The Bizarre Truth

by Andrew Zimmern

  No trip to Singapore would be complete without eating at a Peranakan restaurant. This was the stuff I was most eager to try. Peranakans are also known as Straits Chinese, named after the Straits Settlement, a group of territories created by the British in Southeast Asia in 1826. Basically, the term refers to people in the region of Chinese descent. I learned there are all sorts of names for the different types of Chinese in the region. Once Violet and I were comfortable with each other, she gave me the rundown on the lingo. The whole concept was fascinating given the obsession with political correctness in our own country, but there are two terms I will never forget. The first came up in conversation as Violet and her best friend spoke over lunch one day about flying to Los Angeles, where her best friend’s daughter was getting married. I said, “Congratulations.” Both women gave me a happy but not completely thrilled look.

  I said, “What’s wrong?”

  They replied, “Well, he’s ABC.” I had no idea what they were talking about. They explained, with a healthy dose of humor, that ABC is the acronym for “American-born Chinese,” which I inferred to mean not completely ideal. They also refer to ABCs as bananas: yellow on the outside and white on the inside. It’s pretty humorous. Friends of mine here at home have heard the term “Twinkie”—yellow outside, white inside—but mostly from the mouths of other Twinkies. Maybe I’m crazy, but I can’t tell if it’s offensive or not. I can tell you that during the conversation I was frozen in my chair, smiling, hoping not to laugh too hard, or even laugh at all.

  Peranakan is old-school Singapore and refers to the earliest Chinese who immigrated there and intermarried with Malays, spawning a culture and cuisine unique in its own right. Singapore’s Katong District is the place to see and experience this culture in action. The historic neighborhood houses a famous spice garden containing more than 100 different spices that grow abundantly in Singapore. It was there that I met up with a young chef named Ben Seck who comes from a family that specializes in Peranakan cooking. He introduced me to one of the strangest fruits I’ve ever encountered. The fruit, which grows on giant Buwakala trees, contains a black nut called a Bualkeluak. What’s bizarre about this nut is not its flavor necessarily, but the fact that it is extremely poisonous. Detoxifying the nut is a tedious process (which I am baffled that someone ever managed to figure out in the first place), beginning with breaking the fruit open and picking out only the seeds. Next, the seeds get buried in volcanic ash for 100 days. After the nuts are dug out of the ground, they are soaked in water for three days to wash away the ashes. After all this, each nut must be smelled before it is chopped up to ensure it hasn’t gone bad. Just one bad nut will spoil an entire dish, making it toxic to consume. Once you’ve culled the good nuts from the bad, you can begin to work with them.

  The Seck family restaurant, True Blue, is an extremely popular restaurant in Singapore. Ben shares the cooking duties with his mother, Daisy Seah, who is arguably the most famous Peranakan chef in the country. The restaurant is located in a restored two-story town house, and walking through the front door is like stepping back 100 years. What’s special about the food is that the recipes are not written down. Rather, they’ve been passed from generation to generation. Mother and son created some of the most interesting, authentic dishes using the Bualkeluak nuts, including a duck soup that was just absolutely glorious with the cooked fruit. The paste from the nut smells like coffee and dark chocolate, almost like a fermented mocha taste with elements of burnt caramel and bitters. The paste works on the plate much like a condiment, and once you crack open the cooked nuts, you can spread the paste on anything. It enhances everything it touches, sort of like a naturally occurring Pernakan version of Vegemite. I sampled a braised-chicken dish with fermented shrimp paste and rice. Somehow, when mixed with rice, the Bualkeluak lost some of that coffee and chocolate flavor and instead offered a light, citrusy finish. The nut can change flavors depending on what it’s cooked with, making it the Zelig of the food world. This is a very complex and interesting ingredient, but it’s not the quintessential Peranakan dish I’d been dying to try.

  No one is exactly sure how Laksa earned its name. One group claims it stems from the Hindi Persian word Lakhshah, which refers to a type of noodle. Some say it’s derived from the Chinese word Lasha, pronounced “lots-a,” and means “spicy sand,” due to the ground, dried shrimp that typically goes into the soup. Another theory is that it’s a Hokien term, where it literally means “dirty” because of its messy appearance. But regardless of how it came to be, Laksa generally describes two different types of noodle soup dishes, Curried Laksa and Assam Laksa. Assam Laksa is something that I’ve seen more often in northern Southeast Asian countries, especially in the upper half of Thailand, where the base for the soup typically is a sweet-and-sour fish soup. In Singapore, Laksa is usually built around a curried coconut soup. Most of them are yellowish red in appearance, with dried prawns that give them a shrimpy flavor, complete with a curry gravy or soup. Thick rice noodles, called Laksa noodles, are typically used in this dish. However, sometimes a thin rice vermicelli is used, and these are called bee hoon or mee hoon. Foodaholics will argue that one noodle or the other makes a Laksa more or less of an authentic experience, but I’m not sure it’s as easy as that.

  I was turned on to curried Laksa growing up in New York City, where we ate a lot of Thai and Indonesian food. The main ingredients of the Laksas that I knew as a kid were pieces of tofu and fish, shrimp, sometimes cockles or clams, and maybe bits of julienned chicken if you were at a fancier restaurant. Many places add a nice kick by cooking chilies in the broth or by putting a spoonful of nuclear hot sambal on top just before serving. Of course, the variety of the options—even in New York—is nothing compared to how divergently this dish is represented in Southeast Asia. Malaysians often use Vietnamese coriander and cilantro in theirs, and refer to it as daunkesum. In Panang, where I went four or five years ago, the dish is usually called curried Mee because of liberal use of mee hoon noodles. Curried Mee is a delicacy to the Malaysian Chinese community, especially when served with cubes of congealed pork blood. There so many versions of Laksa, it’s hard to keep track. My personal favorite is Nonya Laksa, made with coconut milk. Katong Laksa, a variant of Nonya Laksa, comes specifically from the Katong area of Singapore, where they cut the noodles into smaller pieces so it can be easily eaten with a spoon. Some people say Katong Laksa is the true Singaporean national dish. I’ve only tried the variety with cut-up noodles two or three times, but to me, the curried Laksa with long, thick noodles is king. What can I say? I’m a slurper.

  There was a place called Tongjimian in the Golden Mile Food Center that I just adored. Another spot, Sungei Road Laksa, served a very traditional Laksa with fresh coconut milk in it. On the East Coast Road there were a couple of places, including a joint called 3-28 Katong Laksa, that one of our drivers wanted to show us, mainly because they pound their own shrimp paste there. It rocked. All the good stuff starts with a combination of lemon grass, galangal, chili paste, candlenut, and blanchan, which is fermented shrimp paste, along with coriander seeds and turmeric. It’s finished with shrimp, tofu, cockles, and sambal on the side. All of these soups were quite good, but I’ve got to tell you, the Laksa that I had at Mary’s Corner still remains the best I’ve ever eaten.

  I spent my entire trip to Singapore carrying around a notebook with “Mary’s Corner” listed on the back. No address, just a name. Whenever we were out and about, I begged our driver to pull over if we ever glimpsed it. Near the end of the trip, we finally found this humble little restaurant. As is often the case with any good eater, sometimes you have to take hostages, and at times my crew suffers the slings and arrows of being pulled like little bits of flotsam and jetsam in a storm all over cities in search of certain types of food. This was no exception. I made everyone have some.

  Mary’s is situated in the Nan Sin Eating House on East Coast Road, with two or three outdoor tables. Orders are placed at a window on the street that f
ronts into the postage-stamp-size kitchen. You get your bowl, sit at one of the tables, slurp down your soup, and move along. At peak hours, the line stretches around the corner, with most people opting to have their Laksa to go. On our visit, I took a moment to peer into the kitchen, where I could see down a narrow space that reached about forty feet back into the rear storage rooms, all the way through to another business in the building next door. Hey, it’s Sinagapore. This interior hall led to the prep area, where I spied Mary presiding over a giant vat, almost like a garbage can, of boiling soup. The noodles are cooked separately and the old crone puts them into a bowl and ladles the liquid gold over the noodles, scatters poached shrimp, bean sprouts, cilantro, sambal, and bits of tofu on top, and hands you a steaming hot bowl of goodness. While this might sound like a simple operation, the guys she’s got making noodles to order would beg to differ. And when I say made to order, I mean made from scratch, hand-rolled in multiple portions, batches-to-order. That to me is one of the hallmarks of a great Laksa. Are you pounding your own paste for your soup? Are you making your own noodles? At Mary’s, they cook thirty or forty portions of handmade noodles at a time. There’s not a knife; there’s not a cutter or machine. Instead, they use that old Chinese repetitive knead-and-fold methodology. After repeating this process for about eight minutes, the noodle maker basically raises the tube of dough up over his head and slams it on the table, where it explodes into a thousand strands of pasta. It’s one of the most glorious techniques I’ve ever seen.

  Mary’s Laksa is impressive. Sure, it had the sandy, ground-up dried shrimp. It had the rich coconut milk I adore. It had the traditional, thick white Laksa noodles. And, yes, it had a curry flavor. But what really put this soup in a league of its own was the fact that it wasn’t made with a fish soup base, but instead was created with a strong, rich, briny, and crustaceously awesome shrimp soup. When cooked with the coconut milk, you ended up with one of the best spicy Asian shellfish bisques that I’ve ever encountered. Sprinkle that soup with some ground nuts, the bean sprouts, the cilantro, a lime wedge, sambal, the blanchan, and you have a dangerous sweet, sour, salty seafood noodle explosion on your hands …

  I realize I throw around superlatives a little too much, and I’m always warning myself not to say things like “it was the best bowl of soup I had ever had,” but boy, I’m drooling just sitting here writing this. I can taste that shrimpy goodness and can almost feel the sweat popping between my eyebrows, which lets you know the soup is perfectly and intensely infused with chilies. You can’t stop eating it. I admit, I might be romanticizing this soup a little because the nearest bowl is 3,000 miles away. Or maybe it’s the fact that I may never have the opportunity to devour it again. But having said that, the simplicity of the dish, the freshness of the noodles, and the immediacy of the cooking preparation made this my ideal bowl of Laksa. It’s hard to pinpoint the best bowl of chili I’ve ever eaten or the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted, because so many places serve up stellar versions of those two dishes. That’s why I don’t want to be Jane or Michael Stern, but I’ve discovered that when you set up readers with high expectations, it’s the readers who are usually disappointed. Sometimes I wonder if my faves will ever be your “best.” After all, we each have our own favorites and our own set of rules that we measure excellence against. But Mary’s qualifies using any set of standards, and frankly, I can talk about great places a million miles away and rarely receive letters saying I am wrong. But I encourage you to see for yourself.

  So I sat at Mary’s at four in the afternoon, eating my last lunch of the day. The streets bustled around me, with motorcycles and pedicabs darting here and there, cars honking, blaring tinny Southeast Asian music from their speakers. And as pedestrians bumped into my table in the endless stream of Singaporean street life, I sat there slurping Laksa, knowing there was no other place I wanted to be. And as for traditional Peranakan food—well, I think it is really special; a cuisine that people believed was nearly at the end of a culinary cul-de-sac. Luckily, folks like Ben Seck and Mary kept it alive long enough for it to enjoy a new wave of popularity. And thankfully, due to Singapore’s strategic location (for travelers, especially business travelers), the local eateries will be open for a long time, doing very well.

  Simple Foods

  Noodle Houses of Guangzhou

  y love of Chinese food borders on obsession. For the record, this Chinese food I speak of is not a plate of indistinguishable, fried hunks of meat, tossed in a wok and coated with a sticky corn starch-based sauce. That’s not Chinese food. That’s like calling Cracker Barrel authentic American cuisine. But for every fifty subpar Chinese restaurants serving buffet dinners yoked to the American way of eating, there are a surprising number of authentic restaurants doing that cuisine justice. You don’t need to travel to the People’s Republic to find authentic Chinese food. I’ve experienced some of the most authentic Sichuan food in St. Paul, Minnesota. All that is required is access to ingredients and a good skill set in the kitchen. Honesty and authenticity don’t have a lot to do with location, although it often helps.

  Few people in the world have a more passionate relationship with food than the Chinese. Due to large-scale immigration from the southern province of Guangdong to the rest of the world, Cantonese cuisine is by far China’s best known. Cantonese cuisine originated in Canton, which is now called Guangzhou. With its fertile soil, perfect for growing all kinds of vegetables and raising healthy animals, as well as proximity to rivers, lakes, and oceans, every ingredient you could possibly want is within reach. And if these people can reach it, they’ll eat it. An old Cantonese adage says, If it walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven, it must be edible. Cantonese live by those words. They will eat anything and everything—not because they are obsessed with exotic foods; it’s just that if it tastes good, they’ll eat it.

  The simply named Guangzhou Restaurant is the city’s most popular. Founded in 1935, this restaurant is the oldest operating restaurant in Guangzhou. You would think that with a country as storied and steeped in history there would be some form of eatery still in operation predating 1935 in this eater’s city, but there isn’t. Its original name was Xi Nan Restaurant, but when the People’s Republic was established, it changed its name to the nondescript, egalitarian name it has today. Despite the name change, the food remained the same. In fact, many dishes are just as famous today as they were at its inception, most notably their dim sum.

  The restaurant is located on the busy merging of Wenchangnan Road and Shangxiajiu Street, one of the most famous intersections in the Li Wan District. Over the years, it’s expanded from just a restaurant on the first floor to a catering and banquet service, housed on the second and third floors. They feed as many as 10,000 people a day at that original location, also running affiliated branches from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. I’m sure you can eat a fine meal at any of their outposts, but you can’t beat a meal at the original.

  The main dining room is all about classic Cantonese food served in a beautiful classic setting. An antique, stained-glass window from China’s Chang Dynasty hangs in the main dining room, with a giant Rongshu tree sprawling overhead. The restaurant is composed of numerous courtyards and rooms connected by arcade corridors. The waitstaff, donning the Chang Dynasty’s traditional servant uniforms, gives the dining experience the air of taking a step back in time. Add the fact that they’ve mastered Cantonese cuisine, and you have a hard time convincing me that if you could only eat one meal in Guangzhou, it shouldn’t be here.

  The Guangzhou Restaurant is known for its dim sum, which was decent but not half as good as that found at other places I’d visited in China or Taiwan. But if you’re looking for traditional Cantonese cuisine, look no further. Cantonese cuisine offers a rather mild flavor profile and consists of contrasting elements. When it comes to flavors and styles, you’re not going to get a one-note Charlie, and when dinner is all said and done, often you’ve enjoyed a steamed dish, a cold dish, a boiled
dish, a spicy dish, and a double-fried dish. I had duck soup with Chinese watermelon, and a bowl of creamy, northeast Chinese peanuts simmered with the black skins still intact. Interestingly, they use a lot of milk skin in dishes, which struck me as odd. Milk skin is made by boiling fresh milk until a fine layer of skin is formed. After the milk cools, the liquid separates from the skin, making a congealed, fatty, egg white-like substance that offers a textural counterpoint to most other dishes. Remember homemade chocolate pudding as a kid? Remember peeling back the skin that formed on top, and how dairy-ish it tasted? Like the sweetest milk imaginable? Well, that’s what they serve here. While I didn’t care for the milk skin in savory dishes, I really liked it served as a dessert. Their double-skin milk, braised with sugar forming yet another layer of skin, is even sweeter still. Caramel heaven.

  The dish that sticks out most in my mind is their Wenchang chicken. Such special care goes into creating this impeccable dish that it’s difficult not to swoon over it. These chickens are to China what wagyu beef is to Japan. The chickens are tenderly cared for, raised in coops high off the ground, and fed a specific diet of coconut, peanut cakes, and banyan seeds. As a result, the meat becomes fatty, with the skin turning yellow and very brittle when cooked. Guangzhou Restaurant’s version is cooked twice, steamed at first, then deboned, plated, and steamed again to heat it back up. It’s finished with a light, aromatic sauce of aged soy sauce and faintly salty and briny abalone. For those of you who stray away from the boring chicken options on a menu, one bite of this delicate, succulent Wenchang chicken will turn you into an evangelist. It’s even said that a Cantonese meal without traditional Wenchang chicken is really no meal at all.