Perigord Dinner

For Dave's last night here, we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Joycelyn, the woman who works here at Perigord Singapore, picked a place with Chili Crab to take us to. We all went - Mathew, Dave, Joycelyn, and Po lin (the other woman in the office) all met me near the restaurant. This was a sit down place with service, as opposed to a lot of the eating venues here where you do not have waiters. We ate inside. The tables had on them peanuts and some dipping sauces, as well as a bowl of water with limes for washing your fingers later. The peanuts were unusual to us, though, because they were steamed. This makes them squishy. I'd never had squishy peanuts before, but I think it's something I'll miss when I get back to the states.



We sort of let Joycelyn order everything - she ordered everything at once and told them what order to bring everything out in . The first was a Bullfrog and Chili appetizer, which we all ate communally with our chopsticks. It was really good and not really that spicy. The bull frogs were bigger than frog I'd had previously in the states so there was more meat and they were easier to eat. Then they gave us this big fried fish.



I think that's after we all picked at it. Yes, there were lots of bones (ew for bones). But the fish was flaky and good and the flavor was amazing. Again, we all sort of took chunks back to our respective plates and that was that. As our plates filled with frog bones and fish bones, the wait staff removed our plates and refreshed them with new ones.

The next dish, a drunken prawn ginseng soup, was really really good. It was giant piles of ginseng (which you weren't supposed to eat) and then about 10 or 12 prawns in a clear broth. Po Lin dished out the soup to all of us. This isn't a great picture of it, but here's a prawn covered in ginseng in Mathew's soup.



Yes, those are eyes. They are apparently put in the soup alive, and they get drunk on the liquor in the soup (white wine, we believe) and then are cooked alive while drunk. Hence, the name - drunken prawn soup. They are obviously shell-on, with legs, tails, everything. So we had to remove the shells in order to eat the prawns. Very very very good prawns, though.

(Prawn soup, bullfrog, chili sauce for the fish, and people eating)

Next they gave us salted fish fried rice. No photo of this, it looks like very light fried rice. But the salted fish was amazing - tiny little chewy chunks of SUPER salty fish in a lightly fried rice complete with bean sprouts. I would have eaten this as the whole meal, it was amazing. (We had it again later at another restaurant and it wasn't anywhere nearly as good as that place.)

Finally, they took most of our food away and brought out the Chili Crab. This was a MASSIVE bowl of crabs in a spicy and hot (temperature wise) chili base. They provided two shell crackers at the table, and one wet nap a person (to last the whole meal - there are virtually no paper napkins given out in Singapore). Luckily the shell was mostly cracked up already so it wasn't too hard, but the crab and chili were hot to the touch and it was very very messy because of the chili. I'm surprised we didn't wind up wearing more of it on ourselves than we did. Occasionally a crab would squirt across the table and hit someone, that was fun once or twice.



It should be noted that these are massive crabs. (The one on the bottom of the photo is the body of the crab, on his back.) The bowl is enormous. There were about 2 full crabs in that bowl, I think - based on the number of claws and bodies - but it was plenty to go around. The chili crab came with a small piece of bread/roll - but it was sweet bread, almost like a doughnut but not quite that sweet. I imagine this is to cut the heat of the chili. It was spicy, but not terribly. Good all around flavor.

We also ordered a pitcher (which turned into two) of Tiger beer - but only the men had it. What was unusual here was that the wait staff kept re-approaching the table and pouring the beer from the pitcher into the glasses of the men who were having it. They never finished an entire glass before it was refilled. There was no discussion of who would have the last bit; the waitstaff decided.

Lastly, Mathew & I split a dessert, and Dave had one, too. It was a sort of Mango purée with little tapioca pearls and bits of fresh mango. Really delicious, and great after all the spicy food.

What was amazing was that all of that food (2 pitchers of beer, rice, soup, appetizer, two entrees, 2 desserts) only came to about $50 (US) a head. That's including tax and tip. Now, most meals here are like $3 US including tax and there's no tip, but for a 2 hour long meal with such amazing food, I think the value was great. It all balances out, I guess - spending $3-5 a day on food and then once in awhile spending $50 - all equalizes out to less than you'd expect to spend on food eating out for every meal.