Deceased Bizarro Food Influencer Strikes Again

In case anyone who reads this blog is wondering where I’ve been, I have two things to say that might be clues. You really have to try Ki’s Roasted Goose in Hong Kong, and you should avoid the chili crab at Keng Eng Kee Seafood in Singapore.

My wife and I keep meeting abroad while we wait for her American visa, and we just spent two weeks in the Far East.

I have never had any interest in seeing Hong Kong (or any Far Eastern destination), but beggars can’t be choosers, and very few countries will let my African wife visit without a fight. China will not accept her, but Hong Kong, which is part of China, lets Zambians in straight off the plane. She wants to see as many countries as she can, and she didn’t want to revisit our prior destinations without including something new, so we threw Hong Kong into the mix.

Before the trip, people gave me a lot of bad information. Somehow, the Internet has made it harder to learn the truth about other countries. It should have made it easier. Because there is so much money to be made from cheap Internet exposure, people who have a lot of eyeballs on them are able to charge a lot for lying about hotels, restaurants, and attractions, and they are making the most of it. Also, forums are full of people who give bad advice for no clear reason.

Regarding Hong Kong, I was told I should get a hepatitis shot or immunoglobulin because something like 6% of the population has the disease. I was told I could get typhoid from eating raw food. People said I should avoid the tap water. I also read that I might be arrested and imprisoned for no reason.

Regarding hepatitis, it’s not easy to get without close contact, so that’s not a real problem. Typhoid affects people who eat dubious things like raw oysters, and I won’t even eat cooked ones. The tap water comes from a completely modern purification system, and it contains chlorine, just like the tap water you probably drink.

I think the people who get arrested are generally Americans with Chinese backgrounds, or Chinese people with American green cards. If you go to Hong Kong to protest the CCP, you may have a problem, but I went to eat restaurant meals and be with my wife.

I was also told people in Hong Kong would be rude, but they seemed fine to me. Of course, I spent most of my childhood in Miami, so I barely notice rudeness that would put most people in therapy.

I guess I can tell you some useful things about Hong Kong.

First, the food is generally very good. It’s not always fantastic, but you will find very little food that is truly disappointing. We went to a number of places, recommended and unrecommended, and the only truly worthless one was the Peninsula Hotel. Everything else was either good or excellent.

Singapore is different. People claim it’s the food capital of Asia, but that’s completely baseless. There is good food there, and there is also a lot of really bad food. You have to talk to locals in order to find out where you should eat.

The Peninsula has a famous high tea service. This is a British thing. “Tea” is a beverage, but the British think it’s lunch. They have a pretentious custom of sitting down in the afternoon and eating really awful girl food with hot tea. Scones and cucumber sandwiches figure heavily.

The Peninsula’s high tea is a tourist thing. It has no redeeming features whatsoever apart from the nice atmosphere. It has no inherent value. They charge you around $250 for tea and a weird three-tier tray of worthless food. You take selfies and enjoy feeling important, and then you leave.

The lowest tier on the tray holds cranberry scones which are overworked. A scone is a sweet biscuit, and when you work biscuit dough too much, it gets gummy, sort of like Pillsbury canned biscuits. The Peninsula’s scones were okay, but not like the real thing. The second tray held cucumber sandwiches with the crusts removed. If you have to remove the crust from your bread, you made bad bread. The crust is supposed to be the best part. The cucumber stuff is just cucumber mashed up with something resembling mayonnaise mixed with low-fat sour cream. Pointless. You also get weird little pastries full of a similar condiment mixed with lumps of bad smoked salmon. It’s hard to make me dislike smoked salmon, but the Peninsula Hotel pulled it off.

The top tier contains about three pastries per person. They are small and not very good. All you need to know. They had something on there that was sort of like a tiny raspberry shortcake, and it was acceptable, but the other items were gross.

We took a food tour in Hong Kong the day after we arrived, and it was really helpful. We had beef brisket and noodles in a soup pretty much like pho. Very, very good. The name of the restaurant is Sister Wah. We also had dim sum at the Imperial. Excellent. We finished up with roasted goose at Ki’s Roasted Goose, which is a chain. We met Mr. Ki himself. He happened to be at the location we visited that day. Very friendly guy. Funny.

Ki’s taught me that America’s rejection of goose is a huge mistake. It’s far better than our standard poultry, including duck. It’s sort of like fatty, juicy, delicious pork. Chinese people gut and clean their geese, and then they slow-roast them. They apply stuff to the skin. I would guess it’s mainly MSG and some kind of sugar solution. In the end, you get a very, very juicy goose with a crisp skin that will make your eyes roll back in your head. Sort of like Peking duck, but much better.

We had roasted goose twice, and it was fantastic both times. The vegetables were also very, very good. If you go to Hong Kong and eat every meal at Ki’s, no one will be able to criticize your judgment.

They give pork belly the same treatment. It’s nothing short of amazing.

The meat is served with plum sauce and beautifully prepared rice. It doesn’t need anything else. Adding too much stuff to it is like pouring sauce on a good steak.

We assumed roasted goose would be all over Singapore, but it isn’t. They use duck because of bird flu issues. It’s good, but you can’t compare it to goose, and Singapore cooks just aren’t as good as Hong Kong cooks.

The dim sum was wonderful, but I would recommend staying away from the steamed barbecue pork buns Youtubers brag about. They’re not great. The pork is very sweet, and there is no acidity or heat to balance the sweetness. Steamed pork buns are popular for breakfast. I would sooner hit the nearest McDonald’s.

Hong Kong is also known for egg tarts. An egg tart is a tiny pie crust filled with egg custard. Maybe it’s exciting to Asians, but I’m used to flan and creme brulee, so I found it lacking. I would not order one again.

We didn’t eat any expensive food in Hong Kong, and by “expensive food,” I mean legitimate expensive food, not garbage like the Peninsula Hotel’s farcical tea. I don’t think there is any point in looking for high-end restaurants in Hong Kong, because the food is so good everywhere else.

Hong Kong is hot, and the wind never blows. Well, it blows, but you feel it mostly when you’re up on a hill or a building, because Hong Kong buildings are tall and close together. The humidity is amazing, and I am saying this as a person who lives in Florida. Laundry takes forever to dry. There is mildew everywhere. When you walk down the streets, water from air conditioners drips on you no matter where you are.

Hong Kong is built below some steep hills, and the buildings pretty much stop at their bases, so the hills are not very developed. We took a tram up the side of Victoria Peak and shot some video. We were around 1800 feet above the narrow streets, and the difference was amazing. The air was cooler, and it actually moved. And we were in the clouds part of the time. Worth the money and time. Victoria Peak is not an alp, but it punches above its weight.

I picked up some camera stuff in an area known for electronics stores. The selection was fantastic, as was the help. Much better than the US. Prices were about the same, though.

The subway and buses were wonderful. When you get to Hong Kong, you buy something called an Octopus Card, and you load it with money. After that, you use it to take you everywhere. We only took two cabs the whole time we were there.

The subway I know best is the one in New York. It stinks of urine, it’s a great place to get beaten or killed, and passengers are constantly harassed by young fatherless morons. It’s really dirty. You can’t use the restrooms because they never work, they are never cleaned, and they belong to violent drug dealers who don’t like visitors. Hong Kong and Singapore have clean, efficient, safe subways. Very different. Best way to get around.

The harbor is nice. You can take a ferry for almost nothing, and it gives you good views of the impressive skyscrapers and peaks. When tiny waves rock the boat, the Chinese people go, “WOOOOOOOO!” Makes a big impression on them.

We stayed in Sheung Wan, a real Hong Kong neighborhood a short distance from the busier areas. We used an apartment-hotel, so we had the luxury of access to washers and dryers. Unfortunately, the staff and other guests were always using them. In the future, I would choose a place with laundry machines in the suite itself.

The neighborhood was full of conveniences such as 7-Eleven, McDonald’s, and bakeries. Very livable.

American cities are full of grandmother-raised, fatherless minority kids who are constantly looking for victims. It was strange to be in busy cities where you don’t even think about things like that. It was very strange not to see ghettos. A typical big American city is MOSTLY ghetto.

Singapore was great, as always. They have cards similar to Octopus Cards, and we used ours to go all over. Our experience with the food was not all that great, though. Liars like Anthony Bourdain have polluted the world with corrupt reviews pushing bad restaurants, and we got burned again.

Bourdain and a popular food vlogger with a channel called Marion’s Kitchen have promoted Keng Eng Kee for seafood. We tried it. Disgusting.

They sold us a $95 chili crab. They said it was a whole kilogram. It looked like a crab, but it was really a collection of shell parts from unrelated crabs, piled up to look like one creature. It appeared they had boiled a lot of crabs in a sauce much like the glop in a can of Spaghetti-O’s. If you took that stuff and added a small amount of Texas Pete and a ton of sugar, you would have nearly the same thing.

There was no meat inside the crab body. The sauce was full of tiny slivers of overcooked meat, however. I believe over 3/4 of the kilogram was sauce and shell.

Our “crab” had three claws. They were poorly cracked, and the meat wasn’t worth the effort of extraction.

We also had deep-fried prawn rolls. Imagine balls of almost-decayed shrimp and vegetables, battered by a machine in a factory and fried in old oil. That’s what we got, as far as I can tell. No salt or seasoning. Worthless.

My wife ordered chicken wings seasoned with shrimp paste. Take several old chicken wings, salt them very lightly, and fry them in old oil. You will get pretty much what she got. The shrimp flavor was barely detectable. A total waste of money.

We also had pork ribs in coffee sauce. They fry boneless pork in breading. It’s almost certainly cheap pork shoulder. There are no bones. Then they soak it in a sweet coffee-based sauce. It’s okay, but the sauce takes all the crunch out of the breading. I think they let the ribs soak in it en masse instead of applying it right before serving.

Anthony Bourdain and the other people who recommended Keng Eng Kee knew they were lying, but I guess they got some cash. Locals recommend a chain called Jumbo. We didn’t try it.

Would I go to Hong Kong again? I guess so, if it were convenient. I would go for the food. My wife would go for the shopping. Hong Kong has huge Western-style malls. I don’t think Hong Kong can sustain a tourist’s interest for more than 5 days, but it’s pleasant.

Having visited Hong Kong, I now realize Singapore’s reputation as a food city is undeserved.

On our last visit to Singapore, we found some good places to eat, but we also found bad ones. Just like this time, Anthony Bourdain’s lack of integrity figured in our misfortune.

Singapore has facilities known as food centers or hawker centers. They are similar to American parking garages. They have no outer walls. They contain rows of food preparation stalls made of stainless steel, and every stall is a separate business. You can get many types of food in a food center. Chinese is most common, but you can also get Indonesian, Indian, Thai, and Malay food. Food centers are very cheap. You can get a good meal for about $7.50 US.

Before his ignominious demise, Bourdain the pretend regular guy hyped a food center stall known as Tian Tian Chicken. It sells Hainanese chicken, which is a bizarre dish consisting of limp, lukewarm steamed chicken draped over rice. For some reason, Chinese people love Hainan-style chicken. I don’t think anyone else does.

We went to Tian Tian, and we had to wait in line for about 10 minutes. It’s always busy. They sold us a plate of food, and we tried it. The chicken looked almost as though it had been boiled. It had almost no flavor. The rice was anointed with a sauce pretty much like the liquid from Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, only not as good. We threw out most of the dish and found a local guy who showed us better places. He said only tourists ate at Tian Tian.

I’m not sure Anthony Bourdain even knew what good food was. He raved about Waffle House. I’m not from Mars; I’ve been to Waffle House. They give you 20% of the pleasure you get from Cracker Barrel, for 80% of the money. Waffle House is where you go when Cracker Barrel and McDonald’s are closed. It’s kind of astonishing that a renowned food authority would be willing to endorse a place everyone knows is a dump, but somehow Bourdain did it and got away with it.

On this latest trip, we hit the food centers again. Some food was very nice. Some was pretty bad. Just like last time. You really need local guidance or the willingness to buy several plates of food and throw out the ones you don’t like.

We only saw one food center in Hong Kong, and we didn’t get around to trying it. Based on our other experiences in Hong Kong, I’ll bet the food is good.

We found a good Chinese chain in Singapore: Din Tai Fung. It’s based in Taiwan, where leftism has not yet succeeded in destroying the character of the people. Din Tai Fung is basically a dim sum joint. A huge variety of dumplings and similar items, served by hustling waiters who never stand still.

The big problem with the Din Tai Fung we tried is that it’s too busy. It’s in the basement of the Raffles City hotel, which sits on a mall, and there is a ton of foot traffic. You have to wait up to half an hour to get into Din Tai Fung there, and dishes you want disappear from the annoying electronic menu while you’re trying to order them. Nearby, in the Suntec City mall, there is another Din Tai Fung, and you can walk right in.

Unfortunately, Rhodah discovered Shake Shack during our trip. We ended up visiting twice. I don’t like Shake Shack. It’s a costlier version of Five Guys, which is a costlier version of Wendy’s. It sells pretty good burgers and fries, along with mediocre shakes and very bad ice cream. Unlike Five Guys, it doesn’t offset the enormous cost of the burgers by giving you three times as much fries as you actually want.

Rhodah thinks Shake Shack is wonderful, so I guess we’ll be buying more $25 fast food meals in the future.

We also visited Five Guys twice. I can take it or leave it, but Rhodah loves it. We paid about 45 US dollars for two burgers, a soda, a shake, and one order of fries. That’s even worse than the price here.

One of my big gripes with Shake Shack and Five Guys is that they serve big balls of grease that harden in your intestines and resist expulsion. I love fattening food as much as anyone, but there is a point where it becomes overkill. When you do something to a dish to make it fatty, there should be some purpose other than one-upping the restaurant next store.

We hit Ruth’s Chris again, but this is our last time, because it costs twice what it costs in America, and the food isn’t that great. Her steak was undercooked, which is inexcusable. What is Ruth’s? A steakhouse. How do you cook steak to medium doneness? Well, figure it out after 96 years of serving steak. I can teach a person how to do it in 30 seconds, so Ruth’s should be able to get it done in 96 years.

Ruth’s also served me crab cakes that didn’t taste great. Making a good crab cake is extremely simple. The final insult was banana cream pie made with green bananas. Singapore may well be the banana connoisseur’s Mecca. You can go into a market there and see numerous varieties of bananas. Ruth’s ought to be able to find decent ones for pie, and a competent chef will not put green bananas in anything.

If we ever go to Ruth’s Chris again, it will be in the US, and we will stick to steak and potatoes.

We ended up taking a food tour, even though we were familiar with Singapore. I arranged it because the Hong Kong tour was so helpful. We tried Malay, Indian, and Chinese food.

Malay food looks great but doesn’t have much zing to it. It’s on the bland side. They sometimes supply pepper sauce, and my advice is to ladle it on. When a plate of colorful Malay food arrives at your table, you may expect all sorts of powerful flavors, but it’s an illusion.

I can’t say enough about Indian food in Singapore. We tried it in a number of places, and apart from one food center stall, every place did a fantastic job. Whether the bill was $135 or $58 (Singapore dollars), the food was about the same.

On our first trip, we blundered into a place called HeritageOne, in Little India. The food was top notch. Better than the expensive places we visited. I recommend it highly, even though they don’t serve samosas. It was so good, we made a second visit when we returned to Singapore.

On our tour, we were given Indian pancakes and puri with various sauces. Wonderful. The food was so good, I was able to forgive the name of the restaurant: Kamala.

Having spent a total of around 24 days in Singapore, I feel like I know a little about it now. My conclusion is that you can get good food, and you don’t have to pay a lot for it, but there is also a lot of expensive food that isn’t great. It’s best to avoid tourist-heavy areas. The food will cost you twice as much as food elsewhere, or more, and it won’t be any better.

We did some things we didn’t do on our first trip. We rode the big Ferris wheel in Singapore, and we visited Gardens by the Bay.

I guess soon every big city will have a Ferris wheel. London has one, and so does Hong Kong. Singapore’s wheel is named the Singapore Flyer, and it has big air-conditioned cars. Not much to say about it except that I guess it’s worth the money.

Gardens by the Bay is a big landscaped area featuring a couple of indoor gardens and several big steel towers shaped sort of like trees. They’re actually shaped more like funnels. Little steel tornadoes.

The main indoor garden is not great. Just a bunch of well-tended plants with little signs on them. We didn’t see the second indoor garden. It’s based on the movie Avatar, and we both hate Disney. James Cameron makes fairly good movies, but as a human being, he’s kind of irksome. A billionaire whose moneymaking enterprises burn enough oil to run a major city, yet who preaches environmental asceticism to the peasants who pay his bills. He also claimed he found the tomb of Jesus Christ, which is pretty funny. I mean the tomb where his dead body was buried and rotted. Cameron apparently thinks any ossuary in Jerusalem with the name “Yehoshuah” on it must belong to Jesus. “Yehoshuah” was a common name in Israel during the life of Jesus. Like “Bob” in the US today.

The funnel towers look great in photos of Singapore, but in reality, they’re a lot like carnival construction in ordinary attractions like Six Flags. They’re also much smaller than the photos lead you to believe. You can go up to the top of the main funnel and take photos of Singapore. That’s fun.

We were suckered into riding on Singapore’s only cable car development. It takes you to a tourist island known as Sentosa. The cars are not cooled, so you get hauled up near the sun, right by the equator, in a little glass box.

The ride was okay, but Sentosa itself is run-down and boring. Not much to see. We paid for two cable car trips, but we only used one. We used it to get to Sentosa, and then we used it to leave.

Singapore is great, and I enjoyed both of my trips a great deal. If I sound negative, it’s because I’m mentioning the lows as well as the highs.

I feel like I was blessed this time when I found my flights. Nothing over 24 hours long. I still suffered quite a bit. My first flight went over the North Pole, and it lasted about 18 hours. That’s 18 coach hours. With no empty seats to speak of. On Cathay Pacific, which has tiny seats apparently designed for Asians. On the way home, I had to take a 15-hour flight from Dubai at 2:30 a.m., and it was jam-packed. If a flight leaving at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday is popular, when are the slow times?

On the flight, I learned something interesting. Indians have body odor problems. That’s not me being racist. It’s a fact. For some reason, Indians have resisted taking anti-B.O. steps Westerners have come to consider normal. You can read about it on the web. The flight I took from Dubai was very popular with Indians, so there were some pretty fragrant people on board, including the guy sharing my row with me, who also appeared to be mentally ill. They always find me.

Will we return to Singapore? Not soon, I hope. In fact, I have reason to hope we won’t be traveling much in the future. Rhodah finally has her embassy interview appointment, so if things go as they usually do, she will be here before the end of October.

Our immigration saga has taught us to feel like making overseas trips twice a year is normal, and of course, it isn’t. We want to see Israel together, and I would like to take her to Europe, but this business of constant foreign travel will presumably have to stop. We have to have money to live on when we get old, and neither of us wants to work.

We both wonder if God has a reason for sending us to Singapore and making us like it so much. Sometimes I think he’s showing us a place we can escape to when perverted America becomes too dangerous for us.

It was very strange, being in a country where no one is afraid of sodomites or rioting punks.

While we were there, the city was having some kind of night festival, and there were activities and displays all over the place. One night while we were walking home, we went through Fort Canning Park, which is a big green space in the middle of town. We saw many people walking with their children, enjoying the festival. We never thought about street crime, except to notice that it wasn’t an issue. We didn’t have to worry about riots or fights. None of the parked cars we saw that night had broken windows. No one tried to sell us drugs. No whores accosted me. We didn’t smell weed. It was completely different from the filthy international disgrace which is urban America.

It occurred to me that life there was normal. It was the way it was supposed to be, and it was something I could not have in my own country, the world’s biggest Christian nation.

I don’t want to take Rhodah to New York. How would I keep her safe? I would be surrounded by armed punks, and I would not be allowed to have a pistol. We would have to play roulette with our lives and property. I can’t even take her to Paris or London without careful research about the safe areas.

We will never have safe cities again in America. That’s amazing. We just have to support the police, punish and restrain criminals, and allow people to carry guns. It’s that simple. But it will never happen. As long as this age lasts, our cities will be disgusting cesspools of cruelty.

I’ll probably write more about the trip when my brain gets over 12 hours of jet lag.