Thursday, June 20, 2013

First day food roundup

Quite productive.  Started off with kaya toast and strong coffee with sweetened condensed milk at Tong Ah, a coffee shop in Chinatown where you sit on plastic chairs on the sidewalk.  I then headed 3 blocks away to Tian Tian for Hainan chicken rice, and discovered to my pleasant surprise that it was in something called the Maxwell Food Centre, which is an open-air food court with up to 100 hawker food stalls.  So it's pretty much the greatest place ever.  And even more so because I got fresh passionfruit-pineapple juice, basically my favorite part of traveling somewhere tropical is the prevalence of passionfruit.  I topped that off with a fried whole banana fritter at a mall food court along Orchard Road.  I tried to get a dessert of glutinous rice with mango and coconut sauce from another stand, but they were temporarily out of glutinous rice.

Then while out walking, I discovered I was right next to a Din Tai Fung, which is an opportunity you simply don't pass up.  So I took a pit stop and got some crab and pork xiaolongbao and some angled gourd and shrimp dumplings, an item I hadn't seen before.

After walking through Bras Basah I stopped in for some popiah at Qi Li (and some more kaya toast, which was actually better than at Tong Ah).  That lasted me until a late dinner of Muslim food, chicken murtabak and nasi goreng at Singapore Zam Zam, both of which were excellent.  Oh, and I also got reservations at Iggy's for lunch tomorrow, to fulfill the obligatory gourmet part of the trip.

Overall this came together pretty easily and I didn't really suffer for a lack of planning.  A solicitation for food tips on social media yielded a lot of good responses in just a few hours (thank you awesome friends), and then after spending about 15 minutes plotting these on a Google Map, I was good to go for the day.

Kaya toast and coffee at Tong Ah

Sidewalk seating at Tong Ah

Maxwell Food Centre

Passionfruit-pineapple juice

Hainan chicken rice from Tian Tian

Fried whole banana fritter

Crab and pork xiaolongbao from Din Tai Fung

Angled gourd and shrimp dumplings from Din Tai Fung

Popiah from Qi Li

Popiah cross section

Chicken murtabak from Singapore Zam Zam

Nasi goreng from Singapore Zam Zam

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