Channeling Gordon Ramsay

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Courtney: During the cultural training course we attended before leaving the US, we were warned that our honeymoon period with our new home would end after about 2 months, leaving us desperate for fresh tomatoes, affordable French wine and fog.  At that point, we would, we were told, start being critical of everything about our new city and culture and comparing it ruthlessly and unfairly with everything back home.  Not us -- we were ruthless in our criticism and our feelings of superiority right from the start. 

What's the top universally expat-maddening thing in Singapore, you ask?  Customer service, especially at restaurants.  Admittedly, we hail from a foodie city, and we've been fortunate to dine at many of its best restaurants, where both the food and the service are world-class.  (Though we still haven't made it to the French Laundry, where they believe that "service should feel like a ballet," train their waiters in professional dance techniques to teach them grace and balance, and calculate the optimal distance to stand from a dining patron -- variable, of course, depending on the height of the server and the girth of the customer. Fortunately most American tourists in the Bay Area don't make it any further north than Fisherman's Wharf.)  But I like to think we're quite reasonable in our expectations of service, particularly when these places are clearly trying to attract expats who are married to people who don't like Asian food and happily charge top dollar for providing an alternative to hawker center fare.  

You'd think Gordon Ramsay would have shown up by now to try to make his next millions on restaurant makeovers here...but given that it's considered very unseemly to get loud or swear, he might not be the right cultural fit.  So let me channel him, F-bomb free, for this post, with advice for restaurant and cafe owners island-wide.  (Please note that this list has been extensively researched, aided by the fact that we were stuck in corporate housing for a month and had to eat out nearly every night.  Each recommendation is based on experiencing the problem at at least 3 different restaurants and confirming with at least 2 other expats that they have been similarly tormented.)

1. Don't teach your servers to earnestly repeat the customer's order out loud after taking it down...and then forget to reinforce the part of the lesson about actually getting the order right.

2.  Don't close the kitchen without asking us if we want dessert or coffee or both.  Keith tried to challenge this system one evening at one of Singapore's nicer Italian restaurants, standing on principle to demand a cheese plate after the kitchen staff were all at home asleep in bed.  The result was a platter of functional cheese -- a hunk of parmesan, a block of pecorino romano, and mound of something like ricotta -- that the waiter had desperately thrown together to prevent an encounter with the side of Keith's personality that's usually only on display when the homeless guys come in and start hassling the bartender chick at the Hyde Out.  

3. Don't hire 20 servers and think that this represents a visible commitment to providing excellent customer service.  Trust us -- we're way more likely to get annoyed when we see 20 20-something waiters gabbing together at the cash register than we are if there's only 2 supremely harried but generally well-meaning and hard-working servers.  

4. Don't offer "starters" and "main courses" if you're actually planning to deliver the plates to various people at the table at random moments throughout a 45 minute period.  Just call it tapas and embrace the fact that maybe timing isn't one of the core competencies of your kitchen staff.  

5. Don't avoid giving the customer disappointing news. (Note: this is tendency we've seen in much of our Asia travels, and you can imagine that in arenas other than food -- like, say, health care -- it might cause real problems.)  If you've run out of tomatoes for a BLT, please don't show up with a bacon and lettuce sandwich and then ask if we want more lettuce to make up for the fact that there's no tomatoes.  Or, in an all time classic, don't think you can, without telling us, substitute squid ink pasta for regular pasta in a pasta dish that's been ordered out of desperation/frustration/starvation because you've managed to screw up our steak three times.  It's not the same.  Really.  Just give us a cheese plate.

4 Things They Don't Tell You in the Relocation Manuals

March 18, 2009

Courtney:  When it comes to culture shock, it's not one big thing that gets you.  It's the accumulation of LOTS of small things.

1. Hot water is optional.  Apparently it's quite common for kitchens in Singapore to have no hot water from the tap.  In our nest of expat comfort, we have a button on the kitchen wall labeled "water heater," and about 15-20 minutes after you turn it on, you can get some fairly warm water.  This is perfectly logical once you experience the joy of a breezeless 34 degree (C) day -- after all, there are very few days when you actually want your shower or coffee to be steaming hot -- but it's utterly illogical when you're faced with a pile of greasy pots and pans.  Maybe this is part of a grand government plot to spur economic vitality either by 1) encouraging expats to employ a domestic worker to scrub those pots and pans or 2) encouraging us to go out to eat more often so as to avoid the whole washing up mess altogether.  

2. You will eat strange things nearly every time you have to go out for a work-related meal.  The relocation guides did cover this a bit, but it was mostly under the "how to avoid food poisoning" section, where they coach you on how to avoid alienating broad swathes of colleagues/customers/countries when you just say no to that sheep's foot soup.  But I understimated just how many strange things one can encounter in a relatively Westernized place like Singapore.  So far I've managed to join in the fun on the stingray (like many other flat white fish), jellyfish (oddly like boiled onions in texture), cockles (man, I miss the mussels at Plouf in SF), boiled peanuts (why??!)...but skipped the slices of unidentifiable duck organ (when the locals can't identify it, steer clear). 

(Related note: I've finally stopped being startled by the most dramatic tea-pouring I've ever seen: this is high-speed, long-distance Chinese teacup-filling action where there's some combination of gymnastic skill, liquid physics, and sheer determination that sends tea into your cup in a stream the width of a phone cable and the intensity of a fire hose.)  

3.  Thirsty Hippos.  You know those little packets of crystals that sometimes come tucked inside consumer electronics packaging?  The ones that your mom always told you not to mess with?  If you live in a reasonable climate, they probably haven't played much of a role in your life.  Little would you figure, then, that when you're 85 miles from the equator, they can make the difference between having a closet full of nice clothes...and then one day not.  The humidity here is the stealth killer of cloth and leather.  Things can literally rot from the inside out while you're off enjoying a beach in Thailand or working another 80 hour week.  One day you're thinking, "Boy, I wish it were cold enough to get some use out of my Cole Haan fabulous black leather boots," and then the next day you're wondering what that random white festering-looking stuff is all over them.  (This is not a real example, thank goodness.)  Enter the Thirsty Hippo.  It's a small plastic box of aforementioned crystals that sucks the moisture out of the air in your closets, where A/C typically doesn't reach.  Fortunately we learned about these before we lost our entire wardrobe...we would have really appreciated this tip over the "where expat wives can get manicures" section in the relocation guide.  

4.  If you think US TV is hopeless and yields nothing decent to watch, just wait until you're halfway around the world and IP-blocked from most decent (and legal) music and TV content on the web. The talent of whoever is doing the TV-buying for the cable carriers here is the spiritual equivalent of whoever does the "women's everydaywear" buying at K-Mart. Rather shapeless. Mostly pastel, with the oddly selected stroke of fuchsia or too-bright, too-earnest blue.  Never too revealing.  Think Canadian cooking shows.  Except for HBO.  Thank goodness, again, for so many reasons, for HBO.  And thank goodness the Cricket Channel will consume all those hours we have left after we get sick of the Football Channel.

Animal Magic

Friday March 13th 2009

Keith: Nine observations about Singapore wildlife:

1. The small black stain at the foot of the wall in our living room wasn't a scuff mark from the movers, a dead insect or a random bit of dirt. It was lizard poop. Honestly. 

2. The perpetrator of said wall-soiling was Larry the Lizard, a three-inch long beige reptile that scuttled across the sitting room floor on our return from dinner one night. I guess we must have disturbed his daily ablutions. We chased him down the hallway but he was way too quick, disappearing into hiding somewhere in the vicinity of the spare bathroom. It's a bit freaky to have to share your home with a lizard, but we got used to the idea pretty quickly. In fact, I'd forgotten all about him until a small beige head peered round the bathroom door 30 minutes later and asked where we keep the spare toilet roll.

3. I was always under the impression that lizards carry salmonella, and that every so often a pet reptile's germs kill a baby. But when I asked my doctor about it he said this only applies to iguanas, and Larry was in fact as healthy as, well, Larry. Mind you, this was the same doctor who said I didn't need to wear mosquite repellant while dining outside in Singapore, which proved to be somewhat pisspoor advice last night (see #8).

4. The other three-inch creature attached to the kitchen window early on Tuesday morning was not, as I initially suspected, Larry patiently waiting for his turn in the bathroom. It was a giant grasshopper. It stayed on the window immobile for a couple of hours and then suddenly disappeared. I don't know who ate it, but a day later Larry had doubled in size, built himself a sandpit and seemed to be in serious training for the 2012 Olympics triple jump team.

5. Courtney shared an elevator with a cockroach on Wednesday. There really shouldn't have been any cause for alarm - it was traveling to the eighth floor and we live on the fifth. I don't want to be critical of my wife, but normal etiquette when someone joins you in an elevator is to ask what floor they want and press the appropriate button, not kick the crap out of them and boot them down the elevator shaft. Must be an East Coast thing.

6. According to my friend Nick, who's lived in Singapore and Thailand for over a decade, you shouldn't stamp on cockroaches. This spreads their eggs and the smell attracts their mate, and before you know it you're got the entire extended family and 300 hangers on camped out in your front room. A similar experience to getting Sarah Palin's daughter up the duff during an election campaign, I imagine. Anyway, best approach is to reason with them and politely ask them to leave, or nuke them with an aerosol. The cockroaches, that is - not the Palins.

7. Nick also informs me that Singapore is a safe haven compared to where he lives in Southern Thailand, where he has to contend with translucent venomous snakes, malaria-carrying mosquitos, flying cockroaches that bite on impact and a frog that blinds you if it pees on your face. I'm curious as to what circumstances would arise where you'd have a frog peeing on your face. I mean, sure, there was that girl I met in a dive bar in the East End of London fifteen years who suggested.... well, whatever.

 

8.  When you spot an insect on your arm at dinner, don't point at it and ask your wife 'Is that one of those dengue fever-carrying mosquitos?' Kill it before it bites you a second time, then describe what it looked like. You'll get the answer "No" whether she sees it dead or alive. After all, this is a woman who's lived with your Generalized Anxiety Disorder for seven years and knows there are certain buttons that are really best not pressed.

9. The presence of so much wildlife might suggest to the casual observer that the monthly fumigation carried out across our apartment complex is ineffective. Not so. While it's true that the sickly-smelling, thick poisonous smoke that swirled around the building on the first Tuesday of the month didn't eradicate Larry the Lizard and friends, it did a marvellous job fumigating my boxer shorts, which I'd inadvertently left drying on the balcony after our weekly wash. I'm pleased to report that there is now no life form of any description in my underpants - something that Courtney was able to vouch for only last night.

Singapore Spurs

Monday March 2nd 2009

Keith: Sunday night/Monday morning saw Courtney and I joining 100+ Tottenham supporters in a hotel bar for the highlight of the English footballing calendar, the Carling Cup Final. Given that everyone in Asia is supposed to support Manchester United - the only football club in the world where the sole criteria for being a supporter is to certify that you've never been within 100 miles of the ground on match day - it was a real encouragement to see so many Spurs supporters in one place. There was beer, big screens, the token Pub Bore reminiscing about great matches of the 1970s, an unusually varied selection of mixed nuts, and lots of singing - all you could ask for, in fact, aside from actually being at Wembley. Oh, and winning, of course. 

It was great to hear 'Come on you Spurs' sung with such gusto in a combination of Indian, Singaporean and North London accents - frankly, an altogether more tuneful version than anything I get from Mat or John at White Hart Lane. Courtney managed to refrain from chipping in with her own unique chant of 'Go Spurs' - and I avoided any rendition of "My old man, said be an Arsenal fan", primarily for fear that my more restrained Singaporean brethren may not appreciate the deep satire and witty juxtapositions of the next line ("I said f*** off, b*ll***s, you're a c***")

As you may know, Spurs lost the match on a penalty shoot-out, after Jamie O'Hara drove one shot down the goalkeeper's throat and David Bentley further enhanced his reputation for precision passing by missing the goal altogether. Highlight of the game, though, was seeing that cheating bastard Ronaldo booked for diving when the replay showed he had in fact been tripped by a Spurs player in the penalty area, thus confirming that (a) there is indeed a God and (b) with a sense of irony like that, He or She definitely isn't American, which leaves the state of Utah with a certain amount of explaining to do.

So at the top is a picture that Courtney took on her phone, showing me in my new 'Singapore Spurs' shirt at half time. Next year we'll put a flash on the camera. Plenty more pics on the Singapore Spurs site - the crowd believing, Courtney sharing the disappointment, the penalties, and a guy hearing the latest odds on Arsenal or Chelsea winning the Premiership.

And here's a big thanks to Eric, once a drinking companion at the Two Brewers at White Hart Lane in London and now a fellow expat. It was Eric who told me about Singapore Spurs when we met up in Hong Kong last month - he's actually set up a similar group there. Just as Obama's path to the presidency was founded on a combination of old-fashioned grassroots campaigning and ground-breaking use of the internet, so the expat Spurs crew will deploy a combination of traditional tools (beer) and more modern devices (mixed nuts) to win over Asian hearts and minds, one misguided Manchester United supporter at a time....