Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

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Gayatri Restaurant: One For The Road


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Your last meal in any city is no small matter, I’ve always believed.

It’s the meal you might still be able to taste as you look out at the diminishing skyline from the plane; the one that you’ll be thinking of to tide you over until you return again.

During my most recent trip to Singapore for book research, where to have my last supper was a particularly hard decision.

I’d eaten well. In just a few weeks, I’d clocked not one but two visits to Hock Lam for the umami bomb that is its gooey beef ball noodles. I’d trekked to the seafront Changi Village to sample the nasi lemak, a Malay dish of coconut rice with a fried chicken wing, sambal chili, fried egg and crunchy anchovies, from a hawker stall I loved but hadn’t visited in over 10 years. And I’d had a lovely lunch at Iggy’s, a high-end restaurant that served up a custard-like French toast dessert topped with thick flecks of truffles that was truly unforgettable.

When plotting the appropriate finale, one thing instantly came to mind.

My friend Basil had told me a few weeks back about taking some people to his favorite restaurant in Little India to eat spicy mutton, drink beer and watch the world go by. 

The choice was obvious.

Come, I said, let’s go.

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Top 10: The Memorable Eats Of 2009


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You know it’s been a good year when you are able to say this: 2009 was when I began to eat for a living.

I’d always been a devotee of affairs of the stomach. I may have written about fashion and other lifestyle areas for a living but baking, braising, trying new recipes, eating out — those were what consumed me when weekends rolled around. 

Luck has its ways of finding you, however. Now, on the precipice of 2010, I’m beginning to close out a lunar calendar year of cooking and eating with my family in Singapore as research for my book, “A Tiger In The Kitchen.” 

My journey so far has taken me many places — France, where I had the loveliest gingery champagne cocktail with friends old and dear; China, where my father and I went in search of my great-grandfather’s footprints in the village of his birth. And, of course, Singapore, where my aunties and maternal grandmother have been plying me with meals, recipes and much, much love along the way.

With all that I’ve packed into 2009, it’s hard to decide what the highlights have been. But, inspired by some stellar Top 10 gastronomic lists out there (definitely check out Sam Sifton’s list of Top 11 dishes in New York in the New York Times), I decided to give it a go.

Here, in no particular order, are my 10 memorable eats of 2009. 

Enjoy, buon appetito and listen, let’s do this again in 2010 …

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The Breslin: Gastropub, Grown Up


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This is the sort of restaurant that The Breslin is: You will arrive on a Monday night to find the restaurant full and the bar jammed with the studiedly — and also studly — casual set. The wait, they will say, is 45 minutes to an hour.

You have a drink, some snacks and 45 minutes go by. An hour passes. There is still no word — even though a stroll through the dining room shows that there are not one, not two, but a few tables that have been sitting empty for a bit.

At almost 90 minutes, it’s getting a little tiresome. Nearby Koreatown is starting to look like a surer bet for dinner — but just as you start to gesture toward your bar waitress for the check, you spy her spotting you and then sprinting over to the hostess for a quick discussion. Faster than you can say “Check, please,” the hostess is by your side, telling you that now, there is a table open.

You consider leaving because, well, this is all a little bizarre. But you decide to stay — and it’s a good thing you do because what’s on the dinner menu, it turns out, is worth waiting for.

But you really wouldn’t expect anything less or different from owners of the Spotted Pig, the small West Village gastropub that quickly became the place for Leonardo DiCaprio spottings when it first opened in 2004. 

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Purple Yam: Filipino, Just Like Mom's


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It’s hard not to be leery of restaurants that try to please too many palates.

When dishes as disparate as bibimbap, goat curry and wild boar pizza pop up on a menu that’s supposed to have a distinct Filipino bent, you get the distinct feeling that something’s got to give. Korean and Filipino dishes, after all, can be complex undertakings.

At Purple Yam, the new Filipino/pan-Asian restaurant in Ditmas Park by Chef Romy Dorotan (who shuttered his well-regarded Cendrillon in Manhattan earlier this year), the menu is that varied. But there’s a lot to like about Dorotan’s food so far.

Well, as long as you stick to the Filipino dishes.

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At-Sunrice: Getting To The Root Of Things


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In the lush greenness, we were led, like foragers, from tree to tree. Stopping occasionally to sniff at some bark or nibble on a fresh leaf, the experience was about as close to the source of food that you can get.

The setting was quiet Fort Canning Park in Singapore, a place that’s as known for being a lovers’ lane as it is for being the panoramic hilltop spot on which the country’s first colonial settlers built their homes. My friend Willin (my stomach-of-steel dining partner in Singapore) and I had trekked to the park for a tour of its spice garden and At-Sunrice, the cooking school that’s perched next to it. (Think of it as the Cordon Bleu of Singapore.) 

Before we checked out the school’s Chinese, pastry and Western kitchens, however, we’d taken a little detour, wending our way along a garden that dates back to the early 19th Century, to get to the root of what we cook and eat. Even with the advent of farmer’s markets and lengthy explanations of the origins of ingredients on restaurant menus these days, it can be hard to feel a sense of connection with where our food comes from.

But when you’re holding a broken-open nutmeg shell while sniffing and stroking the thin film of mace that covers the seed, you start to have a deeper appreciation for all the cakes and pies that you’ve beaten mace into. 

(It also made me want to get back to my oven and whip together my favorite apple-pear tart with a mace crust. And pronto.)

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