Archive : 10th May 2020
I suppose I am lucky.
I think I am lucky because my late father taught me, and all his kids, to appreciate good food from a young age.
When we were young, he used to take us to hotels’ coffee houses and restaurants and his favorite fancy restaurant was The Chalet at the (old) Equatorial Kuala Lumpur where ours and our mother’s birthdays were usually celebrated.
He also loved Japanese cuisine and he was a regular at Kampachi (also at The Equatorial).
His love for good food ran the entire range.. from nasi padang (usually in Singapore) to nasi kandar (in Ipoh & Penang only), Indian Muslim food such as kurma & briyanis (Dawood in Penang), mamak food (especially fish head curry, a restaurant in Race Course Road in Singapore) to hawker food (the now extinct stalls along Jalan Campbell) to Hailam cooking at rest houses (also extinct now) and kopi tiams.
When he was in London, he would take us to some of the best restaurants there... The Ritz Restaurant, The Savoy Grill, The Dorchester Grill... at a time when these restaurants were still ran on very old-fashioned regimes with gloriously old-fashioned menus. None of this new fusion rubbish which I don't think my father can ever like, much less bother to understand.
He enjoyed his Chinese cuisine, his Indian food, both Northern and Southern, his Italian, he liked French and he loved his English roast beef. The only cuisine he expressed disappointment was when he was in the US, not once he praised the food we had when we were there.
I got the news of his passing one 1999 morning...I was at Cornell in Ithaca, upstate New York. That evening, in my own personal homage to his life, I went with a friend to what possibly was the nicest restaurant in Ithaca and ordered foods that he liked. His favorites.
Mind you, I had not shed a tear since I got the news that morning but as I was having the crème caramel at the end of the dinner, I broke down and ran out to the garden to cry.
I owe my father many, many things but one of his most memorable legacies to me was his love of good food. This love of his reflected his love of life, his love of people, his generosity in giving people joy through food.
It is true. No matter how long our parent(s) have gone, we still miss them, don’t we?
Till today, the hole in my heart that first came to be in 1999 is still there, and sometimes, when I happened to have a crème caramel or a good fish head curry or say, a teppanyaki, that hole there in my chest would ache a bit, a tiny bit.
Thanks, Yeop, I love you.
Al-Fatihah.
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