How to Save Money, But Still Eat Great in Singapore

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES back on 10 July 2015.

Being poor makes you eat weird shit. That's what Aesop said in his fables, and it's how the world came about eating foie gras, ham hocks, and your college diet.

It's also the basis for Singaporean cuisine, because although today this city/nation looks like the set of  Her, when Singapore was founded 50 years ago it was significantly Singa-less affluent. But where does this eat-anything mentality fit into the blissful default wallpaper nation that Singapore is today? I had 48 hours to find out.

Being about half the size of New York City, Singapore doesn't have much in terms of natural resources. In fact, it's got nothing: less water than California, and its food output can fit in your refrigerator. What it does have though is diversity. Malays, Chinese, and Indians have been co-habitating on this tiny island for centuries, and then the British showed up, and I mean, I'm probably not the first American to visit. So even though they may have had to eat their neighbors' scraps, at least old Singaporeans had a few combined millennia of solid culinary tradition to pull from to make them taste less like scraps.

Fish head curry is a meeting point of Singapore's waste-nothing pragmatism and multiethnic society; originally a south Indian dish, it exploded in popularity among the Chinese clientele here. When my cabbie from the airport recommended I look for it at a popular junction in the city, I thought there would be no better place to find this model Singaporean dish: at a crossroads, an intersection, a confluence.

But it turns out JUNCTION is a shopping mall.

Now, I'm from Philadelphia so I think in cheesesteaks, and it'd be a shame if you tried your first real cheesesteak at a mall. In fact, if you're planning a visit, better just avoid the malls all together. So I headed to Little India to look for a more lovingly prepared meal. But some restaurants that had it on their menus weren't actually serving it and a few were just reheating frozen fish heads in the back .

Eventually, I did find one place that told me they made theirs fresh. The restaurant had the vibe of somewhere you'd meet estranged relatives, and they wouldn't let me in the kitchen, but they did drag the chef out to serve me. I couldn't take a picture of him, but he helpfully propped up the fish head with a serving spoon for me to snap a few shots.

It was pretty good. This curry was delicious; the cheeks were super fishy but got away with it; and the eye—you'd think it would be soft and gooey, right?—was rock hard.

Traditionally, fish head curry is a meal eaten with friends or family over the course of an evening until just the skull remains—not only did its original consumers waste nothing, but they made what they had last. I, however, was in no position to recreate the custom.

Far from eating "Singapoor," I was now down $25 SGD (Rp 235,000) and blacklisted at a casual dining establishment after admitting that I might not write a story about the fish head curry (though, apparently, I have). I tried to regroup at a trendy coffee shop but just wound up blowing ten bucks for a tea and a Spotify playlist.

Later, I met a friend who lives in the city on and off for dinner that night at a mall named something like FUTUREOPOLIS. We ate at its food court.

All of the stalls had uniform green signs that advertised their JAPAN FOOD, INDIA FOOD, WESTERN FOOD, etc. I got THAILAND FOOD and HOT BEVERAGE. At least it was cheap. As we ate, my friend was telling me that Singapore is the most free-market place in the world. "There's no minimum wage here, man," he said, and a Malay woman cleared our trays for us.

How many hours of that job's pay had I just wasted looking for a  genuine experiencein this woman's city? Where was this woman's city?

The next dish I was looking for proved I wasn't the first American in Singapore: fried carrot cake. It sounded like something straight out of a Midwestern county fair where any concerned talk of arteries might be considered witchcraft.

I took an immaculate MRT past the edges of my hostel's map to a place of towering, nondescript apartment buildings with big numbers painted on their sides. I showed the address to a maintenance worker who told me to take a bus even further from the city center, to another neighborhood of Orwellian housing estates full of subtle reminders to be cool.

But in an unassuming FOOD CENTRE in middle of some housing projects, I found the fried carrot cake stall I'd been looking for.

Spoiler alert: Fried carrot cake is not actually fried carrot cake. It's more a cake of fried carrot. I was pretty upset at this point, but thought it the wiser to not make a scene, and in case there was any thought policing going down, I did my best to enjoy it.

And there's a lot to enjoy. Once you get over the initial shock that this isn't Easter-cum-cardiac arrest, you can really get into how greasy and filling this hawker food is. Think savory carrot latka. And it's no wonder the family running the stall has got it down so well: they've been making these carrot cakes for a generation, changing little except the location. As the city has grown, they've always remained on its edges.

But I still wanted a dessert. Apparently there's some kind of shaved ice incorporating a certain malodorous fruit that's in season, so I went looking for it at another FOOD CENTRE in another neighborhood of unnerving skyscraper apartments.

One of the first things Lee Kwan Yeu did when Singapore gained independence was put air conditioners in all government offices, because he knew how stupid hot and humid this place got. Something they never seemed think of, however, was putting public benches anywhere. I had been wandering shadeless streets for an hour looking for this ice stall, but I'd messed up the address and forgotten to write down its block number or the  lorong, so no one could help me find it.

A big metal pavilion I passed offered at least refuge from the sun. I went in, got some chicken rice, and sat down near the only other white person there. Casually, like,  I just so happen to be sitting here. It has nothing to do with the fact that you're the only other white guy here and I need to ask you a question. He knew.

But he didn't know where the place was and he had never heard of the shaved ice dessert. He asked if I lived there and I told him I was just visiting.

"Well," he said in some ambiguous European accent, "it is awesome that you found this place. You have got some great chicken rice." It was. A little bit gingery and too tender for its own good. Not bad for less than 5 SGD (Rp 47,000), and as I started eating my new friend waxed a bit poetic on his adopted city.

People say Singapore is plastic, and parts of it are. But not all of it.

A few MRT stops past those places where the impossibly wealthy make deals that change the world that most of us will never know about, old men sit at round tables below dystopian apartment blocks watching Chinese epics and drinking coffee with condensed milk or big bottles of Tiger beer, depending on the time. They eat the food that they've always eaten. Nevermind the future they helped create a few miles away: canned mushrooms and chicken rice. Some nights, maybe, they have fish head curry too.