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Singapore

Laksa

Speaking of food related trauma, let's talk about a curry that will melt your spoon if you leave it in the bowl too long.

I love a good hot curry. My favorite Desi cuisine is Punjabi. But holy crap, this stuff was meaner than a junkyard dog. (For the record, I knew a junkyard dog personally as a child, the guard dog at Poplar Level Auto Parts, the salvage yard that sponsored my father's stock car. Nice enough if you were introduced to him as a friend by his owner.)

So I was tooling around Harbourfront Centre, which is a massive sprawling multilevel mall with a playground and a scenic overlook and pretty much everything else, a sort of tiny capitalist Disneyland. People try to use that to describe Singapore as a whole, but it really only applies to segments of the place. I'm hungry, and I come around a corner and there's a food place with three different lines, one of which is doing laksa.

I get a bowl with steaming hot coconut-based curry noodles, shrimp and abalone floating in it, grab a spot at a nearby table, and dig in.

Steam shoots out my ears.

I look around. There's a stand maybe three paces away selling Mango lassis. I leave the laksa on the table. It can defend itself. I try not to fidget or look panicky while the young woman is making the lassi. Two slugs of it and my mouth and throat ease down to where I can think clearly again. I go back to the table and regard this bowl of curry with a whole new level of respect.

This goes way past Punjabi cuisine. Many years ago, I was in Bryan / College Station, Texas, doing an install at Texas A&M for a medical lab equipment company. During the week I was there, one of the places I tried was Hapa, which they made very clear was the Thai word for “hot”. On a one to five scale, with a warning that 5 was native Thai only, I ordered my main dish at a 2, and the shrimp and lemon grass soup at a 3.

I could not finish the soup.

Singapore laksa, as it turns out, was on that level.

This day, I finished the laksa. I broke a sweat with the next go, and was perspiring freely by the end. It took the last of the lassi to quench the final flames, but I made it out of there without a second dairy-based beverage.

Be aware, when you talk about Singapore, that its everyday cuisine includes thermonuclear curry.