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Salad days in Singapore: Pineapple, turnip, cucumber, kalamansi, bean sprouts, dough crullers, crispy tofu, fermented prawn paste, sugar, guava and mango if you’re lucky, chilli paste if you know what’s good for you.

Deftly mixed in a clay bowl cemented to the counter with flourishy swishes in every direction, ground peanuts are then liberally splayed. The gooier, more piquant, more cloying, the more reason why it’s one of my top five favorite Singapore dishes.

Although rojak (Malay for “mixture”) blossomed from ancient Javanese times when tropical fruits were eaten with tamarind and sugar to mitigate tartness, fruit rojak (there’s a savory, fritter-dominant version, but that’s for another meal) is now predominantly a Chinese hawker offering this end of the foodway. You should order a century egg sliced over and garnished with pickled ginger slices. You should ask for grilled cuttlefish tossed on top. Like the best salads on earth — Caesar, Chinese Chopped, Cobb, ‘Slaw — there’s nothing dieting-worthy about this one.

I love rojak because that prawn paste with the hit of assam and kalamansi pommels home a flavor profile that absolutely cannot be replicated outside of here. It’s bodacious, in your face, larger than life. It’s the Mike Tyson of Southeast Asian sauces — so much bite. When you stab at a morsel with a satay stick — rojak’s typical utensil — 28.6 percent of the time it plops back into the hot mess of a heap and some of that mass splatters onto your nose or glasses. My three favorite rojak stalls lie within a kilometer of my house.

At Labyrinth, of course chef L.G. Han leads you on a winding, maze-like odyssey before arriving at his rojak rendition, part of his current “My Homage To Singapore” menu. Han is about local street food taking the express elevator up to where Michelin stars play, getting gussied up with a costume change along the way. Then it struts out to, oh, say, the Marina Bay Sands Skydeck. From that million dollar view, Han’s neo-modern Singapore cuisine can see how far it’s come, literally, because some of our most vaunted hawker centers are part of that skyline. With deft hands, clever thinking and adoring heart, Han’s dishes are Singaporean chow in another intergulletic dimension, but never far from home. You feel like you’re experiencing 55 years of how a sprouting port town growth spurted into crazy rich Asian city, over a two-hour degustation.

We get Han’s rojak five dishes into “My Homage…”, which is, if you’re at a hawker center, typically when you might jump up and run off to add a rojak to the table, because it would complete everything else savory, spicy, sizzling. In his sauce, the chef steeps in honey from stingless bees in Batam (Mexico is the only other place you can find these insects), which is why the Labyrinth rojak has no sass. Instead, it excludes botanical grandeur with a cornucopia of edible herbs and flowers — pea flowers, Indian borage, green wood sorrel, Okinawan spinach — from local urban farmers Edible Garden City, and jackfruit and chempedak sorbet. It’s Gardens By The Bay on a plate. It’s a worldly whirl of gastronomy, as defined by a Singaporean.

You realize, once more, that it’s OK you’re here in the midst of international border lockdowns. There’s just so much to intrigue in. You eat that rojak a bit faster than you want to, and it’s gone in a flash, but then, there’s so many more dishes on the menu to look forward to.