Travel log: Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)

I recently came back from a weekend trip to Kuala Lumpur (KL), which must have shaved a few years off my life. Nothing screams living in the moment more than binge drinking and indiscriminate consumption of unhealthy but delicious foods. Unfortunately for me that sounds like an apt description of much of my life.

KL is a popular destination for Singapore foodies, especially those in search of richer, more authentic hawker food. We set off for the trip armed with recommendations of what to eat, and over the three days and two nights it felt as though I was continually ingesting either food or drink. By the end I felt like I had aged considerably – such was our excess – but it was worth it, and then some.

Yet after all that it would be hard for me to say that KL food is better than Singapore’s; the stand-outs were, of course, memorable, but there was the odd mediocre dish. I didn’t eat enough to compare the average standards, so there is nothing left to do but make a second trip! And third, and fourth trips, of course.

Overseas Restoran (海外天)

Located near the fringes of the busy Bukit Bintang area, this sleepy little Chinese restaurant was the first stop we made, and filled us with nothing but excitement and anticipation for the rest of the trip. We arrived just a little bit before they opened for dinner, and walked in to see the waiters and cooks having their staff meal in a corner of the restaurant. They welcomed us with gracious smiles, apologised for not being ready to serve anyone yet, and asked if we were willing to sit down and drink some tea while waiting for the kitchen to start up again. Their inviting manner won us over, and we settled down for what became a leisurely wait for our food.

The roast meats are the specialty at Overseas Restoran – whose name became all the more appropriate when the waiter told us that the bulk of their business came not from locals but from out-of-towners coming in from Singapore and Hong Kong for a taste of their famous char siew. We had to get an order of that, and also picked the roast duck, but not before we opened our palates with a helping of herbal soup.


This was the char siew. Unbelievably fatty, and coated with a syrupy glaze of barbeque sauce. Clearly the concept of carcinogens had not entered the consciousness of the kitchen, for the exterior was covered in delicious black char. I got the same feeling as I did when I was dining at 2941 in DC and eating Mishima beef. Back then, I remember thinking that I was swallowing butter instead of chewing into muscle fibre – such was the tenderness of the beef – and also concluding that comparing it to normal beef was just inappropriate. This was in a whole different category. The same thing applied to the char siew at Overseas Restoran – it did not fit the preconceptions of char siew that I had, and as such comparison was unfair. It was very, very good though.


But the true star was the roast duck. I could not explain why and how this was so good. The exterior wasn’t crispy like how I usually like it; the meat was not tough, but yet not overly marbled with fat. But it was exquisitely seasoned, and everything was just done perfectly to create amazing bite-sized bursts of flavour and texture. I racked my brain to figure out what it was that was so special about the roast duck and still could not come up with an answer. I think sometimes you don’t have to have perfect technique, or execute everything with such precision; sometimes a dish cooked with care, and with the selfless conviction of providing pleasure to the diner can result in a very tasty meal indeed.

Wong Ah Wah

Our next stop for Part 2 of dinner that night was Jalan Alor, formerly the red light district but now a street of outdoor food stalls and restaurants. The “mamak stalls” never cease to amaze me – the entire workstation, including the stove top, is usually no wider than the armspan of an average person. And yet, standing in front of the stall and in all probability not moving his feet for the entire duration of the night, the average hawker can whip up a variety of meats, noodle dishes, vegetables. Jalan Alor is alive in the sense that you can feel the hunger in the air – the hunger of the people there who are in search of good food, on the cheap, in bustling, ramshackle environments. They just want to eat, and eat well.

(Just as an aside, why is it that all the good food always sprouts up around the red light districts, especially in Asian cities at least?)


These are the BBQ chicken wings at Wong Ah Wah at the end of Jalan Alor. The perfect marinate of honey and soy sauce, cooked over a charcoal fire. I thought they were delicious, but then again I think all wings are delicious. Buffalo wings, teriyaki wings, barbeque wings, they’re all good.


In the middle is spicy la-la, and in the foreground is kang kong. There is absolutely no combination like spicy food and cold beer. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I feel for people who do not eat spicy food, because they will never get to experience the immense satisfaction in numbing your taste buds with searing heat, before cooling them down with an ice cold beer. You don’t even need good beer, in fact the beer should in fact preferably be cheap and light. Just thinking about that combination makes me hungry.

Sek Yuen

For dinner the next night we went to Sek Yuen, another recommendation for good Cantonese tze char cuisine. Now this place is something else. It is legitimately stuck in a decade from long ago. And when I say long ago, I mean it. The restaurant takes up two shophouses, and one is clearly a later addition – it looks cleaner and is actually air-conditioned. But it is the other that I recommend eating at, for an experience tinged with history.

The feeling you get at Sek Yuen, apart from that of stepping into a time warp, is one of going to someone’s house for dinner. The staff all have that motherly/fatherly/grandmotherly/grandfatherly look, and are constantly scurrying around trying to anticipate your needs, as if you were a visitor from afar who had dropped in unannounced in hopes of a good meal. There is no menu, so you order what you want to eat, and if they can accommodate you they will. It is an interesting concept, and one that I wanted to take advantage of. But I figured that since it was our first (and only) time at the place, we should defer decision-making responsibility to the kitchen, and order what they felt to be their own specialties.


This place really should be a National Heritage Site of some sort.

You know the food is good when it is all gone and you realise that you have forgotten to take pictures. This is the only one I managed to snap, of the deep-fried garoupa in sweet and sour sauce - after we had devoured it, of course.


The standouts here include the fish dish that we had, and also a Cantonese staple of braised pork with yam slices. My mother loves this dish because when she first moved in with my dad and his family, this was one of the first dishes she ate that she had never tried before. My dad’s family’s maidservant at the time made this dish particularly well, and to this day it brings back fond memories for my mom, of her newly-wed days and the initial pages of what was a new chapter in her life. For my part I just like to eat it, so I am happy when anybody makes it for me. It is deceptively difficult to do well, just like all Chinese food, so when I find a good version I make a mental note of it.

We had a lot of other stops along the way too, but these I felt were the standouts. Perhaps I shall continue this in time to come, with a write-up of the other places we visited in KL. For now, I would recommend these places as must-tries for any visitor to KL.

"Crispy sells."

"Crispy sells."   - John Gibson

This is a maxim that I couldn't agree with more.  John, my former chef, used to say this from time to time and he was certainly correct, what's more, whichever menu item received this descriptor always sold like hot-cakes.  There's something about a crunchy crust giving way to a moist and succulent interior that gets my palate going, whether it's veal milanese, chicken wings, croquetas, fried sweetbreads, fish-cakes (particularly bolinhos de bacalhau), or my childhood favorite deep fried shrimp.

Surely deep frying is the easiest method of creating this crispy exterior.  However, I often find that the traditional trifecta of flour, egg, and breadcrumbs, while delicious, becomes oil soaked and heavy.  Happily I've found a couple of techniques for creating this crispy business in ways that are lighter and new (at least to me that is):

1) If you have the luxury of deep frying I particularly recommend a buttermilk batter.   This is very easy to prepare, dip item to be fried in some buttermilk and then into flour.  I've been doing it with 1/2 AP flour and 1/2 semolina flour and also with all AP Flour and I've found the semolina mix to be a bit lighter, though both are delicious.  It's very important to have extremely hot oil for this frying process or else the item will be overcooked before the batter is as crunchy as one would like.  I've tried it with bacalhau, shrimp, hake, zucchini flowers and sweetbreads, all to great satisfaction.

2) Dijon mustard is one of my favorite ingredients: I love its heat and its tang.  It is a great accompaniment to meats of all sorts and has endless uses as an emulsifier for sauces.  Recently I marinated some de-boned chicken legs with lots grainy Dijon, lemons, capers, garlic, thyme, chili flakes.  I heated my cast iron pan to smoking hot and slipped them in, skin side down.   At high heats the mustard caramelizes and the resulting crust and rendered skin creates a great textural contrast.  I recommend placing a weight of some sort on top of the item to make sure that all of the surface is touching the pan and thus quickly making a more even crust.

3) I don't have much experience with tahini, but I do now know that it creates a beautiful crust on a variety of foods.  At work lately we've been marinating quail with tahini, olive oil, lemons and smashed garlic cloves, salt and black pepper.  Put into a hot pan the tahini will turn a golden brown and have a charming toasted nutty flavor and aroma.  I think this could work very nicely with chicken as well, or maybe some sort of chopped chickpea cake.  On a lark we threw a couple of the quail into the deep fryer and ate them as a snack with hot sauce to make a gourmet chicken wing.  Very delicious.

Prune, NYC

Had at Prune:

Marinated white anchovies, celery hearts, marcona almonds

Capon in Aspic, chive mayo, red leaf lettuce

Lamb shoulder chop, rice beans with an egg/citrus dressing, green garlic

Vanilla trifle, whipped cream, sour cherries, lady fingers

A very good meal.

The Peace Hotel

Wo Peng Eatery (和平饭店)
476 MacPherson Road
Tel: +65 6747 9892

The one thing a good foodie cannot do without is a network of reliable fellow foodies. In a city of any size, new gems open up with incredible frequency, and old favourites lose their lustre from time to time. Without a cadre of scouts it is nigh-on impossible to keep track of the goings-on in Singapore’s culinary scene. However, maintaining such a network is not without its difficulties. First and foremost, not all foodies are created equal. It is tough to find one, let alone a few, to match your own exacting standards and ideas of quality. At the same time, you also want to maintain some diversity within your network. For example, I don’t often go out of my way to try Japanese and Korean food, so I need someone who does so regularly to keep me updated on the good places to go. One needs a network to cover all cuisines, in all locations and neighbourhoods, across all price points.

Victor sent me a message the other day that was uncharacteristically full of exclamation points – claiming that he had discovered a gem in MacPherson. I was initially sceptical, for MacPherson is a sleepy industrial estate that was once littered with manufacturing plants – most of which have since exited the area in search of cheaper rents. But the idea of finding good food in such a forlorn place was a romantic one, and I fell even further in love with the idea once he told me it was Cantonese cuisine cooked by a master chef from Hong Kong. I made a reservation immediately, and spent a good hour scouring the Internet for reviews.

Most of the press on Wo Peng Eatery is very good. The basics are simple and can be found in any blog or press clipping: Julian Tam, who used to cook at the Furama Palace before leaving to open a restaurant chain in Guangzhou, made a triumphant return to Singapore last year when he heard about an open shop space. The resulting eatery pushes out hotel restaurant-worthy cuisine masqueraded as tze char and served in an undistinguished setting.

At first, I wasn’t sure whether or not to place a reservation but did so anyway. It turned out to be irrelevant, in a bad way. We arrived about ten minutes late – (a warning: it is difficult to find parking) – and the person who greeted us had no clue of any reservations made. Upon checking their (handwritten) logbook and finding our reservation, she informed us that there were no available tables. To her credit, she was pretty apologetic about the whole situation, but it still was pretty annoying. What is the whole point of making a reservation, then, if the front of the house is not going to make sure there is a table for you at the time you stipulated? To compound matters, there is no space or seating for you to wait, either in or out of the eatery.

Fortunately for us, business had began to slow – it was approaching 9 o’clock – and it was only another ten minutes before a table opened up. You cannot say that Wo Peng has a spartan décor, but yet you cannot say that it is thoughtfully decorated either. The entire place takes up two shophouse units, has blockish beige walls adorned with lucky Chinese couplets and photos of the chef with many celebrities (a very Asian thing). It is only when they set the table that I realise that this humble eatery has restaurant pretensions – for all its faults Wo Peng does have some good cutlery.

The menu is simple and limited, and from the selection it is again evident that this is no simple tze char place. For one: the soups. These came highly recommended both by Victor and the blogosphere, and we ordered two to try – first the shark cartilage soup with hua jiao, and then a herbal soup with ming mu yu. The shark cartilage soup was excellent, with just a slight taste of ammonia from the shark cartilage but otherwise masked and countered perfectly with the hua jiao. The other soup was also hearty and delicious. My only complaint was that while the former arrived at the start of our meal, the latter only arrived towards the tail end, and only after our prodding of the waitstaff. I like to drink soup before the main course, so this was another on the list of grievances.

The deep-fried fish skin pieces were also excellent – wafer-thin and fried to a crisp. They came with a bowl of superior stock topped with chives, which made for an excellent complement. The simple kai lan (kale) with lean pork slices was fiery and had good wok hei. This was a simple dish that showcased the skill of the kitchen – the kai lan had been blanched to remove its bitterness, but not for so long that it lost its texture. And the masterful use of chilli pepper was impressive given that the chef was not local. For a foreign chef to appreciate the exact nature of the local palate’s inclination towards spice can only imply a curious mind behind the hands at the wok – for, clearly, Singaporean spice is different from Szechuan spice, and much different from the spice in Yue cooking. We also had a dish of braised garoupa head with eggplant and tofu, which was very well executed, save for the unfortunate fact that the eggplant had been cooked to the point where it had lost its texture and flavour.

The big disappointment for the night was the lobster ee mee., which had, again, come highly recommended. The waitstaff that brought the dish out forgot to present the dish at the table and hurried straight to the serving table by the side to begin dividing it up into individual portions. A terrible faux pas that would not be condoned at any good restaurant, but since we were in much humbler surroundings we did not kick up a fuss. Yet when the noodles arrived they were almost unedible, for they had been tossed in too much butter. I never thought I would write those three words together, but now I have. We made our feelings known to the waitress, and were informed that you can request for less butter, or no butter at all. Good information for next time, but a lesson that came at a cost: at $15 a head, the lobster ee mee is not a cheap dish.

The saving grace of the lobster ee mee was a side note that came as a great surprise – for I ate the dish with some of the house-pickled green chillies, which were excellent. Wo Peng also provides house-made sambal that is a little heavy on the dried shrimp, but nonetheless has good flavour and spice. At least these details were well taken care of.

To me, Wo Peng operates at a very strange price point. It is not cheap, by any means, which implies that they are not competing with the cheaper tze char places. And yes, it may not ordinarily be as expensive as the top restaurants, but if you order the big-ticket items you can actually come close. The question then is – wouldn’t most people who are already paying that much for a meal then throw on a little more cash and head to a nice hotel restaurant with a similar if not better quality of food, but much better service and surroundings? The things that Wo Peng has in its favour would then be its neighbourhood feel, and portion size (you do get slightly bigger portions here than at top restaurants). Yet still it is a dangerous space to work in - when people are either thinking of a weekday dining out option because they are lazy to cook, or racking their brains for a destination on a special occasion: it is hard to see Wo Peng at the forefront of anyone's mind.

There is no question that you will have a good meal at Wo Peng, the chef is too skilled for that not to happen. Yet its restaurant pretensions are cruelly exposed. It is the various processes essential to a restaurant’s operations that separate the men from the boys: the big houses have these nailed down, where the pretenders often struggle. If the front of house operations can live up to the food that comes out of the kitchen, this place has a chance to become a Singapore staple despite its less-than-favourable location.

"Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."

For New Yorkers, going to Chinatown must feel like a surreal experience. Block upon block of signage in a foreign hand, streets teeming with Asians and their quick-fire bursts in a foreign language – it must feel somewhat like setting foot in another country. Strangely enough, in Singapore – which is predominantly Chinese – going to Chinatown has a somewhat similar effect.

Chinatown in Singapore refers to the Telok Ayer / Kreta Ayer district, just off the Central Business district (CBD), and in some loose definitions stretches up to the Bukit Pasoh and Duxton areas nearer Cantonment and Tanjong Pagar. Architecturally there is a lot of history here, since it was one of the first few urban areas to be built up in Singapore. There are traces of Singapore’s pre-war colonialism still reflected in the baroque, almost Italianate, shophouses, but the use of slit windows and the preference for pastels may be uniquely local.

But it is the thronging masses of people here that make Chinatown unique. The demographic tends to skew largely older, and many senior citizens over 60 keep making their regular pilgrimage to their favourite restaurant or market stall week-in, week-out. Conversations are conducted largely in dialects, with Cantonese being predominant, giving the younger, cosmopolitan Singaporean the same feeling that the New Yorker gets in his Chinatown – one of foreign-ness. It also doesn’t help that streets are narrow and there are typically large crowds of people willing to fight through other people to get where they are going.

Yet there is a lot of good food in Chinatown, and most of it is cheap. (Just like how the people there are stuck in the 60s or 70s, so are the prices.) Many household names like Ka-Soh originated in this area before moving away, and others like Da Dong are still going strong. These are the restaurants with tradition in Singapore, serving Cantonese cuisine the way it should be done and the way they have been doing it for decades now. I was in Chinatown for brunch one day and hit up some of not all of my favourites.

Smith St Market / Food Centre

My mother gets her fresh fish here, and we usually stop by the cooked food centre, which has several hidden gems. One of the things we always get is XO 鱼片米粉 (yupianmifen – Vermicelli with Fish Slices), which they do a very good job of here. I have no idea what the name of the stall is, but I could find my way there from the elevator blindfolded. They add a lot of ginger, and use XO in the cooking process in addition to just topping the finished product off with it, so you get a very hearty, savoury soup.

One of the Cantonese classics that I have a particularly soft spot for is soya sauce chicken, and there is a stall here called Ming Kee that is worth the long lines for. Tender, roasted chicken parts marinated in a house-secret soy sauce, served over noodles or rice – Ming Kee does the basics and does them well enough to attract a constant line of folks desperate for their fix. It is a shade inferior to the soya sauce chicken at 126 Beer Garden in Joo Chiat, but the noodles are particularly good, and the chef cooks them to perfect al dente doneness (or in Hong Kong lingo: QQ). They also make soup from scratch, with lots of red dates and black wood fungus, and both the skin and the filling of their handmade dumplings are top-notch.

Liang Chen Mei Dian

One of the areas in which Singapore is miles behind Hong Kong is the standard of their baked goods and pastries. Hong Kong has their custard buns and their egg tarts and bo luo baos, and nothing we have here even come close. Even our imitations of the Hong Kong classics come nowhere near either. But there is a shop in Chinatown, on Sago St, which has absolutely fantastic egg tarts; and the rest of the pastries they have aren’t too shabby either. It is hard to talk up an egg tart because the finished product is so simple, but the good ones have a sweet but not overly cloying taste, a smooth, rich and creamy textured filling, and flaky butter-filled pastry. The kind of butter you use also is critically important in making egg tarts (and really, in all pastry) – you need one with a high butterfat content.

Words are not enough, so here are a couple of pictures.



Lim Chee Guan

I remember craving bak gua during my first year abroad at college, and my mother – in her infinite graciousness – sent me a care package with some bak gua vacuum-packed and hidden under a scarf. I did not know how to describe this to my friends at school, so I told them it was a pork jerky. Simon in particular went crazy over it, and with good reason. Bak gua is so sinfully delicious that it needs no description, and Lim Chee Guan is – in my opinion – the best version around in Singapore. No trip to Chinatown would be complete without a trip here.

I felt a little out of place in Chinatown the first time I went there after moving back, but I am glad to say that that is slowly fading. The bustle, the noise, elbows in your face, and the terrible service at restaurants – these are now more likely to put a smile on my face than irritate me. If only it weren’t so hard to find parking.

The Chicken Rice Capital of The World

Mention chicken rice to any Singaporean and it is likely that you elicit a paean to what many consider the national dish of Singapore (there are surprisingly many of those). Originating from the island of Hainan, from which many immigrants made their way to Singapore – the dish is simplicity itself. Whole chickens are boiled in a pork and chicken bone stock liberally laced with cloves of garlic and ginger. Separately, rice is prepared with a similar chicken stock – resulting in an oily but intensely flavourful rice. Both chicken and rice are served together, typically with slices of cucumber and soup broth derived from the stock. It is also common to eat this with chilli sauce and dark soya sauce as dipping condiments.

Because of its simplicity, I am of the opinion that there are no bad versions of this dish in Singapore. You just wouldn’t be in business otherwise – the competition would weed you out. You can’t compete on price because chicken rice is so commoditised that it is cheap almost everywhere. There are mediocre ones, sure, but you would have to know your stuff to tell them apart. And even then, the less fussy among us would definitely still eat those versions gladly.

The good versions, though, are a joy to eat, and take care in the preparation of all the different elements of the dish: the chicken, the rice, the chilli sauce, the soya sauce and the soup. I count myself very fortunate in the fact that in the immediate vicinity of my office there are several stars of the chicken rice world. As if lunchtime decisions weren’t difficult enough. But you don’t see me complaining.

Chin Chin

Chin Chin is located near the end of Purvis St, a (comparatively) large eating house always bustling at meal-times. If I had to pick a representative chicken rice as a first-time experience for anyone, this might be it. Both their boiled and roasted chicken are very good without being spectacular, the soup is very tasty, and the rice decent enough. Neither the rice nor the meats are overly oily, and the portions enough to satisfy without being too much. They also have evolved into a more typical tze char place and have a wider menu of alternative and side dishes than the other places on this review. Almost everything is decent to good, and I have rarely been disappointed going here. A trusty fallback with efficient service.

Yet Con

Directly across the street from Chin Chin, this is an old-school, more traditional Hainanese eating house. The furniture and the décor are both stuck in decades past, and the old man at the counter still insists on tabulating your total bill with the use of an abacus. You feel as if you’ve stepped into a time warp. But no matter what time of day you go there, there is often always a line, and with good reason. Yet Con is a little more traditionally Hainanese in that they use older birds, which tend to be springier and have a stronger poultry taste. Not everybody likes this: the Cantonese tend to like younger birds, which have more tender meat; and most palates in Singapore have been attuned to the milder, more agreeable taste of these younger birds. Yet Con also only does their chicken one style – boiled in stock – so there are no options of the roasted variety or other braised meats. But they do have an assortment of great Hainanese side dishes, including a spectacular Hainanese pork chop in tomato sauce; and the soup they provide with your meal is good and strong and has no hint of MSG or bouillon – which sadly happens to be a common shortcut taken by many others.

Old Swee Kee

There are names, and then there are names. Long before marketing became a management discipline, one brand stood head and shoulders above the rest in chicken rice hawker history. Swee Kee is to chicken rice what Chanel is to haute couture and Cartier is to timepieces: an affirmation of history, tradition and above all, excellence. But the word on the street is that the original Swee Kee clan has long since exited the business and hung up their cleavers, leaving a network of disciples, former cooks and distant relatives to carry on the tradition. And banking on the name is not such a bad idea – I am sure many of the people who come here are drawn by its allure. Old Swee Kee is located on Seah St across from Raffles Hotel – another venerable name in Singapore’s history, but I am unsure of its origins and its connection to the the real Swee Kee. Yet the stall is never very crowded, and from the one time I went there I could see why. All the components of the dish here are quite ordinary – not bad, but just ordinary. And in the chicken rice world, ordinary is a big sin.

Sin Swee Kee

Literally the “New Swee Kee”, this is located down the street from Old Swee Kee and has done a little better. It’s the age-old sales trick of bundling a good product with a bunch of other useless ones to increase revenue. I say this in jest, but in actual fact Sin Swee Kee does offer a “degustation” of chicken together with other various side dishes for parties of 4, 5, or 6. I’m not sure if you can order a la carte, and of the side dishes that I have tried, none have been spectacular apart from the steamed egg, and really, how hard can that dish be? In any case, the chicken here is very decent, and they provide ground garlic laced with spring onions that is a very delectable condiment indeed. The rice is somewhat lacklustre, and the soup almost devoid of flavour, but if you’re not a stuck-up snob like I am, you would enjoy this place very much.

I may have been harsher on the latter two stalls, but in actual fact if you take them in comparison with any other chicken rice versions across the island, I am sure they would be up there. But competition is stiff in the Bugis / City Hall area, and sometimes even good is not good enough. Objectively, I think the best version of chicken rice in Singapore is Tian Tian at Maxwell Hawker Centre; and personally my favourite is the chicken rice on the fifth floor of Far East Shopping Centre, but the versions around my workplace leave me no shortage of very respectable options if ever I crave this dish.

Random mobile uploads

132 mee pok in Siglap, one of the few reasons I am glad to be alive.


A "mantou" at Kim Moh all by its lonely self, after we have polished off the rest of them.


"White" Lor Mee at a Tsinghua coffeeshop in Little India.


Having a beer at Paulaner.


There is so much more fruit in my diet now, I love it.


Longans.


Durians.


Loosely translated as "Saliva Chicken".

The Golden Goose

Yung Kee
32-40 Wellington St
Central, Hong Kong
+852 2522 1624

Almost every culture, every cuisine – wherever in the world you go – has roasted meat of some form. There is something decidedly primal about this, and despite it being theoretically such a simple task – applying heat to meat – it has inspired a wide variety of styles and techniques. From Texas to Tokyo, wood fires to charcoal fires, perhaps the only common denominator is the love of food.

I was recently in Hong Kong for work, and made a trip to Yung Kee. An “establishment” restaurant famous for its roast goose, Yung Kee has been around since World War II and has made the transformation from sidewalk “dai pai dong” to multi-level banquet ball. It is one of those places that generates lots of commentary, some good and some bad; and this has increased exponentially ever since the Michelin Guide awarded it one star. But I noticed that even the people who rail against it and how its standards have slipped often still wind up going there anyway – so I knew it was worth a shot.

Yung Kee is housed in a grand building on the outskirts of Lan Kwai Fong, an area littered with bars and dominated by expatriates. Apparently you get seated – depending on how important you are or how regular a customer – on different floors within the building. The 4th floor VIP area is the most desirable, followed by the ground floor, which is in full view of the street. If you are unlucky enough to get banished to the second or third floors, not only should you expect inferior service but also inferior food. In Yung Kee as in many large Chinese restaurants, this customer segmentation happens very often. Because the average Chinese restaurant does hundreds if not thousands of covers each night, only a small portion of the food is actually prepared, or even passes through the hands of the head chef. The likelihood of your food being prepared by the head, or even the senior chefs, corresponds to where you are seated. That is why locals are so picky about where they sit. As a rule of thumb, if you see any expatriates in your section, always ask to be reseated.

By a stroke of luck, we were sent to the 4th floor even though we were by no means important – much less very important. But we were not complaining. We sat in the general area, facing a wall of doors that led to private rooms; and every time those doors were opened for food to be brought in, I could see and hear much merriment, and half-expected a celebrity to walk out. What recession, indeed. The restaurant was not short on customers, hustling and bustling with families, couples and all manner of food enthusiasts. There is a certain look to the true local Hong Konger - people whose families have been in HK for generations – and almost everyone on the 4th floor had that look.

Ordering tea in a Chinese restaurant when it is the first time you are eating with your dining companions is always tricky. I like to drink puer or tieguanyin; but those are not always to everyone’s tastes. Jasmine tea is always a good compromise, but the lowest common denominator is chrysanthemum. Now, I like chrysanthemum tea, but I get mildly annoyed when I have to drink it when there are other more delicious options available. In my mind, chrysanthemum is for children who have not acquired the taste for more refined teas.

But it is the roast goose we are there for – and it does not disappoint. Goose is similar in taste to duck, but typically fattier and gamier. Yung Kee’s version is smothered in a sweet plum sauce and served on a bed of soy beans. The meat is moist, with just enough fibre to make you chew, and the glossy, lacquered skin is this side short of sinful.


In the background of the photo is their suckling pig, which was decent as well. You can always judge Cantonese restaurants by their roast meats, and for some it seems as though there isn’t much else worth eating. The tofu dish that we ordered was mildly disappointing; I think you have to go to mainland China or Taiwan for good tofu. But everything else was well executed, and while the meal was not earth-shattering one could hardly find fault with it. We ordered a dish of steamed egg with conpoy that convinced me once again, if I had needed any convincing, that simplicity is always better.

The service was calm and efficient, which was quite admirable given that it often seems nigh-on impossible to retain your calm working in an environment like the average Chinese restaurant. The captain who attended to us had a perpetual look of placid composure on her face, and attended to our every need smartly and wordlessly. It made me smile to myself just imagining her walking through the doors leading to the kitchen and yelling at the runners for her food, which I have little doubt she did once out of sight.

When all was said and done there were no regrets visiting Yung Kee. It could have been better, but it also could have been a lot worse. Prices were high, but not high enough to call them exorbitant. If anything, this Hong Kong institution is worth visiting just for the roast goose alone. Just remember to decline if you are asked to sit on the second or third floors.

UPDATE: Another picture:

My kingdom for a Wallaby yogurt!

When I first left Singapore for the US to go to college, it took me a while before I noticed that my diet had fundamentally changed. I suppose I was still a growing boy – concerned with quantity over quality, and blissfully oblivious to the impact of such a diet change to my physique and physiology. That’s right, I’m blaming Nature for putting on so much weight. But about eight or nine months into college, I noticed just what a drastic change I had wrought in the food I was putting in my mouth – and its effect on me.

There was the weight gain, obviously. But fundamentally I had gone from a place where carbohydrates were the focus of the meal (starches like rice and noodles) to one where proteins were the main focus. I ate my vegetables raw (if at all) instead of cooked, and my intake of fruits dropped drastically. It proved surprisingly difficult to get fresh fruit in Providence. I’m not sure how this affected my body, but I’m sure it must have.

I say that because I an undergoing the reverse change right now, and I am now more acutely aware of how I am adjusting to the Singaporean diet. After such an extended period of time away – most of it spent eating well – there are things that I am slowly getting used to again. There is the spice, for example. I am relearning to love eating everything topped with red or green chillies pickled in soy sauce. Cooks here also tend to season everything on a sweeter note, which was comfortingly familiar when I first returned, but now takes some wrestling with. Little things – but for some reason I am so much more aware of them now.

And there are also some things I’ve left behind that I miss. I miss a good sandwich. There are many times when I say to myself that I could really go for a nice sandwich, some honey mustard, chips and a bottle of Nantucket Nectars Big Cranberry juice. And there isn’t a lot of cheese in the Singaporean diet, so I miss that too. But one of the things that I miss the most is Wallaby organic yogurt.

Hunter first introduced me to Wallaby yogurt, and I think he succeeded where I failed subsequently because he did the soft sell on me. Later when I became a fan of the yogurt I would literally grab people by the arm and yell at them to try this yogurt. I don’t think I converted very many people that way. But I remember Hunter telling me, almost offhandedly, that Matthew had turned him on to a new brand of yogurt and it was good. That was all he said. A few days later I was at Whole Foods when I saw the yogurt he was talking about and bought a couple to try, on a whim. I didn’t look back.

According to their website, Wallaby yogurt was inspired by the creators’ visit to Australia (hence the name) and the creamy-style yogurt that is apparently available there. The difference, allegedly, is that gelatins are not added to Wallaby yogurt to thicken it, but instead it undergoes a slow cooking process to give it a smooth, creamy texture.

Back in the days when I was working from home, I would have a Wallaby yogurt most days for breakfast. One of the amazing things about yogurt is that it is a multi-task enabler. You don’t have to be in one place to eat it, and you certainly don’t have to focus to enjoy it. Come to think of it, I was almost always doing something else while eating Wallaby yogurt. I ate it while reading the paper, or my email. I ate it while leisurely strolling out to get the mail. I ate it as I paced around my living room, talking on the phone. I ate it standing up in the kitchen, sometimes with the refrigerator door still ajar. One of my favourite parts was carefully, meticulously scraping the bottom of the cup to get every last drop of the yogurt, and then licking the back of the spoon.

I liked the single flavour ones the best (peach, blueberry, lemon) but the more exotic and mixed ones weren’t too shabby either. The creamy mouthfeel is hard to beat; and they were all just sweet enough, no more and no less, unlike most commercial fruit-flavoured yogurts that are too sweet for me.

There is nothing in Singapore that comes close.