Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

I’ve worked in Singapore for close to 6 years now.

As a Filipino expatriate (AKA “Overseas Filipino Worker”), I am here mainly for work. The pay has been good to me, I earn a programmer (web applications) salary that is more than 4x what I earned in a plushy corporate job as a product “supervisor”. There has been many ups and downs, but I am always grateful to the blessings I was given to have this opportunity and I’m trying to earn as much as I can. Hobbies eat at it, though.

But the food here… it’s a world of wonder, even to this day. When I first came here as a solo tourist in 2017, I was pretty impressed. There’s Malay food, Indonesian food, Indian food, Thai food, Korean food, Chinese food, all in one food centre? And (relatively) affordable? My stomach was in both a state of wanting and cursing. An abundance of options, if my stomach could only fit them all in. I couldn’t find this kind of multinational abundance in the Philippines. If you wanted a multinational melting pot of meals in the Philippines, it’s definitely in a mall, and almost all of them were “diluted” in a way to suit local palates. You’ll have to do research and go to, like, a “Koreatown” or something, in isolated places. But here, many of them in just one place. Wonderful.

And so in Singapore, I always have an option, especially lunch. And often I switch cuisines because, I can tell you that you’d get sick of just one cuisine many times in a row. Alternating is a wonderful thing. Monday, I had aglio olio pasta with a slice of margherita. Wednesday, I had nasi lemak. But I always end up favoring my go-to dish option for lunch because of comfort – yong tau foo.

See, this dish can be eaten a lot of ways, and your choice is the best choice. You want it soupy or dry? Do you want vegetarian or meat galore? You want noodles or rice? What kind of soup do you want? Do you want sweet or spicy sauce? Do you want those little things fried or boiled? Do you want fried shallots or sprinkled chives? Your call, your way. Very rarely that customers end up with the exact same dish. And it always end up good for me.

My current usual lunch order goes like this: I get a half-block of tofu, a bundle of leaves (spinach or Chinese cabbage), an assortment of fried items, bitter gourd stuffed with fish paste, wood ear mushroom, one each of the stuffed red and green big long chilies, and opt for instant noodles or mee sua, and have the soup option. Then once the bowl comes back, I put in a spoonful of beans, fried shallots, and ten sprinkles of white pepper (I like my soup very peppery). All of that for 8 SGD (about 6 USD). And it hits the sweet spot like a rampaging tank.

I first had this dish when my old boss Iñigo took me for a lunch treat at a food house near the old office in Commonwealth. He treated me to yong tau foo. I was unfamilar with ordering one, so I observed how he did his. I ended up with a laksa soup variant with long chilis and loads of fried stuff, with yellow egg noodles.

And suffice to say, I was hooked like a junkie. Since then, I always had it once every two weeks, then it got to once every week. I tried every combination I could in the first year. The second year, I settled into what I first had as my go-to option – laksa soup, with eggs, kangkong or choi sam, fried things, then a piece of fried yam and opt for the yellow noodle. Usually at the 7 to 8 SGD range. And sometimes when I feel rich, I’d add the century quail egg, the fried pumpkin, or the cheese-stuffed fried thing. See, I don’t even know the names of some of them, but I know they’re good shit.

Then 2020 came like a plague, and some of my favorite yong tau foo joints either closed down or relocated somewhere with a kinder stall landlord. So my go-to option settled from “abundance” into “what was left”. And I moved away from the laksa soup option partially due to my unfortunate inability to hold back sniffles. See, I get the sniffles quickly with spicy food. And I LOVE spicy food. Curses. I order the dish with laksa soup, I sniffle while eating and my nose runs wet with snot like a river, and the intense spices (not chili spice) sometimes get my throat and I’d cough hard. And this was in 2020-21, people were starting to eat out again but super wary of others with nasal maladies. So I immediately moved away from laksa in dine-in when a very rich soup (you can easily tell one if you’ve had it regularly) had me coughing crazy with bad sniffles, and people started looking at me like I just kicked a puppy or something. I switched to the normal soup option then, and adjusted my preferred ingredients accordingly. That went on for two years. It sucked that I had to walk with essentially a hot soup baggie for a while, then by the time I get back to my rental place, the noodles were already soggy from the residual heat.

By the time late 2022 came and people were starting to wean off the masks, I thought, hey, maybe I can go back to the laksa option. But my taste buds and my health did not allow me to switch back. Doctor flagged me with things in my yearly checkup and recommended I opt for less salty options when eating. Most laksa was salty – like XBox salty but not Steam salty. But I still ordered one. And while I ate it, my taste buds did not like the big spice jolt anymore and I barely finished a bowl. One year later, I can eat laksa the standalone dish but I tend to be very picky of whom to buy it from. I have at least four I know of that I’d buy the laksa dish. But not for my yong tau foo soup base anymore. It’s a big bowl of saltiness and spice.

And so, I settled for what ended up as my current preference, plain soup, the one that they boil the things with. It’s usually a proprietor recipe – some use chicken or beef bones, some use bouillon cubes, some use mixtures of bones and vegetable stock. My current go-to likely uses bouillon cubes with bones, I can’t blame them due to rising business costs. For me, I ended up adding the white pepper overload option later. I kind of liked the taste of the soup with lots of white pepper when I first tried it. I attribute it to my newfound appreciation for the ultra-peppery bak kut teh.

Yong tau foo now has always been my preferred lunch option during rainy days. It’s hot soup – can’t beat that as warming food. It’s also my preferred option when I don’t have any hankering for other types of food. Walking thru the building cafeteria with an “I don’t give a shit just give me something please”, I’ll just go to the yong tau foo stall and order my usual. Doesn’t take much for it to heal my crankiness. I mean, every ingredient was of my own choosing.

… and I just finished my yong tau foo lunch. Superb.

Back to the office I go.