Singapore, City Of Many Foods

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31539, 29 November 1967, Page 5

Singapore, City Of Many Foods

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter) SINGAPORE. Singapore, where two million people of half a dozen different races are crammed on an island 27 miles by 14 miles, must surely be one of the world’s greatest eating-houses.

Befitting its cosmopolitan population, Singapore has an unrivalled collection of restaurants, cafes, night clubs, hotels, bars, coffee shops, soda fountains and .eating stalls.

There Is a place for the gourmand, gastronome and glutton. The epicurean can take his pick of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Malay, Indonesian, Nonya, Russian, French, Italian, Swiss, English and American food. He can either spend a small fortune on the most exotic food or spend very little on simple, but still fascinating, fare.

Chinese cooking alone would keep the average gourmand busy for days. Immigrants from the different regions of China have brought their own distinctive styles of cooking to Singapore. There is Cantonese, probably the most widely-known throughout the world, Teochew (Swatow), Hakka, Hokkien, Hainanese and north

Chinese. Northern Chinese is sub-divided into its own groups with Tientsin, Szechaun, Peking and Shanghai styles.

The fare provided by Chinese restaurants and eating stalls covers everything from a 40-cent (about one shilling) bowl of rice to an expensive 14-course banquet including dove, bird’s nest, raw fish, “thousand-year old eggs,” shark’s fin, crab’s eggs, or baked chicken in lotus leaf. Chilli and Spices

Another favourite food comes from Malaya and Indonesia, and is mostly cooked in the Sumatran style. Known as Nasi Padang, it has as its base liberal amounts of chilli pepper and spices. The most popular dish is Satay, which consists of tenderised spiced chicken or beef, barbecued over hot charcoal and eaten with a spicy peanut sauce. Every night, one city sidestreet is transformed when hundreds of eating stalls are set up and the famous “Satay Club” takes over. Another Indonesian “must” is the Dutch-developed Rijsttafel. The early Dutch settlers in Java experimented with the many varieties of spices which they found there and added these to a basic dish of curried chicken and rice. Their experiments resulted in a masterpiece which includes curried chicken and

prawn, dried shrimps and whitebait, salted fish and vegetable marrow, prawn crackers, bananas, cabbage and beans, fried mutton, beef and prawns with spices, grated coconut, salted duck eggs, mixed vegetables in vinegar, and dozens of spices. For those who like to eat with their shoes off there are Japanese restaurants serving traditional meals in traditional tetami setting. Russian Fare For the vodka drinker there is caviar, chicken a la Kiev, beef Stroganoff and shaslik, at an assortment of Russian restaurants. The ingredients are flown from the Soviet Union and customers have a choice of atmosphere with Isha, Hatta and Odessa-styled decor representing in a very small degree various parts of the Russia of former days. The large hotels and many restaurants cater for those desiring French and English cuisine, and most hotels can provide visiting Americans with any amount of hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas and hot cakes.

For those wishing to savour their chianti in the proper setting, there are Italian restaurants owned and run by Italians and serving Neapolitan dishes such as pizzas and, of course, spaghetti. Indian restaurants abound, and various types of Indian 'food are available. The two

most popular are Indian Moslem and Brahmin vegetarian. With all this wealth of food to choose from, Singapore has still developed its own style of cooking. Known as Nonya, its basis is curry or chilli pepper with no relation to Indian, Malayan or Indonesian food. The man With simple tastes and a very big appetite can get a large, succulent, fresh Australian steak brought by air and then washed down with ice-cold Australian beer.