a collection of breakfasts
I’m writing from the Long Bar of the Raffles Hotel, which would be a good bar in which to watch the world end. There’s big band jazz on the stereo and fake palm fans and high French windows with glossy black mullions. Sitting within, it is impossible to regard the outside world with anything but languorous apathy. There are at least eighty people drinking here, and I am one of exactly three Asian guests. The ascension of Boris Johnson was confirmed this morning, so I guess everyone else has come here to remember that Britain used to be great.
I was last here several lifetimes ago, in 2012. We had just opened our first cocktail bar, which meant I was duty bound to get a Singapore Sling when I went back home. At the time the Raffles was owned by an American hotel group which was owned by some sheikhs from Dubai. Someone somewhere along the line figured the old dame wasn’t going to make them a dime, so they were running her into the ground.
The Long Bar was a sty, heaving with bodies and awash in peanut shells. The bartender had sixteen shakers held in a steel frame that looked like a torture device. As far as I could tell the sole purpose of the frame was to hold the shakers steady while he slopped in fruit punch from a gallon jug and free-poured gin from a bottle in each hand. The contents of each shaker got dumped right into tall tulips filled with cheater ice and a cherry on top without further mixing. Servers, all of whom had sweated through their uniforms, threw drinks at people and yanked credit cards out of guests’ hands. It was purgatory with a backbar, and the demons were paid $1300SGD a month.
In 2015 the Raffles was sold to a French hotel group. They threw everyone and everything out and shut the whole place down for a couple of years and spent a lot of money renovating. The first thing they re-opened, even before the rooms, was the Long Bar. They brought in some American consultants as one might bring in American “military advisors.” In time we might regard cocktail bars as one of the pillars of American soft power, on the same footing as Hollywood and the hamburger. Singapore’s hospitality trade tends to import capital and knowhow as well as cheap labor, which does make one wonder why we don’t just outsource the whole sector. Is it colonialism if you invite the colonizers in?
Now I’m watching a very serious bartender jigger every single ingredient into every single Singapore Sling, right down to the three dashes of angostura in each shaker. He’s got metal sleeve garters and is perfectly expressionless under a K-pop bowl cut. He builds ten shakers at a time then shakes and pours each one and perches a perfect, pre-built garnish pick on the rim of every glass (slice of pineapple, scored to fit on the rim, real maraschino cherry, Japanese bamboo pick). He doesn’t talk to anyone.
This isn’t really a smart way to mass produce high-grade cocktails, but management was probably so desperate to put some distance between the new Long Bar and its previous incarnation that they aren’t willing to cut out a single part of the show — yet. The bowl-cut bartender’s job is entirely mechanical — in some sense he really could be replaced with a robot arm and an automated jigger, and the robots would probably get more instagram love.
The Singapore Slings are now balanced and delicious, exactly as they would be in a high end American cocktail bar.
A collection of breakfasts in Singapore.
My dad, his pipe, his coffee, my coffee, fresh ham chim peng, which is a piece of fried dough with a swirl of salted bean paste (sort of like red miso). A vastly superior iteration of coffee and doughnuts.
Mee pok tar for breakfast. Bukit Batok. Almost perfect.
Mee pok tar for breakfast again, except this stall runs out of mee pok before 8am and has to use kway teow (generally called hor fun in the US) instead. Whampoa Market.
Teochew kueh, rice flour dough filled with sauteed chinese chives (upper) and a turnip/carrot/mushroom stew (lower). Each of these is about half the size of my palm. Great texture. Tasty chili sauce, I think made by the hawker. Whampoa market.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
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best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!