no. 111: continuum
For readers in North America, Little Perfections is now available for pre-order from the good folk at Kitchen Arts & Letters in NYC. Official release is February 17. For some now forgotten reason, Tuesdays are traditionally the day for book releases – but it also happens to be the first day of the lunar new year. Pre-orders are one of the nicest, most important ways to support a writer. They carry a huge amount of weight in the publishing industry, almost more than actual sales. So if you’d like to give someone a nice IOU… you can tell them it was on at least one book of the year list (thanks Marc!).
There’ll be a North American book tour in 2026 – if there’s a bookstore you’d like me to stop by, drop me a line.
Last time I called the bak chor mee at Bao Fa a kind of origin, but maybe we should look farther back, to something that’s not bak chor mee at all.
The fishball noodles at Thye Hong, in Bukit Batok. Superb. The family is fishball royalty, one trunk of a great, dying oak tree with roots in Ghim Moh and a branch in Holland Village, all still doing this by hand. I love the looseness of their fishballs, the give after the snap.
Joo Chiat Chiap Kee in Bedok. I assume the lone pork ball is there mostly so they can get some pork flavor into the broth, but have never asked. Similar construction, just noodles and paste. Fishballs more regular, noodle saucing similarly sambal-forward. The soup was also a little less of a power drill to the palate.
Hu Ji Fishball Noodle Yong Tau Foo in Tiong Bahru, 2018. Note the slices of pork. The dumpling-shaped objects are her kiao 鱼饺, or fish dumplings, minced pork in a skin made of fish paste. Fishballs more muscular than at Thye Hong, ketchup in the sauce, the soup just as MSG forward.
Tanjong Pagar Teo Chew Fishball Noodles, 2022. Excellent noodles, lightly sauced, the generous spoon of cilantro made a real difference. Minced pork in the bowl, two types of meatball, which felt neither ornamental nor distracting.
Golden Mile Teochew Fishball Noodle, 2023. Sliced pork, a meatball, a lonely prawn. Functional. Relatives who’ve been to Chaozhou tell me fishball noodles and bak chor mee are virtually unknown there, so I wouldn’t take the “Teochew” too seriously.
The late, lamented Teck Hin Fishball Noodle at Seven Mile Market, in 2023. Mushrooms now. And minced pork. Also a ketchup in sauce place. The noodles inspired to resistance by just the right amount of time in the bath.
Yong Hwa Delights Handmade Fishball Meat Ball Noodle. Bedok Bus Interchange, 2022. Minced pork, meatball, lettuce. Visibly oversauced. A rare stall where the soup didn’t feel steroidal, but there are still better things to eat in Bedok.
And now Bao Fa, here a destination, the end point of a long and winding process by which a dish slowly becomes another dish.
I have no idea whether fishball noodles or bak chor mee came first, but you can see how a fishball seller would fall into the noodle business. Making fishballs takes hours, and then it’s a short step to selling them ready to eat. We didn’t just start loving convenience a generation ago. Once you’re cooking fishballs, noodles are just an extra pot, or even the same one. And then one day someone decides to skimp on the fishballs and make up for it with a spoonful of minced pork, and they stop being called a fishball noodle seller at all, and became known simply as a “Teochew noodle seller” instead, and eventually they become “that Teochew noodle seller who gives you more minced meat than fishballs,” and then by the time hawkers start having signboards, a few decades later, they’re just doing what their forebears did and some signboards say fishball noodles and others say bak chor mee, and then the magic of the written word preserves that distinction for all time.
But there’s also a kinship between Bao Fa and Thye Hong. When you eat at Thye Hong, there are five components: noodles, sauce, fishballs, fishcakes, and broth. The fishballs and fishcakes are kind of the same thing, and the broth is the water in which the fishballs are poached, amped with ladles of MSG (that’s one way to make a soup so clear you can read a newspaper through it). The dish is practically an aesthetic, zen for people in a hurry.
I think bak chor mee needs that clarity, literal and figurative. The sense that it’s not much more than fresh pork and improvisation, that the flavors should be light, transparent. So my assertion that No. 25 is only bak chor mee in name stems from a sense that the cook is pursuing other goals altogether – richness, depth, concentration. Maybe in time we’ll have another name for what No. 25 is making. It’s certainly good enough, and distinct enough, to declare independence.
But I’m not sure it actually could. It doesn’t feel like the kind of change that’s legible on the internet. The internet understands change at the speed of fusion: Ube croissants, ramen Alfredo, mochi everything. Like we have a periodic table of elemental foods, that in the right circumstances, with the right catalysts, we can compound. Put the flaky flatbread and the tropical flavor in a reactor, add marketing and form factor, see what comes out, and if it doesn’t stick, try again. The speciation that gave us first Bao Fa and then No. 25 is a longer, slower process, decidedly less photogenic, but, perhaps, more enduring.
And if you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!