3.28

It was a scene out of a secondary school afternoon. A sliver of a snack bar in the second floor corner of an aging shopping center, advertising an inexplicable mix of Japanese and Peranakan dishes from ramen bowls and bento boxes to mees of siam and rebus variety, at a price kind to your student’s allowance. Or maybe you shared one dish with your friend, or two dishes between three friends, because it’s getting to the end of the month and you need enough money for the bus.

Except that I had not been here before, because my sliver of a snack bar on the second floor of an aging shopping center was La Creperie at Far East Plaza, not My Cosy Corner at Coronation Plaza. We rarely ventured into Bukit Timah because that wasn’t our territory — ours was Orchard Road, and the sidewalk Häagen-Dazs in front of The Paragon, The Ship at Shaw Centre, the former Orange Julius at The Cathay; these and more, they know it.

But here I was in the southwest second floor corner of Coronation Plaza, both of us almost 30 years older than those secondary school afternoons, remembering all those snack bar good times. I was not interested in the strongly recommended katsus or highly touted “professionally made” udon soups, which would have been very exotically alluring to us, age 14. What I figured to be a much simpler taste request — I was there for the mee siam and kueh pie tee, and I wanted a black coffee, not a Pearly bubble tea nor brightly colored confection drink — turned out to be super complex, messy, intangibly tangly.

For starters, how do you explain mee siam? It’s a Malay masterpiece (rempah spice paste) with Thai inspirations (tamarind and sugar) and Chinese intuition (fermented soy beans), and an all-star Southeast Asian line-up of galangal, lemongrass and chili. As this concoction simmers and reduces, it’s lavishly ladled onto a mass of rice vermicelli, then bean sprouts, chopped chives, tau pok (tofu puffs), two halves of a hard boiled egg and calamansi are plopped atop. Mix with aplomb. Eat with gravy sploshing all over your cheeks and chin.

When My Cosy Corner’s mee siam arrives in a rustic mess at a functional table for two (perfectly capable of comfortably cramming three in normal times), you know it can only come from a Nonya stove. There’s nothing pretty about cooking by feel from a family recipe, only sassy luster that glows from brassy handling of pots, woks and ingredients in a kind of kitchen joget. That Pollockian tumult of gravy is the serif of a confident cook, the sass of toppings a flamboyant hand. Both are required in Peranakan cuisine.

And your fork — it knows the trouble it’s getting into as soon as you stick it into the bee hoon with a mission. It understands that tangy-with-cloying-flashes gravy will storm up the handle so its piquant orange flecks your fingertips, no matter how careful your table manners (save time, leave them at the door). It accepts that once the noodles twirl around the tines in a Möbius matrix, there is no unraveling, only extricating by entire mouthfuls. But the fork is the Bonnie to your Clyde, and it will full this heist off. Meanwhile, a blot of gravy hits your sunglasses next to the plate. And you’re totally OK with that.