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Tag: Restaurants

  • Week 45.25

    Week 45.25

    I spoke too soon. Jinxed it. Stupidly counted my chicks. By which I mean I had another vertigo episode out of nowhere after thinking I was safe. It came just from tilting my head down to look at something, and suddenly it felt like the floor fell out from under me. I immediately put my head back, and it only lasted like half a minute, but it was enough to burst my bubble of security that maybe the earlier incident was a one-off.

    According to the online literature, recurrences are common with BPPV, and it’s just something you have to learn to live with and manage. Some lingering unsteadiness followed for the next couple of days, which is annoying but survivable. I’m mostly worried that I’ll get a bad case of it on a plane at some point, because pressure changes can apparently trigger it.

    PSA if you also have this: it seems people with vitamin D deficiencies are more susceptible. So I’m going to be more religious about taking supplements and see if that helps.

    ===

    For the second time in two weeks, I decided to break my weekday lunch routine by going further out to a Sushiro, followed by a little cafe reading time. Eating alone in a walled-off solo dining booth sounds sad and lonely but is surprisingly cozy; just ask Japan.

    Later, I came across a Reddit thread discussing local restaurants and when Sushiro came up, someone replied “if you’re in Bangkok, try it there — it’s a world of difference in quality, price, and size.” Well then! That’s something I’ll be in a position to verify next week because I’m actually going to be in Bangkok for several days (hence the airplane vertigo worries, pray for me).

    My itinerary as a traveling husband is still quite open — while Kim’s at work I’m planning to check out this new mall with a rooftop park, visit some exhibitions, and watch Predator: Badlands in a cinema superior to anything we have in Singapore. And depending on how I feel, maybe even stay in with my iPad and enjoy the very nice hotel for a bit.

    ===

    Speaking of touchscreen devices, I’ve been waiting for the full reveal of the Anbernic DS handheld emulation console, and now that it’s up for pre-order, my excitement has been considerably reduced. Enthusiasts online have been disappointed by the choice of a weak processor which, when paired with an Android OS, means it’ll struggle to run any 3DS games and maybe even some DS games. I’m not up to speed on DS emulation, but I’ll take their word for it that things could be much better here.

    The original DS Lite was my favorite handheld of all time because of its minimal clamshell design, which also housed its tiny stylus. The Anbernic DS does not include that critical feature. What’s the point of recreating the DS if you have a separate, chunky stylus to carry about and lose?

    Anbernic has also earned a reputation for releasing improved variants shortly after launching new products. So I’m hoping we’ll see a faster, more polished version out in six months. Wake me up when that comes out.

    ===

    Media activity:

    • I’m reading Wraith, which is Book 1 in the Convergence War series. It’s shaping up to be a fun if not-so-elegant “assemble a team and go on a big space adventure” action story. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a palate cleanser in between more challenging fare.
    • I started watching the popular Apothecary Diaries anime series that Netflix has been aggressively pushing, and it’s not bad! Essentially a medical procedural set in ancient China, with other dramatic hooks like a super-competent main character who wants to stay invisible but can’t help stepping in to fix things, plus royal court politics.
    • After watching The Woman in Cabin 10 last week, we looked for more murder stories on boats and started on Death and Other Details (a murder on a cruise ship) before finding out it was canceled after one season. Still, it’s been okay and stars Mandy Patinkin as the detective.
    • If you’d asked me about Death and Other Details a few days ago, I might have said it was “pretty good”. But after watching the first two episodes of Apple TV’s new tentpole series, Pluribus, the bar is now insanely high. Don’t read anything about it, not even Hideo Kojima’s reaction tweet, just go straight into watching it on the nicest screen you can find. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is looking like the kind of show I’ll think about long after it’s over.

  • Week 26.23

    There was a massive thunderstorm Wednesday morning, and we woke up to water leaking across our living room floor, dangerously close to some power sockets, which would have totally ruined the not-on-fire vibe I’m going for in this apartment. It seemed that some fault on the rooftop was letting water into an unused cable housing that runs through the entire building. Once upon a time, this “pipe” used to carry terrestrial TV signals from the antenna above, and it’s definitely not supposed to have water in it.

    The storm continued all morning, and I was mopping up water and wringing towels every 10 minutes while trying to be on work calls and contacting the authorities and arranging for our own contractor to do something about it. Although the town council sent someone down within a few hours, he turned out to be not so useful, firstly by not understanding the size of the problem (it was already sunny and dry by then), and then by trying to tell me there wasn’t really a problem on the roof. There was no other possible ingress point for the water.

    Because the next day was a public holiday, I was pretty anxious to get it resolved ASAP as staying up 24/7 to be a squeegee operator was not acceptable. By the end of the day, thanks to some prompt private sector assistance — albeit at my own cost — I had the issue resolved (and I was right about the source).

    The leak added unnecessary stress to an already difficult week, exacerbated by the tough transition back to work after my holiday. As if on cue, I came across this piece in the New Yorker on “The Case Against Travel” which I won’t try to summarize. It ends with a sobering observation that holidays are a salve for the grind of working life, and that first-world people just live looking forward to the next trip and the next, each time believing in some life-changing outcome of travel that never actually materializes. This reliance is something I never believed applied to me before, because I’m quite alright not traveling for long stretches — dear god, I just want more time left to my own devices — yet, startlingly, the absence of any further planned trips and the abyss now facing me feels… depressing?

    It’s definitely about being tired. I also read this article (a book plug) about the “cost of traditional masculinity”, mainly centered on the role of providing, which powers economic growth but maybe not happiness. What would the world look like if every socially enforced achievement target was replaced with an appreciation for “enough”? Human progress would be hindered, I can hear you say, but the human-driven damage would be too, and that seems worth it.

    I took a couch break one afternoon and read this other article in the New Yorker about quack surgery for a certain masculine insecurity, which was very, very disturbing. It’s about as graphic a piece of writing as I can ever recall reading. I am still trying to forget some details! Ah, modern life is closing one’s eyes to tragedy.

    ===

    Other bits:

    • We went out for dinner Friday at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Kotuwa in Little India. I don’t remember half of what I ate, but it was very enjoyable. Since Peishan and James were there to enforce vegetable eating, I was able to try the cashew curry — literally a little bowl of boiled cashews in a sweet gravy, which worked.
    • We finished Silo on Apple TV+ and enjoyed the season overall. I’m told the books are light and not very good, so it seems this was an adaptation that took a good central idea and nailed the execution. I’m pretty sure a second season will be coming.
    • I chanced upon an Apple Music page of DJ mixes made to celebrate two Tokyo clubs that closed last year, and I’ve been enjoying a few of them. I don’t think I’ve been inside a club in years, but I remember the feeling of often being disappointed in the music and thinking, “I’m gonna get home and listen to XYZ instead”. But I think I would have loved hearing some of these mixes irl.
    • I started using Vibes, the latest app in the (Not Boring) series by Andy Works. These functional apps (calculator, weather, etc.) borrow video game aesthetics and interactions to offer an appealing alternative to Apple’s flat design, and they’re winning — they won an Apple Design Award last year, and the standard Weather.app has grown increasingly rich and playful of late. Anyway, Vibes generates a real-time videogamey soundtrack for your life, based on your sleep and movement patterns, helping you to rest and focus throughout the day. I usually use Brain.fm or lo-fi music for this, but Vibes is simple: just hit Play and it’ll do what it thinks you need.
    • After watching some Bob Ross on Twitch one night, I fooled around on the iPad and drew a landscape in ProCreate. It’s nothing great, but then I tossed it into Midjourney and said ‘do this like Bob Ross’ and oh my lord. It makes me both want to improve and to never draw again — like, what’s the point?

  • Week 2.23

    We kind of started planning our trip to Japan later this year, but there’s still a lot to figure out in terms of what to do, and where to spend our time. It seems a lot of the popular hotels and destinations are selling out fast, if not already sold out, because of the resumption of travel out of China. I’m going to use this as a test of two new collaboration features in iOS and macOS: shared Safari Tab Groups, and the new Freeform whiteboarding app. In theory this should allow us to gather links to interesting ideas and plot them out together across our devices over several days.

    On Friday afternoon, I was excited to see an article saying that one of the best bowls of ramen I’ve ever had was finally coming to Singapore. In fact, it was their opening day, and we decided to just go down right after work to try and get a seat. After about 20 minutes of queuing (which was nothing compared to the maybe three hours we spent in line for the main restaurant in Tokyo), we got into Nakiryu at Plaza Singapura, and were sorely disappointed. For starters, their signature Szechuan-style Tan Tan/Dan Dan noodles were sold out. We ordered shio and shoyu ramen instead, and they were roundly mediocre. The service was also spotty and uncoordinated.

    It’s a pattern that the local franchisee Japan Food Holdings (who’ve done the same thing with Afuri and others) seems to be repeating: bring in a brand people are excited for, then do nothing to capture the original taste and quality. I suspect if you did a side-by-side comparison of the ramen from several of their brands, you’d find they’re just selling the same product under different names. Sadly, they’ve probably got the connections to get these deals and as long as the money flows in, the original companies don’t care how badly it’s done outside of Japan.

    ===

    SEA Focus NFTs: Art by @ykhaamelz, music by @discokid909

    Singapore Art Week is back and we attended two events: SEA Focus and the creatively named Art SG. The former’s at Keppel Distripark where the Singapore Art Museum’s temporary spot is, and features a little NFT art corner sponsored by Tezos. In contrast to the other exhibits, I found the work in there refreshingly playful, modern, vibey.

    Art SG

    At Art SG (a large and mostly serious gallery fair over two floors at Marina Bay Sands), I also found myself reacting more to the digital or digitally inspired work. There was a large print of a CloneX pfp, attributed to Murakami, mounted on a wall that I saw from across the hall and made a beeline towards. The Pace gallery (which I only happen to know because of their collaborations with Art Blocks) space featured teamLab’s NFT project, and a James Turrell projection. The teamLab one is cool: anyone can download and run the artwork (an app) on their PC or Mac. These are regarded as authentic and valid copies of the work. However, one can also own an NFT of the work (there are only 7), and these collectors can change the text seen in the art for everyone else. Oh, and they’re $200,000 each.

    Unknown work at Art SG (forgot to take notes!)

    Elsewhere, I saw a work that was a white flag printed with a surrender message that I’d read before but didn’t know where. I googled the text but nothing came up. Later, I found a tweet from early 2022 referencing it: an on-chain exchange between two MEV… “searchers”? The tweets only have between a couple hundred and a couple thousand likes, so it’s probably not a widely known thing. But I definitely saw and remembered it from last year, which means I’ve spent too much time spectating in a very small fringe community. And my time spent appreciating generative art has definitely ruined traditional abstract art for me.

    The Field #290

    Speaking of which, I was excited to add an edition of The Field by Beer van Geer to my collection this week. It’s an interesting (animated) work in that all 369 pieces are different views of the same “territory”, starting at random points, zoom levels, and rendered with different palettes, but viewers of any section can move away from those starting points and explore. As I understand it, the field itself was created from noise data created by aggregating hundreds of images from the artist’s body of work, trying to derive a sort of pattern map or artistic fingerprint from their ouevre. Isn’t that so much more exciting than static paint on canvas??

    ===

    Ricoh announced a new special edition of the GR III compact camera, called the “Diary Edition”. Yeah it sounds like one of those translated-from-Japanese names that sounds slightly awkward in English, but I like it. As a name, you can’t get much clearer about the concept of a camera that you’re meant to carry around to intentionally document everyday life, and it even comes with a new “negative film” look that will also come to older GR III models via a firmware update. Whether or not this behavior is one that users will actually embrace when they already have smartphones, I don’t know. I suspect not, outside for a few glorious weirdos. But the atmosphere and quality of these photos could hardly be more different than your smartphone snaps, unless you go the film route.

    As a new colorway, I also love the look of the Diary Edition.

    Here are a couple of photos I took with my GR III on the way to the art fair:

    ===

    • We watched a couple of spy TV shows, of which Jack Ryan’s season 2 was the undisputed best. We’ll start on season 3 soon.
    • Miyachi’s second album, Crows, is out. I heard it through once and it’s a bop. I don’t know what he’s rapping about but I’m sure it’s slightly problematic.
    • I finished Arcade Spirits but can’t recommend it if you’ve got many great games in your Switch backlog. To recap, it’s a Western visual novel about running a video game arcade. Some of the background art is basic and not very polished. I was struck several times by the thought that a game creator today could create far better generic bar/beach/arcade interior background art in seconds using AI. And they probably will/are already. So as an artifact of our pre-AI phase, Arcade Spirits stands out as a bit lacking in the production quality department.

    Here’s a tweet showing a game prototype someone purportedly threw together using AI tools to create the graphics, icons, and voice acting!

    • Quite coincidentally, I started experimenting with Midjourney prompts on Monday trying to get the EGA/VGA PC game look of the Sierra games I played in the 80s and 90s. I found a good solution and started using it to visualize screenshots of #fictionalgames from the golden era of PC games, ones that never existed, or that might be made today with modern concepts.
    Police Quest 5: Capitol Invasion
    Quest For Glory 6: So You Want To Be A Private Military Contractor
    Where in the Bahamas is Carmen Sandiego?
    Leisure Suit Harvey: In the Land of the Casting Agents
    Command & Conquer 2022

  • Week 49.22

    It’s alarming how that number suddenly jumped to 49 and we’re nearly at the end of another year.

    This week was another tough one, and and our cat isn’t feeling well. Next week will probably continue to be challenging.

    The Apple App Awards were announced and this mental health How We Feel is an easy recommendation. It allows you to log and analyze your emotions over time. You just need to quickly check in by picking a word that describes your mood in the moment.

    We did go out and have an incredible dinner experience on Friday, however, at a home-based private dining set up called The Estate & Co. — a labor of love by two brothers and their families, telling the story of the Arab community in Singapore of which they’re a part, through the recreation of inherited recipes and a beautiful home that serves as a museum of their culture’s storied past. They only do it once or twice a month, as it takes days to prepare. The amount of food you get is easily double what’s required, as is apparently the tradition when hosting guests. I can’t recommend it enough if you can gather a group of 8–10 people.

    Nothing much more this week. I am a shell.

  • Week 41.22

    My Seveneves journey on Goodreads

    After four long months of procrastination and avoidance, I finished Seveneves. I hope that’s the end of my 2022 reading slump. Someone said that Neal Stephenson books start well but fizzle out at the end, and one could say that about this, but it wouldn’t be fair. The first half is an incredibly detailed look at the mundanity that occurs inside a giant tragedy; the eye of an apocalyptic storm — the world is ending, okay, but how is a small team going to engineer their way to survival over two years? And then a lot of time passes, and the final third of the book is a sort of sci-fi action movie, but not at an epic scale. So, super meticulous world building, some powerful ideas about humanity’s purpose, and then an ending that doesn’t quite shoot for fireworks.

    I still loved it though! Coming after Daniel Suarez’s Delta-V, also involving survival in space, it was a lot of mental time spent banished in an orbitory purgatory. Back when I started in late May, I was reading it in a darkened bedroom, with live-streamed video from the ISS projected on a wall, feeling intensely alone and stranded. Perhaps that not so enjoyable experience made it hard to pick up again and continue? Anyway now that it’s over, I need to make up for lost Goodreads reading challenge time so I’m moving on to the (relatively slim) One Day This Will All Be Yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

    ===

    Earlier this week I got exposed to Covid in the workplace via a client who tested positive later, but still haven’t developed any symptoms myself. I’m hoping to make it through the next few days without incident.

    ===

    We had an excellent dinner at Brasserie Gavroche one night to celebrate my brother-in-law’s birthday, where I declined to taste the bottle of wine in that little ritual they do. What are the odds, really? One bad bottle in a million? Is that worth the amount of sniffing and swirling time this steals from humanity in aggregate? All the interrupted conversations; the sheepish nods to say okay?

    ===

    I met Ci’en and Peishan for a Saturday afternoon coffee and chat for the first time in what feels like forever. Somewhere, an alien observer has a record showing that we used to do this more often, undoubtedly along Orchard Road in cafes long-since shut, and they’re probably writing in their little notebook that some things in human life do stay easy and stress free. If you’re reading this, I appreciate you both immeasurably.

    ===

    A few weeks ago, I read Michael’s complaints on his blog about not being able to get a pair of Uniqlo shorts that matched what he was used to, and I want to rant a little about Muji’s jeans in a similar vein. I’ve bought several pairs over the years — completely switching over in allegiance from other brands — solely because they had a dedicated smartphone pocket. It’s on the hip, just above and to the side of the regular right back pocket, high enough and to the side enough that you can sit down without sitting on your phone. It wouldn’t fit a Max iPhone, I think, but anything below. It was discreetly sewn into the lines of the jeans, enough to be hidden away that if someone robbed you and wanted your phone, they might not be able to find one.

    This obviously freed my front pockets for putting my hands and mask and maybe a single credit card in. It was wonderfully minimal. The phone had its own place, and it wasn’t in the way of anything at all. And for some reason, their new jeans do not have this pocket. I think some of the skinniest jeans may still have it, but I wouldn’t/couldn’t wear those. It suggests that Muji believes the pocket is only useful in scenarios where you can’t put your phone in the regular front or back pockets, but that’s a ridiculous conclusion to make. A dedicated phone pocket is always welcome!

    I discovered this a few weeks back while looking to renew my currently faded pairs, and have made several visits to confirm that none of the ones they sell, and that I fit in, have this pocket anymore. Liberated from my obligations, I may now be in the market for some nicer specialist denim, I don’t know. They’ve really done it to themselves.

  • Week 32.22

    Hello, it’s Sunday evening and I was hoping to say that I’d started and then spent all day playing Lost Judgment on the PS4. That didn’t happen but I saw two films instead.

    Prey (4/5) was a surprise: the strongest and most memorable Predator franchise film in probably decades. All the other spinoffs and reboots haven’t stuck in memory because they were generic and lacked characters you care about. Prey takes place in a space and time we don’t often see in film, especially not in a genre flick like this, and splashes in some Horizon Zero Dawn and Tomb Raider familiarity by having a young female hunter protagonist master her dangerous environment.

    Comparatively, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (3/5) was a letdown in the competence department, essentially taking its joke premise and stretching it out to feature length — and didn’t Jean Claude Van Damme already do something like this? But I enjoyed much of it, to be fair.

    A few days ago, we put on Groundhog Day (500/5) on a whim, thinking we’d just see a little, and ended up watching the whole thing to the end, again. It is such a perfect film, the kind where you’re thankful every variable in the cosmos came together for it to exist.

    Later: We binged all three parts of Netflix’s new documentary on Woodstock ‘99. It’s well made with extensive ground-level footage, and builds satisfyingly from ‘oh boy’ to ‘this is totally fucked’ just by chronologically following events. The scale of mismanagement and delusion from its organizers dwarfs that of the Fyre Festival. I don’t know why I have no mental recollection of this happening. Perhaps I was in the army at that point and didn’t get much news.

    Game-wise, a quiet week. After finishing Life Is Strange: True Colors last Sunday, I only had time for a little Spiritfarer before we went on a brief staycation from the middle of the week. The hotel break was a long-unclaimed gift, maybe from last Christmas, that we decided to use now since it’s something of a long weekend ahead. Although only two days, it put us in the area bordering Arab Street and Little India, which meant a chance to see some sights and eat at a couple of new places.

    I live in this city but it’s taken me all these years to finally visit Atlas, a cocktail bar that is probably on several World’s Best lists, on account of not having that many friends to drink with and its reputation for being a fancy place for people who like to dress well. It was rather good and not unreasonably priced either. The Art Deco interior is remarkably cool (if you played Bioshock, it will trigger unpleasant memories), but didn’t photograph very well on my iPhone given the late afternoon mixed lighting. So what I did was try to generate a similar scene with Midjourney, and then used Pixelmator Photo’s AI-powered “match colors” feature to transplant the vibe over to the real life photo. Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself.

    Before
    Midjourney render
    After

    It also took about two or three years since Nicolas Le Restaurant was first recommended by my brother-in-law for us to finally make a reservation there. My threadbare jeans, flat pockets, and lack of wine knowledge were swiftly recognized and appropriate recommendations were deftly made to accompany the five-course meal, all of it excellent to our unrefined palates, and so I happily pass the recommendation onto you now.

    We also did a quick introduction to pottery “throwing” (?) as an afternoon activity on the second day. It was my second time, and proved that I must have gotten lucky the first time around where I did really well. It seemed much harder this time to control the clay while trying to make a simple high-walled cup. One wrong move and you’re taking home an ashtray. I guess that’s a life metaphor.

    In the unlikely jackpot event of you 1) still reading this AND 2) being into NFTs, then I’d like to direct you to a couple of new Deca galleries I’ve made. Cities is mostly made up of pieces I (sadly) don’t own, but that suggest urban shapes and structures to different degrees of abstraction. GPU Burners is a work-in-progress featuring pieces I do own, that are graphically intensive and best seen on a proper computer. The first artwork on the page is a new acquisition from the Jiometory no Compute series, which I’ve been wanting to get into for awhile now.

  • Week 16.21

    We had a series of strong storms this week. It’s bright out now as I type this, and yet I’m still hearing distant thunder. When they get going, these rumbles send deeply unsettling bass throughout the house, and the torrents of rain above make me imagine a hole opening up in our ceiling. They turn the mid-afternoon depressingly dark and they’ve been coinciding with conference calls, which makes me feel like I’m working at night. Because Singapore is so small, I often hear thunderclaps on a colleague’s end of the line just seconds before hearing it for real. Saturday was especially bad, with some streets kinda flooding with about a foot of water, which made me rethink going out to our dinner reservations.

    However, the $70 penalty for no-shows was a great motivator. We had a good steak dinner at a restaurant that I, no joke, got served the day before in an Instagram ad. There’s a lot of junk being sold through Instagram ads, but fortunately this was a quality discovery. I did my homework via TripAdvisor and Google reviews, at least, and they have a 4.5-star average that I can corroborate on the basis of last night’s meal.

    Come to think of it, there was a lot of eating out this week. On Tuesday night, spontaneously, we decided to go out for one quick drink at the neighborhood bar before dinner. This ended with a total shitfacing on soju and beer before 10pm. I haven’t had a hangover in a very long while, but Wednesday morning convinced me not to try that again.

    Friday night, Kim made a leg of lamb for dinner with her parents. It roasted away for a good six hours, and because the doors weren’t closed, we had a delicious muttony and rosemaryish aroma in every room over the whole weekend. Which… might have subconsciously led us down the path of an over-the-top Korean BBQ on Sunday night. My birthday’s coming up, so I’ll blame all the weight gain on that.

    We’re still watching Gogglebox most nights. One old lady, Shirley, is fond of saying “shitting hell” in reaction to things on TV, which cracks me up. She probably chose it as a less vulgar way of saying “fucking hell”, but because it’s such an unusual pairing, it sounds even more offensive.

    Her husband remarked to her in one episode, “you’ve never had Indian food, have you?”, which blew my mind. She just wasn’t interested in trying it, or anything else exotic. She was also handed an avocado at one point, and had no idea what it was.

    A couple of days later, I saw these tweets:

    The linked article from the Guardian is about a farmer who’s had the same dinner every night for the last 10 years, and is totally fine with it. He says “I’m not interested in other food. I’ve never had Chinese, Indian, French food. Why change? I’ve already found the food I love.” And what’s this food, you ask? “Two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end.”

    I don’t have a problem with a couple of odd people being perfectly satisfied with their uniform dressing routines, or some others not having the sense of adventure that leads them to visit underdeveloped countries or dangerous natural environments on holiday. But celebrating a life where you don’t bother to try eating (just eating!) things that billions of other people have agreed are awesome; that’s kinda strange. It’s such a low risk/effort for high reward scenario.

    That’s enough about food. I’ve been playing a lot of the new Star Trek: Legends mobile game, a story-driven strategy gacha game that has no in-app monetization as per the rules of Apple Arcade. If you’ve ever wondered how such a game would play out without the usual pay-to-win mechanics, they’ve still got timers and time-limited events, but you can earn all the currency you need by grinding, and the reward rates are generous. I can’t tell if I’ve had enough yet, but I may keep going to see where the story goes and hopefully unlock Picard and Data.

    I read just one chapter of The Diamond Age this week, which is an utter embarrassment. Fortunately, I’m going to have some free time coming up soon, so my Goodreads 2021 Reading Challenge target of 24 books has no reason to worry.

    I see Michael’s posted his weeknotes already, and recommended this 20-minute video on Portishead’s debut, Dummy. I’m still watching it, but it’s definitely worth your time if you know and love the album.

  • Eating Healthy at Grain Traders, Singapore

    Eating Healthy at Grain Traders, Singapore

    A little over a year ago, I was eating a KFC rice bucket (it’s popcorn chicken and a cream sauce over greasy Singaporean chicken rice for $4) when some friends on holiday sent photos of themselves by the pool looking trim and fit. Major mirror shame. That same day I started on a diet and ultimately lost about 10 kilos over the following months.

    Not knowing anything, I did the most logical thing and went with calorie counting. Over a few weeks and several conversations, I worked out that it was far better to eat protein-rich salads, embrace fats, cut down on carbs, and eliminate unnecessary sugars. Only lately did I learn that eating like this continuously is the most important thing; if you’re only doing it every other day and not letting your body get into a rhythm of ignoring carbs and burning fat, it’s useless.

    So lately I’ve been trying to get back into eating healthily because I’ve spent the last 4 months of this year being careless and having too many nasi lemak breakfasts near work. There’s a lot of salad in the CBD area, but it’s awfully generic, especially if you’re looking at the ones in hawker centers. Gotta break it up once in awhile. Which is why I’m really glad to have found Grain Traders at the new Capital Green building diagonally across from Lau Pa Sat.

      

    I’m not sure how they describe their concept, but since I’m a copywriter I’m gonna go with “fancy ass salads made with freaking tasty shit”.

    I dropped in in the morning for a cup of coffee and a takeaway bowl of roast pork brown rice porridge ($8) which was more pork than porridge. I tried to spoon some rice up for a photo but couldn’t get enough of it because of all the baby corn and avocado and egg in the way. That’s a really good problem to have. The boiled egg, by the way, was perfect: soft and runny in the center.

    In our corner of the CBD, breakfast ranges from $2 for some plain fried beehoon to $15 for an expat-friendly wrap. As I ate the porridge, I couldn’t help but imagine how much some of the places around would charge for something like that. Not $8. Maybe $12? A bowl of tomato soup goes for $10 at one place!

       
     

    People say I can get a bit obsessive, but if those jerks are too undisciplined to eat the same thing for 6 months straight, I don’t care what they think. So naturally I went back again a few hours later to check out the $16 bowls. You can get them on white sushi rice, brown rice, quinoa, salad leaves, soba, or bulgur wheat.

        

    I’m impressed by the amount of care that seems to go into the individual components, like this “crunchy medley of greens” they put in some of the recipes; it’s conceptually one whole unit, but some vegetables in it just pop, like they were cooked and flavored in a separate process, and it elevates the whole thing with complexity. And that’s just one of the 6 or 7 things that was in my “Rooster’s Crow” quinoa bowl today, alongside chicken, roasted peppers, nuts, a mixed bean Pico de Gallo, basil dressing, and… leek?

    Every ingredient has its own thing going on, which should justify the cost easily when compared to one of the popular salad chains nearby, which ungenerously spoons in pre-processed chopped olives and cold cherry tomatoes for nearly the same price. I read one comment on Facebook that said $16 was prohibitive and they’d maybe eat there once a month! Sadly, if you’re trying to eat low-carb, there’s no way around spending more since all the cheap stuff is rice and noodles with half a handful of deep-fried protein thrown in.

    Anyway, I’ll be going back tomorrow to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, but damn I liked what I saw.

        

    Update: Oatmeal with banana, apple, and cinnamon for breakfast the next day. Pretty good along with this bottled white cold brew.