Jonathan's Spontaneous Travels: 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.