Taste-full Tour Of TiongBahru

by - September 24, 2017

I recently visited an extensively trodden place called Singapore and yet, yet I have an ‘off-the-tread experience’ to share… Firstly, it was a work trip which does not warrant packing an SLR, still I did… secondly I have my besties staying in that city and so looking up for ‘places to see’ is not required, still I looked up… thirdly such searches land you up at Universal Studios, Sentosa and Marina, still I did not land up there… I just landed myself in Singapore, opened my Mac, deleted all the browser cookies, connected to a local wifi, signed out of Google, changed the local time and erased my identity for the ‘virtual’ world, then searched for ‘things to do’ in Singapore [my self-discovered tip to find the local charms!!] :-)) Next I picked up a map, a folded paper map which opens up to cover almost entire study table and circled the places I wanted to visit… this is the way I have learnt to ‘read’ cities and the ‘google maps’ don’t come to my aid here at all...

Going by the map, me and my equally enthusiastic friend decided to hit the farthest place first and sprung out of the hotel early that Saturday morning… After a cup of strong coffee to shed the slumber and quite a few MRT stations later we reached Tiong Bahru… the main ‘attraction’ that had brought us here was the local market and the local food… with it came an expectation of a noisy, glittery area to wade through [thanks to the evening before at China Town]… to our pleasant surprise, Tiong Bahru was a quaint little suburb, with narrower roads [comparison is with other areas of Singapore ofcourse !] and lined with two storied houses giving an old-world rustic feel… a mild drizzle, just a handful of people walking around, whiff of coffee [or kopi as they say] from the small roadside cafes, soothing music that they played, helped us ease into this gorgeous town of Tiong Bahru… The cafes were also an assortment of everything from Pan-Asian to Continental to American… but we were looking forward to the ‘local’ food and had to resist their aromatic pull..
A quiet walk across a few blocks from MRT brought us to the market that we had set out to explore… this is a two storied market, lower level being the ‘wet market’ as locals call it and upper level being the eat-out area [food court as we call it]… the best test to find how deep-in-the-country-side you have gone is to count the number of fellow Indians around you, or lets say tourists around you… this was no country-side, just a local-market, still not a single Indian we encountered there in our three hour long excursion with food and other ‘substances’... that was an assurance enough of being where we intended to...

With such a plethora of food on offer, their descriptions written in Mandarin or Cantonese [I am not sure and did not bother either], it was going to be fun… You cannot trust your digestive system to eat what the locals were eating there… But if you follow the search tip above, you will come across some useful blogs by the city residents which can come real handy… one such blog had recommendations on the food stalls in Tiong Bahru… [http://danielfooddiary.com/2014/05/05/tiongbahru/]… The fish balls, the fritters, the rice cakes, the tangy sauces were all a delight to our ever-starved souls, highlight of the food being Chwee Kueh, [even after savouring, we could not believe was a vegetarian dish], is all about soft rice cakes topped with radish… I have never had any radish dish as tasty as that, ok frankly I have never found any taste in this vegetable called radish before that… Chwee Kueh was out of the world though!!
Whats a local meal without washing it down with a local drink? And being a coffee enthusiast, went straight for a Kopi stall… a special Kopi was brewed for us over an elaborate conversation on Singaporean Kopi, its origins from Indonesia, and the various forms it takes with Kopi-O, Kopi-C and 15+ variants… while black coffee, iced coffee, with/without sugar, with/without milk are familiar terms, I was particularly thrilled with Kopi with ‘condensed milk’ and one with ‘evaporated milk’… I settled for condensed milk version and loved it totally… [so much that now my refrigerator at home stocks up condensed milk to add to my black coffee occasionally]…

Downright satiated, we climbed down to the lower floor, the wet market… the market was full of ‘substances’ of all sorts… and I use that word because I have no freaking clue of many of the items I saw on display there… be it various kinds of raw meat cut out neatly [not sure if chicken or turkey or fish or something else altogether], of various colorful liquids [not sure if they were pastes or syrups or sauces], of heaps of colorful foods [again not sure if they were fruits or vegetables or some unknown condiment], of assorted powders [could be herbs or spices or as one display read ‘for chinese naturopathy’]… it was quite an overwhelming experience to walk through the mysterious and the unknown… all we managed to pick up confidently from that market was fresh grounded coffee, a mix of Arabica beans and Indonesian beans… Every morning now when I have a cup of that coffee, the aroma fills up my home and brings with it a dash of memoirs of this resplendent charm of Singapore – Tiong Bahru…

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