Hullo to readers old and new!
This is the second weekly entry in the Cambridge, MA Companion to Singaporean Food, an ongoing series about all those words I italicize in essays, like lou bak, and rempah, and kopitiam. It’s modeled on one of the most beloved books on my shelf, Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, a reference text that’s warm, erudite, and opinionated, but also as solid as basalt. The goal is to be more entertaining than wikipedia, but more informative than Tiktok. Going forward, these issues will be a benefit for paid subscribers, but this and the first entry are free.
If you’d like to have access to these, there’s no better time to sign up, especially since subscriptions are on a deep discount until the end of the month. A month’s subscription costs less than coffee in a big city – and your subscriptions enable me to continue writing for you.
As always, comments and corrections are very welcome – I claim no special qualification for writing this other than a willingness to pursue harebrained schemes.
Kopitiam
Hokkien. P’eh-ōe-jī: ko-pi-tiàm. English: Coffeeshop. Malay: Kedai kopi. Simplified Chinese: 咖啡店 Pinyin: kā fēi diàn.
Literally, a coffee (kopi) shop (tiam), a place to buy coffee. In practice, one of several types of eating place, usually open air. Most commonly, the term refers to either:
Essentially, a Straits-style cafe. An eatery owned and operated by a single entity, with a menu of Straits-style coffee, tea, breakfast, snacks, and possibly light meals. A “cafe” or “coffee house,” (the latter term is no longer common) as opposed to a “coffeeshop” has the kind of food, and coffee, familiar in cafes elsewhere in the anglosphere. (An entry on kopi culture is forthcoming, see also no. 37: shops and houses.)
An eating place with several stalls selling food orbiting a stall selling coffee, other beverages, and often beer). This is probably the most common form of kopitiam. The operator provides seating and maintenance, and charges the stallholders rent. They also usually operate the stall selling drinks, conventionally held to be the most profitable..
Kopitiam in the second sense is one of three common terms for apparently similar institutions that all look like a collection of hawker stalls:
Spiritually, the kopitiam is the centre of the neighborhood, concentrating the social and psychogeographical functions of the diner, the local fast food joint, the local pub, the bodega, and the corner store in a single institution. The kopitiam is where politicians go to meet the common man, and “coffeeshop talk,” depending on the conversation, can mean anything from “nonsense” to “word on the street” (with all its ambiguity of meaning). In popular culture, kopitiams are both everyday spaces, where most of life happens, and loci of violence and disorder, typified by movies like Fight Lah!, 15, and Money No Enough. The brawl in a kopitiam is Singapore’s proverbial civil disturbance (the first newspaper report of one is from 1911). Of course, the depiction of kopitiams as disorderly places almost always involves racist, classist overtones – “respectable Chinese residents” were agitating to have “coffeeshop keepers” removed from their neighborhoods in 1892.
The distinction between food courts and kopitiams is blurring as more and more regional chain restaurants adopt the form of a kopitiam, i.e. a small collection of apparently independent stalls serving cooked food – it’s impossible to clearly distinguish these from small food courts. Similarly, kopitiams are increasingly incorporating creature comforts, higher-priced stalls, and seizure-warning quantities of neon and screen space.
On kodomo shokudō, another sort of community eatery.
I’m incredibly excited for Frostbite, Nicola Twilley’s forthcoming book on the cold chain. She talks to Scope of Work about it here.
And salad season, part whatever.
