Before I launch into a retrospective spiel about the food I’ve eaten all these decades that gave me so much confidence in many of my recommendations and helped refine my palate, I first like to take a sentence off to thank The Singapore Tourism Board for conferring the Special Recognition Award on me (and my colleagues at Makansutra), for our work in promoting and celebrating good food culture here. The fussy foodie public and the very ardent feeders that reside on our Makansutra website have also been of great support. By default, I think practically everyone in Singapore is a food critic, given our culinary crossroads geography and heritage, which exposes us to many flavours and makes us all food ambassadors of sorts.

Now back to the retrospectives. I am really talking about the very uninspiring food I have had the pleasure of consuming all these while. I’ll reflect why it was a pleasure. If I’ve never had that opportunity to digest that roti prata which tastes and feels like an inner shoe sole lining, I won’t be able to cry in joy over the Upper Thomson Road or Jalan Kayu ones and wax lyrical about how the deliberate folding of air pocket into the dough before they pan fry, helps steam the soft insides as they crisp the outside. And oh, to those few prata masters who squirt a few drops of vanilla essence into the dough for fragrance…terima kasih!

We are currently in the midst of updating our seventh edition of Makansutra Singapore (2008-9 edition) and it means each team of testers has to go through about ten places or dishes a day, over two months. They test (one bite to taste, two to confirm and three to rate) and don’t eat, but it can amount to the equivalent of five meals a day, which isn’t so bad. But when you factor reality checks like how more than 70% of the stuff we slide down our gullet are actually sad stuff that helps us appreciate really good ones, it becomes a different equation. We get a compilation of recommendations from a variety of sources –from our old long time “makanmatas” food cops, some very reliable food forummers, floggers and reviewers on our web, the thick skinned hawkers and chefs who write or call in to demand a rating (some of which are gems), and the good intentioned public who just want to share their makan escapades with us. And of course, the pure curiosity and food anthropological nature in our core team helps open some avenue of discoveries. Some recommendations just miss the mark by a mile (and we wonder how it got to us in the first place). We share some misadventures of our wasted caloric musings.