Margaret Drive Hawker Centre

Channel 5's Our Makan Places Lost & Found 4 did a two-parter on my beloved Margaret Drive Hawker Centre!!!

For Part 1, you can watch it here.
Part 2 will be shown on 5 Feb (Tuesday) on Channel 5 at 8:30pm! They will be showing Hai Kee Char Kway Teow uncle!!! :)

For store listings, check out my page. Some info needs updating... so if you know any news, do drop me a note.

Kopi revisited

Managed to patronize Rui Xing kopi stall again (had to take leave off work!). See earlier post.
Their kopi is strong and hence can be super addictive. Still long queue.

Difference between coffee (like espresso, americano etc) and kopi (Nanyang or South-East Asian coffee) is in the roast. Understand that in Vietnam, they roast their coffee beans with corn. For Nanyang coffee, butter is usually added. I once had a service captain who adds a little butter to the regular coffee to make it "smoother" and tastier. Not quite the same IMHO... would have preferred to use Nanyang coffee beans directly. Anyway, this means that different varieties can be created if someone studies into different possible additives that can be used for roasting the beans. In that way, product differentiation can be achieved and price differentiation can be made (ie., possibility of higher profits). I would love to visit a coffee roasting facility one day...

Due to the usage of butter, one tends to feel more thirsty after a cup of kopi, especially if you have it with condensed milk. The liquid is also denser compared to western coffee. I like it when Black Canyon Coffee from Thailand served a small tiny glass of Chinese tea with the coffee. I was told back then that the tea will help to cleanse the palette from the bitter coffee aftertaste. But I think it will also help to neutralize the "oil" in our kopi. So, if I start to sell kopi, I'll serve a small glass of water with lemon juice. That would be great service and will set me apart from other coffee joints. You read it here first!!

Time flies...

It has been more than 3 years since the last post... I guess I've sort of "given up"... It's always more enjoyable eating the food than blogging about it. I mean, God knows the number of times I've eaten half the amount before realizing that I've forgotten to take pictures... haha... Besides, there are so many food blogs nowadays... Ok, enough of excuses...

Just wanna pen my thoughts on food enjoyment:

In Mandarin, a common description of a good dish is 色、香、味俱全. Literally, it means, full of "colour", "fragrance", and "flavour". It is not coincidental for the words to be in that order. One approaches a dish firstly through sight. A ghastly looking pot of goo will never taste good because psychologically, the mind would have dismissed it. How many times have we seen Japanese dishes that are so appealing aesthetically that we could not bear to eat them?

Next is smell. It has been proven that if one is not allowed to smell the food one is eating, one will not be able to tell what is being eaten (assuming of course that texture is constant, eg all blended into "baby food"). That is also why all food tastes bland when we are suffering from flu and blocked noses.

The last is taste.

Ever so often, when critics judge a dish, they only comment on the taste and texture. They have missed two-thirds of the criteria for a good dish.

Psychologically, our memory is not as good as we think. According to the book "How customers think", our memory is actually a creative product of our encounters, beliefs and plans developed at a preconscious level. Therefore, food will always taste better in the company we love (positive emotions affecting our judgment). Food will always taste better when the environment evokes positive memories (eg., noodles served in "cockeral" bowls in old hawker centres). In fact, food will also taste better if we have to wait/queue for it (a belief that long queue = good food).

Understanding the above will enable us to embark on our journey of becoming a food critic... haha... or at least act like one. :)