bubble.

“Uuughhh…” I let out a moan that’s half pain, half pleasure, before diving back in for more: filling my thin metal soup spoon with the red liquid and slurping, mixing air and broth and inhaling the spice. It constricts in my throat before seeping, boiling, in rivulets across my esophagus. My throat relaxes and another mouthful of heat percolates down into my stomach, and the process starts again.

This is the end of  a bowl of noodles at the restaurant simply named “Noodel Soup.” Madam Puii, the proprietor, sets up shop in front of the gas station convenience store every evening to offer a small make-your-choice selection of noodle soups. You choose the noodle size, the meat of choice, and she delivers you a new level of euphoria.

You get high from this soup. A slow, surging wave of power that multiplies on itself – a mitosis charged though each successive spoonful of broth, each slurp of those noodles dragging with them across your lips a confetti of black pepper, onion, sweet chili and fried garlic.

By the time you realize you’re on fire, it’s too late. Are those tears running down your cheeks from the heat or from the pleasure? Where is the sweetness coming from? Why is your mouth singing? Now you are crying, snorting, laughing. Is it a chemical hook or a metaphysical one?

It doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is that you don’t stop slurping the soup. You can barely make out your utensils through the fog of water in your eyes. Your lips went numb long ago, so when you manage to get the chopsticks up there you fumble around like a blind man until your tongue can take charge.

Before you realize it, the utensils have been dropped onto the wet wood table and the plastic bowl is in both hands and that peppery smell is now in your sinuses and the world gets a little darker as your vision clouds behind the circular rim of your destiny. The red tide of flavor lies cradled halfway up the sides as gravity guides it, slowly and precipitously, into your half-open mouth. You can’t stop for air, if you do the spice will choke you, a cough will erupt and you will lose the nectar. Your only choice is to keep going, power through it, until this liquefied crack has passed the portal and now you can’t move your lips, they are swollen.

There is no more talking, but there doesn’t need to be. For now, I am flying. 

Recipe for Awesomeness #1

Recipe for Awesomeness # 1

10-23-11

You will need: 

2 eggs

handful of parsley and chives and/or scallions

1 baguette - good - crispy outside, airy and soft inside - not too big - maybe 9 inches

oil

sliced garlic and chilis pickled in white vinegar

sriracha (or any chili sauce)

lime

S&P

Directions:

1. Beat eggs and greens together + salt & pepper, in a bowl. Heat oil in a small sautee pan (high heat) and put the egg mixture in. It should cover the bottom of the pan and have a little bit of depth to it - not much - maybe half an inch up the sides.

2. After the eggs have soldified a bit, browned around the edges, flip.

3. When the entire circle of egg is done - firm and browned and smelling delicious, remove. Cut into 1”x1” pieces. 

4. Leave the excess oil in the pan. Use to toast baguette, flattening it, squishing and crunching its exterior a bit if you have to in order to get it to fit. Once lightly toasted and oil is mostly absorbed, cut into small pieces. 

5. For dipping sauce: 

Salt, sugar, a spoonful chilis and garlic slices and accompanying pickle liquid. juice of one small lime. squirt of chili sauce. 

dip egg in sauce. eat. enjoy. invent ways to use the now tasty bread. 

Worm Donuts, Ugly Bees and Roast Fido

Worm Donuts, Ugly Bees and Roast Fido

So at this point - after three days in Ha Noi - I’ve eaten my fare share of pho andbun cha and banh mi. It’s time for more exciting fare.

Today I am going to the Temple of Literature, an 11^th century Confucian temple, home, I am told, to “a well preserved jewel of traditional Vietnamese architecture…five enclosed courtyards… and a peaceful reflecting pool.” City-center respites to the orgy of horns and exhaust – the army of motorbikes that criss-cross Hanoi.

On my map, an 11 x 8 ½ piece of printer paper from the hostel, there is an area labeled “Delicious Zone,” about halfway between the temple and myself.

Necessary stop #1

The delicious zone is, as I expected, a loud market spilling out of a dirty alleyway – generally the kind of place where you can expect to find some interesting, delicious, unpronounceable treats. Plastic blue children’s stools are festooned across the sidewalk, propping up old men sipping bia hoi – fresh beer – while wrinkled old women line the street to offer chicken guts and wriggling eels and other oddities.

The first thing that catches my eye is a woman making doughnuts. She kneads a gluey mass of chalk white dough, building a pocket into which she stuffs spices and grain, or, into others, brown sugar. Sweet and savory morning doughnut treats. I sit on her stool to watch, fascinated by her deft hands performing movements as instinctual as drawing breath. With a blinding speed she nimbly twists her chopsticks through the bubbling oil, flipping each little nugget as if floats in the wok. Around me, sizzles and smoke and scents carry through the air, the deep-fried morning in Ha Noi.

After two minutes of uncomfortable silence, (doughnut woman has yet to look up at me,) I ask, “How much for 1,” sticking my index finger in the air.

She raises five fingers in silence and offers me a scrap of old newsprint, never looking up. I hand over the money – 5000 dong (25 cents) – and grab one of the finished golden spheres nearest my perch, from the batch she was finishing as I arrived.

Walking away, I take a bite. Delicious fried dough. Surprisingly light and airy for the concrete appearance of the raw batter. Greasy constitution to a hungry morning traveler.

Bite two – new texture – an almost wet crunch, little pops between my teeth.

A third – more of the same. Now I look down at the proverbial ‘donut hole’ my teeth have ripped open. Worms. 100s of tiny grey and brown worms.

 

“Protein,” the amused part of my brain says, followed instantly by a very strong desire to throw the mass in my hand into the nearest trash can. But I am still right next to doughnut lady. My sense of moral embarrassment prevails. What? Am I too good to eat the things these people eat every day? It cost me a quarter for Christ’s’ sake. Also: until I looked at what I was eating, I was actually enjoying myself.

I manage to get down ¾ of the ‘doughnut’ before finding a shade covered bia hoistand. Two glasses of fresh brewed goodness and a bowl of raw, soft, wet peanuts and I’ve almost forgotten the worms.

I’m almost feeling comfortable again. Deep into my book and getting deeper into my cups, beginning to see the possibility of a nice sun drunk afternoon stroll, when a prostitute in a baby blue tank top and matching gym shorts starts staring me down. I turn away and she walks to the other side of the street corner and continues her iron death stare. Like some hypnotized monkey, I can’t help but turn my head to look back at her. Tacky gold chains are draped over her pock-marked breasts, disappearing into a cleavage that is ballooning out of a bra that could maybe fit a 12 year old. I am grotesquely affixed to this dark crevice, like some kind of sickening horror show you can’t tear your eyes away from.  As though it was a bad movie, she walks straight towards me and sits in the adjacent stool.

“I sit here,” a statement, not a question.

I turn and try to keep reading my book, hoping this bad dream will go away. I’m too tired: too drunk to try and take any proactive stance here.

After two minutes of uncomfortable silence she starts.  “Where you from?”

“America”

“I live in Ha Noi. I am schoolteacher. Little children”

“That’s nice,” I say. It is anything but nice to think about this woman anywhere around little kids. If they did a COPS: HA NOI, this woman would be the crazy one fighting police with her shirt half ripped off.

“What your name”

“Daniel”

“My name Queen Bee.”

This is not going well. I start packing up my book, signaling to my adolescent waiter that I want to pay my tab. Suddenly, Queen Bee’s sidekick shows up – a preteen girl with a digital camera. She stands three feet away and points it at the two of us.

“Smile” the Queen commands; she drapes her arm around me, brushing her breasts against my elbow and laying her head on my shoulder. To say that my personal space felt a little compromise is something of an appalling understatement. Just before sidekick girl clicks the shutter, Queen Bee lunges and kisses my neck.

I jolt out of my seat, knocking Ms. Bee and the remainder of my beer on the ground. Literally running away from my table, I knock another three stools over in my haste to throw my backpack over my shoulders. Shoving a 20,000 note into my waiter’s hand, I march out to the laughter of the entire establishment, a collective of wizened old men who had watched the situation play out with ever-widening grins, whispering to each other what I can only assume were asinine comments about my idiocy.

Whatever. I have the Literature Temple to look forward to.

The Temple, it turns out, is something of a one-stop shop for photo backgrounds. Local women are here in scores, dressed to the nines in traditional silk robes, with eager, pimply-faced young male photographers following them through the courtyards and ornamental gates. They take pictures in front of giant bells, next to the reflecting pool, peeking out from behind ornately carved doors; all the while the same vacant smile flits across their face. Empty submission. This is a temple wide photo shoot to capture the essence of the perfect simpering woman. It’s more than a little distracting.

But this is the Temple of Literature after all, so I find an almost secluded bench in the corner and try to enjoy my book. I succeed, and two hours pass quickly while I march through the pages. But soon my hunger comes back. A few bites of worm donut and two beers to not a meal make; and there was so much else at the Delicious Zone that I find myself walking back to where I was so recently terrified.

In France they eat horse. Apparently it tastes a lot like the way it smells. In Iceland they eat fermented shark meat. Apparently it tastes like shit. In China, chicken feet are a prized staple. They taste phenomenal when fried and covered in a spicy sause. In Vietnam they eat dog.

I’ve known this for a while, but didn’t expect to find it so easily. I thought I’d have to go searching for the special dog-centric restaurants. As such, it was to my surprise when I dodged an oncoming motorbike and bumped into a table piled high with roasted Jack Russell.

With the crisp golden skin I almost mistook it for a suckling pig. It even had the same crinkly looking ears that are so prized on roast pork. Its paws, however, along with the canine revealing snarl, dictated otherwise.

 

With a sort of boyish-glee I pointed to the one nearest and asked for a piece. After a complicated piece of negotiation (she wanted to sell me an entire dog) I was able to secure a slap of dog shoulder, violently hacked from the rest of the body by an old woman wielding a rusty cleaver. Skin still intact, I dug in, fingers rather than utensils.

Dog, it turns out, tastes a lot like beef. Blander, stringier beef.  The skin was the best part. The crunch of pork without as much wet, dripping fat. It’s filling, dog, and not very tender, so when I was done with the shoulder I didn’t try to nipple the meat off the paw. I’d seen the stray dogs skirting nervously in and out of the city’s alleys. Their feet scrape against a lot of piss, shit and garbage juice. Then again, if I were on the menu, I’d be hiding anywhere I could too.

Lunchtime

On the days that I spend in the city, I do a lot of walking. I walk to the beach, I walk to the Arab markets in Jaffa, I walk through the shouks, I walk where my feet take me. Some days I find new, secret avenues of shade and some days I sit down to read my book in parks that now seem like old friends. But most of what I do is walk.

That walking, it turns out, burns a lot of calories. On average I will spend four or five hours just meandering up and down streets, looking into store windows, sipping an iced coffee as I make my way through new playlists on my iPod.

 

When my feet get tired and the sun becomes overbearing, a shady place for lunch is the perfect way to refuel. I’ve refined my lunch-seeking technique in the past few weeks, but the basic principle remains the same: find a place where there are no English menus (better if there are no menus at all), where local men in stained shirts eat wordlessly and service is brusque to the point of offensive. This is where the food is cheap, honest and filling. If you see flies or the occasional pigeon flying through the restaurant – plus ten points.  

The local favorite is a dish that I’ve come to adore. It may be the thing I miss most when my plane leaves in three days. Hummus has always been a staple of my diet, but I fear that my homecoming may mark the end of my tenure as a hummus purchaser. It will never be as good as it is here.

Chummos Ful, or “Hummus, fool!” as I pronounced it when I ordered it for the first time, is the memory of Israel that is likely to linger longest and strongest in my sensory-centric brain.

It’s one of the simplest dishes I’ve eaten here, which most likely explains its deliciousness. A shallow bowl is smeared with a base layer of plain yet luscious hummus.  The silky, mashed quagmire of chickpeas creates a basin into which is layered a puddle of warm fava beans stewed with garlic, tomato, cumin and lemon. This brown and white bowl of delectable gloop is slicked with a few lashes of fluorescent green olive oil, and finished with by plopping a hard boiled egg in the center and quickly slicing it into a dozen skinny pieces. This is bowl #1.

For accoutrements you are served three very important things. Firstly: pita, here serving as both utensil and foodstuff. But this is not pita like what I’ve ever been used to. Always freshly baked, the puffy circles still seem to be deflating when they arrive stacked two or three high on a little plate. The dense fluff of airy start is riddled with vacuous pockets, that when you drag through the puree of beans manages to latch onto anything and everything in its path, delivering to your mouth a perfect bite of chewy, glossy, bean and bread proclamation.

Also brought to the table are sides: A quartered white onion, which is meant to be peeled apart, layer by layer, to act as an occasional palate cleanser, sharp and sweet and watery. A spicy, green, peppery dressing sits in a small bowl for those that like a little kick. I prefer to dump two-thirds of this mixture into my hummus at the beginning, swirling it into the beans with my first piece of pita.

Lastly, a large plate of sliced, sweet and sour pickled cucumber, bright green like so much else on the table. I think these little morsels are meant to serve much like the onion, as a mid-meal break from the beans and pita and beans and pita. I like to save them to the end and load up on a bunch of acidic, crunchy plant fiber as a bright refreshing conclusion to lunch.

All this, plus a drink, runs about 20 New Israeli Shekles (sheks, as people are known to say), the equivalent of about $6 U.S.

Falafel on the streets of New York just isn’t going to cut it any more.