Location: 36 Purvis Street #01-02, Singapore 188613
Taste-type: Italian
Price: Mains between about $25 and $50 SGD.
How to get there: MRT to City Hall, then a quick walk just up and across from Raffles Hotel.
Contact: 65-68371468
It is my last night in the Lion City and I am practising my listening face. I am eating and listening – or, to be more exact, presenting the façade of aural attention – and also, because I consider myself the Perfect Ninja and thus more capable of multi-tasking than mere mortals, thinking a little on the side. I am thinking about Garibaldi, one of the new breed of slickly Western fine dining establishments to germinate in Singapore’s urban centre, thinking about what has happened – is happening – to the country in which, once upon a time, a little Ninja was born and bled. I am thinking and listening, afraid of what I might hear.
I listen to the food, and it saddens me. All I hear are lacklustre echoes of some pre-packaged, streamlined vision of an Italy which might have never existed, bland lashings of sauces as a sort of stylish afterthought, meats and fish cooked out of their saving juices. And food is but a symptom of greater things. When I perch atop the tallest industrial parapets of the city, I hear a perpetual hum of teetering excitement, the whine of fast cars and trills of fashionably dressed women. I hear the screams of progress on the winds.
Where has the old Singapore gone? Was it ever real, or just a hallucination etched into a few steel girders and the concrete slabs beneath the Merlion? I cannot call this my country with any justice, and I cannot say for sure. All I can do is listen, to taxi drivers who prophesy the decay of the once-deified ruling class, to hawkers whose grief-drawn eyes belie their smiles and raucous laughter. I am told that sometimes when people listen, they weep.
Instead of shedding tears, I seek out the taste of a hallucinatory past in an empty shopping mall, a simple finish to a whirlwind mission. It may be as fake as everything else, but it still tastes good.
Verdict: I like kaya toast.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
i like kaya toast too. and i weep.
I weep that in the City of the Merlion they have special bags just for Kaya Toast and we can’t even get the damn things for sale anywhere in the CBD, I resort to bringing my own Kaya in a plastic bag.
You cannot master the way of the ninja without first learning the art of weeping
Sometimes when I think of the small, individual food vendors that no longer exist, I weep. Everything has been mass chain-ified and though it creates ‘consistency’, the food once created with love, care and bags of flavour are no more.
When the Ninja has no kaya toast to eat, he practises his kaya face.