Tom Pepinsky

Category: Food and Drink

  • Singapore, Stomach First

    People often talk about Singapore as a place where people are obsessed with food. Before yesterday I hadn’t been to Singapore in a couple years, so part of me forgot about this. Or at least thought it was a little exaggerated, as lots of places are obsessed with food. Italy, France, and so forth. But seriously, Singapore is obsessed with food in a way that I don’t think is comparable to other places. Maybe it’s a consequence of the fact that Singapore is so, well, orderly and boring. There’s no politics to talk about, no real economic woes to talk about (although Singapore is getting hammered by the crisis in GDP terms, unemployment is still only around 3%), the weather is essentially the same all the time (hot and humid, or not quite as hot but more humid, or raining), the traffic is usually pretty OK by regional standards, there’s no really old history (the city was a fishing village until 1800) and so forth. So what else is there to talk about besides what to have for lunch? I think that standard Singaporean day revolves around (1) eating and (2) thinking about where to eat next. There are many, many, many food blogs dedicated to Singaporean food.

    This bothers me not in the slightest, of course, because I’ve seen all the tourist things there are to see in Singapore. Moreover, I love to sample local food, and I had two sets of great tour guides to show me where to go. So what did I do on this trip? I caught up with old friends and ate good food. I focused on South Indian food this trip more than Southern Chinese food, which is Singapore’s number one specialty. The problem is often that Chinese food has shellfish in it, so I have to be careful to stick to pork and fish. I can’t eat lots of things like chili crab or prawn whatever or really authentic char kway teow. Plus, this one place that we wanted to try for dumplings was closed for renovations so we substituted banana leaf rice for pork-intensive dumplings. I ignored Malay and Peranakan food entirely because, well, it’s often so close to Sumatran food and that’s normally better here (or in Malaysia itself) anyway. The pics and descriptions are here (they start with my most recent meal in Jakarta, but the Singapore pictures are a few in). Below is the pretty front garden of my friends’ place, which is a great and quiet retreat from the disorganized hustle and bustle of downtown Jakarta.

    A Leafy Front Garden in Singapore

    5-24-09

  • Seriously, Another Holiday?

    Today is another holiday, one that I had not only no reasonable ability to foresee but also which I had never even heard of before. It’s Ascension Day, or as they say here, Kenaikan Isa Almasih. Ascension Day. I had to look that one up to make sure I was getting this right, but of course it’s not hard to figure out, it celebrates the ascension of Jesus into heaven forty days after Easter. According to Wikipedia, it is celebrated as a public holiday in Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Vanuatu…and the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia.

    I’m not in principle opposed to holidays, but I do believe that two in the space of three weeks is too many. This has practical consequences, ranging from the slightly annoying to the truly inconvenient. Slightly annoying: no newspaper this morning, which forces me to read my pleasure book (Infinite Jest) over breakfast, which is only a problem in the sense that I don’t have much of it left and I’m trying to save enough to keep myself distracted on the plane rides home. Truly inconvenient: I have an interview way down in the southern outskirts of Jakarta today, in a satellite city known as Depok. Depok is far, far enough that when I go there I prefer to take a train rather than a cab (the cab’s just too expensive). But of course, on a public holiday like today the train schedules are totally unpredictable. So that will force me to take a cab anyway. But the real kicker, of course, is that since it’s a holiday the traffic will be in all likelihood pretty light, which means that the cab ride might not take nearly as long, and accordingly might not be quite so expensive.

    More food pictures are available here. As always, click Next to get to the new ones. Today I bring you gurame goreng, ayam bakar, buntil, es alpukat, and some famous nasi goreng kambing.