efficient. safe. protected. controlled. a utopian city-state run like a multinational company. welcome to singapore incorporated. this beautiful world felt the cool rain on my shoulder found something good in this beautiful world i felt the rain getting colder shchlt ah la la la la sha la la la singapore. one could be forgiven for thinking it s a giant, ultramodern shopping mall. an interconnected, fully wired, air-conditioned nanny state, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. and those things are kind of true, especially if you read the papers or the carefully monitored internet. you look around the litterless streets where everything seems to work just fine, just fine. and you think, or you could be forgiven for thinking, gee, maybe a one-party system is just what we need. you look at all the social problems and ethnic strife, street crime, drugs that singapore has managed to avoid, and you could think, is this the life we want? it ain t my sy
Recently, Parminder Singh, Google’s ex-MD, took to X (formerly Twitter) and shared a photo of a Peranakan lunch, which made everyone intrigued about the same. But, what drew major attention was the ‘Blue Basmati Rice’ that was made using blue pea flowers. If you also want to know more about this cuisine and its connection to India, then read below…
For years, chef Malcolm Lee's restaurant Candlenut struggled. At one point, he wondered if he'd made a mistake, but he doubled down on Peranakan cooking and a cuisine he saw disappearing.
much effort in it, right. where is the prestige in a peranakan restaurant? you work in the kitchen 12, 14, 15 hours a day, you know, and most of them don t want to do that. so what happens is that they want to work in a french restaurant, they want to work in an italian restaurant. why? because they get more money. okay. okay? i think it s a tactical mistake, because i just flew halfway around the world to singapore, and i sure as am not eating french food when i m here. no, you re right. and you know what? you shouldn t. i m not going to eat japanese food. no, you shouldn t. so you talk about peranakan cuisine, right, and are there people that cook it today? i can tell you, out of 100 peranakans, maybe one. whoa. maybe one. so you re saying that, basically, you re talking about the dinosaurs? yeah, this no longer exists
Restaurants in Singapore have revived old recipes from the city state and the other islands of Southeast Asia, conjuring diners’ nostalgia for dishes their grandmothers used to make.