{"id":515,"date":"2008-02-07T10:13:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-07T15:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/2008\/02\/07\/indian-chinese-food-catching-on-in-singapore\/"},"modified":"2008-02-07T10:13:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-07T15:13:04","slug":"indian-chinese-food-catching-on-in-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/07\/indian-chinese-food-catching-on-in-singapore\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian Chinese food, catching on in Singapore?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reuter’s Gillian Murdoch seems fascinated by the emergence of Indian Chinese food in Singapore, writing a fairly substantive review of a restaurant there. Singapore, remember, has substantial ethnic Chinese (East Asian) and Indian (South Asian) populations — and the food in the region often reflects that<\/a>. But Indian Chinese food is not the same as Southeast Asian food. It is its own hybrid. But one that New York City too has long been able to experience in Indian culinary concentrations like in Murray (Curry?) Hill and Jackson Heights. Chinese Mirch<\/a> is the one that pops most immediately to mind.<\/p>\n

Indian Chinese food in India is almost as Indian as Indian food itself. It’s all over the place <\/em>even in Indian restaurants, where their menus will often have two pages of Chinese specialties like Hakka noodles, Chicken Manchurian, and American chop suey. Full text of her article after the jump.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Singapore warms to fiery Indian Chinese<\/span> cuisine
\nBy Gillian Murdoch
\nSINGAPORE, Jan 29 (Reuters<\/span> Life!) — Stir-fried naan, or a Peking-style
\nsamosa?
\nTo purists, and the uninitiated, the idea of Indian Chinese<\/span> cuisine can
\nsound suspiciously like the sushi taco — a fusion step too far, that
\nrisks ruining two of the world’s best-loved cuisines in one fell swoop.
\nBut as restaurants dedicated to mixing the two neighbours’ recipes take
\nhold even in fussy foodie haven Singapore, “Chindian” cuisine is winning
\nover sceptics and carving its own niche.
\nFirst cooked up in India’s only Chinatown in Kolkata about 100 years
\nago, Indianised Chinese<\/span> food was created by Hakka and Cantonese Chinese<\/span>
\nimmigrants who worked in tanneries on the city’s east side.
\nThey added Indian spices such as turmeric, cumin and coriander to
\ntraditional Chinese<\/span> dishes, and then whacked in some chili, to satisfy
\nIndian palates which still found them too bland otherwise.
\nIn doing so they created a cuisine that has become popular in its own
\nright in Indian metropolises from Mumbai to Delhi.
\nThe genre’s new classics include Manchurian chicken, marinated in soy
\nsauce and vinegar and stir-fried with spring onions, honey, and sesame
\nseeds, and crispy noodles topped with “American Chop Suey” — sauteed
\nvegetables such as broccoli, mushrooms and carrots.
\nNow the concept, as Chindia-watching geopolitical analysts would have
\nit, is making a bid for world domination and going global.
\nCatching on from San Francisco to Singapore, it can now be found in half
\na dozen hybrid restaurants in the melting pot city-state’s Little India
\narea.
\nOne of the longest-established of Singapore’s Indian Chinese<\/span>
\nrestaurants, Indian Wok, out on the east coast, is a good place to start
\nexploring the experiment.
\nPaneer, India’s unique cottage cheese, usually paired with spinach to
\nmake palak paneer, or peas to make mutter paneer, gets a Chindian
\nmakeover as chilli paneer, where the white cubes are cooked with green
\npeppers, green chilli, onion and garlic.
\nAnother old stalwart, cauliflower, typically served with potatoes as
\naloo ghobi in Indian resturants, is transformed into dry Gobi
\nManchurian, a dish of spicy, sour fried cauliflower tossed with chilli,
\nonion, garlic and spring onion.
\nFlat Hakka noodles and Indo-Chinese<\/span> fried rices accompany, rather than
\nbreads such as naan or roti.
\nHere again Chindian cooks, unsurprisingly, seem to have scoured China’s
\nmany variants looking for the most fiery.
\nThe southwest’s red-chili-studded Szechuan fried rice, fried with
\nchili-infused oil, ginger and garlic, and the Yangtze delta’s Yangchow
\nfried rice, which fries grains with egg and shrimp or ham, are the
\nwinners that made it onto Indian Wok’s menu. No serious nouveau cuisine
\nis complete without its own sweets, of course, and Indian Chinese<\/span>
\ndoesn’t disappoint.
\nIn what must be a chef’s pun on jalebi, the sticky syrupy orange swirls
\nof fried flour that grace Indian sweet shop windows around the world,
\nIndian Chinese<\/span> serves up darsaan — flat, crispy honey-glazed noodles,
\nserved with vanilla ice cream.
\nAnother fusion classic is the “sizzling brownie”, a walnut and cashew
\nencrusted chocolate brownie served on a small, super-hot Indian-style
\nskillet, which waiters ceremonially top with chocolate fudge and vanilla
\nice cream.
\nWhile the technique of dropping the toppings onto the hotplate from
\nvarious heights may be improvised by the individual waiter, rest assured
\nthat the rest is a bona fide Indian Chinese<\/span> standard.
\nScraping the left-over chocolate off the hot-plate, our waiter told us,
\nis the best, and most authentic way to end what can be a sometimes
\nsurreal, sometimes magical, but always interesting, meal.
\nIndian Wok
\n699 East Coast Road, Singapore
\nTel: 65 6448-2003
\nWeb: http: www.indianwok.com.sg<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reuter’s Gillian Murdoch seems fascinated by the emergence of Indian Chinese food in Singapore, writing a fairly substantive review of a restaurant there. Singapore, remember, has substantial ethnic Chinese (East Asian) and Indian (South Asian) populations — and the food in the region often reflects that. But Indian Chinese food is not the same as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-restaurants"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2pydS-8j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}