Pichet Ong: belief

Transcript context

…But I’ve found I can’t get very good Sichuan food in Singapore, or at least I don’t know how to find it. That southern Chinese — Hokkien, Fujian — it’s weird, but it’s pretty good. Singaporean food is amazing. Malay food is amazing. But a lot of the harder-core Chinese regions . . . Somehow, Singapore has too many other good things for Singaporeans to be interested in them. Or do you have a different impression? Well, to clarify a little bit more, there’s restaurant Chinese food and there’s home Chinese food. The home Chinese food might even be more simple, probably a lot of Hokkien or Teochew kind of flavors, which has a lot of soups and clear broths, and almost no stir-fry and very little oil used in the cooking, and it’s lean cuts of meat. Restaurant tends to be spicier. But I would say that Sichuan is . . . For some strange reason, for me, in Asia it has taken a slower growth, especially in Thailand, where you almost never see Sichuan restaurant. It’s ironic because you mentioned the complexity of the flavor profile, and I agree with you. But in Thailand, for some reason you just don’t find a whole lot of Sichuan restaurants, and the same thing in Singapore. I would say that you’d probably find more in Hong Kong and the rest of China, which is a huge feat. Well, I think it is the story of immigrants.…

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