Bedok Corner

In Singapore, I have the great fortune of living right by a popular mosque.

What this means is, the closest hawker center to me — a rather small one named Bedok Corner Food Centre — is a veritable smorgasmord of incredible Malay food. From dawn to past dinner time, there are stalls there selling hearty Malay noodle soup breakfasts, turmeric fried chicken lunches, satay and more. While lunch and dinner are always delicious, my favorite meal there is breakfast.

I love walking in when the place is still a little sleepy — you can smell the chicken that’s just been fried; some hawkers have commandeered whole tables and are hunched over benches peeling potatoes and chopping onions.

My favorite Malay breakfast, mee soto, is offered at not one but five stalls. After hopping around and sampling versions from two or three over the years, I finally decided to analytically work my way through the lot and decide once and for all which one I liked best.

And so it began bright and early this morning. First stop: Sinaran Cahaya Bedok Corner …

[Read more…]

Anyone who knows me even for a nanosecond usually picks up fairly quickly on the fried chicken fanatic that I am.

Besides noodles (and perhaps meatloaf), fried chicken is just about my favorite food. And the kind that I tend to crave is Asian fried chicken, specifically Malay or Indonesian, which usually is marinated in a melange of Southeast Asian spices — turmeric, ginger, cumin, coriander and more — before getting deep-fried to crisp perfection.

While this may be fairly hard to find in my adoptive home of New York City, there’s a plethora of it in Singapore — especially, lucky for me, at the closest hawker center to my family’s home on the country’s idyllic east coast. At the cosy Bedok Corner Food Centre, there is not one but four excellent stalls, all side by side, serving nasi ayam penyet, an Indonesian dish of crispy spicy chicken that’s been smashed for greater tenderness right before serving.

So when I was sitting at home in Singapore today, daydreaming about the perfect lunch, the decision was easy …

[Read more…]

Sinaran Cahaya Bedok Corner (Singapore): So-So Mee Soto

Nur Indah Kitchen (Singapore): Indonesian Fried Chicken Perfection