Eating Singaporean Style.

Eat your heart out Jeff Coons!

This elephant was just outside our hotel window.  Very tasteful, about twice normal size and contructed of plastic roses in all colours (including blue and green). Woven into them are LEDs for night time when the flowers can't be seen. 


It's the edge of Little India, a maze of small streets where street food venders slot into spaces between hardware shops, travel agents, barrows selling unidentifiable objects (food?), a mosque, and something called 'Singapore Beauty' (I don't know what it sold but the rate was S$50 for 20 minutes).

We ate here on our first night.  The place we chose seemed popular with locals and was pretty much what you'd get at an old fashioned India restaurant in Britain.  But a fascinating area to wander around.

For our second night we decided to splash out a bit.  Trip Advisor knows millions of places to eat Chinese food in Singapore but two were within easy walking distance of our hotel.  One did traditional, proper, Chinese cuisine.  The other offered 'Chinese fusion' cooking which clearly didn't appeal to some reviewers.  So we went there, Lokkee (on Handy Rd, just past Oldham Lane - how English that sounds).  If you don't like things which fuse alternatives, upset traditional realities, have fun with differences .... well no doubt Singapore can cope but the new seems much more appealing to us.

Lokkee is inside a seven storey shopping  mall.  It looked very conventional, decorated in the usual style with Chinese landscape prints and line drawings of  terracotta warriors. It was some time before I noticed the warriors wore starship trooper helmets.  And Chewbacca, R2D2 and the gang had infiltrated C18th rural China.

We started with spring rolls crossed with tacos: small crisp corn flour cones packed with traditonal shredded shrimp and sweet corn.  An alternative kept the Chinese spring roll outside but filled it with a layer of cheese and then minced beef upsetting both burger fans and spring roll traditionalists.  The menu said the chef was 'intoxicated with the possibilities of fusion' or maybe, they added, just drunk.  

Prawn dumplings with honey roast pecans and ice pears (some sort of melon?) were good but otherwise we went for tradition: wild mushroom chop suey and completely old fashioned duck in pancakes.  And we chose Jasmine tea, not coke.  Eleanor struggled with, but eventually resisted, the opportunity to try a deep fried roll containing bacon ice cream - wimp!  It could be a big hit in Glasgow.