The first time a friend visited me from overseas, they asked where they should eat. Not the fancy places, they said, but the food I actually go back to. I didn’t hesitate. I took them for a bowl of fish soup.
It surprised them. They expected chilli crab, or laksa, or something with a bigger reputation. But fish soup is the dish I keep returning to, and it is the one I quietly recommend to everyone passing through.
There is a stall near where I grew up that has been there longer than I have been alive. The uncle ladles the broth without looking up, adds the slices of fish, the tomato, a handful of bittergourd if you ask. Nothing about it is loud. The bowl arrives, milky or clear depending on how you order it, with a small dish of chilli and light soy on the side.
I always take the clear soup. There is something honest about it. You taste the fish, the ginger, the faint sweetness of the vegetables, and not much else hiding behind it. On a hot afternoon, or on the kind of evening when the rain comes down heavy and sudden, that broth settles something in me that a heavier meal never could.
I think that is what comfort food really means. Not the dish that impresses, but the one that meets you where you are. Fish soup does not ask anything of you. You do not need to know the menu, or the etiquette, or the history. You sit down at a plastic table, you eat, and you feel a little more like yourself afterward.
When I bring visitors, I watch their faces at the first spoonful. Most of them go quiet. Then they ask why nobody told them about this. I understand the question. Fish soup does not travel well as a story. It is not the thing people photograph and post. But it is the thing they remember on the flight home, the taste they try to find again when they are far away.
The version with milk in the broth is richer, a little creamier from the evaporated milk stirred through. Some people prefer that. I don’t argue; both have their place. What matters is the freshness of the fish, the care in the broth, the fact that someone has been making this same bowl for decades and still makes it well.
I have eaten fish soup when I was sick, when I was tired, when I had nothing much to celebrate and just wanted to be fed. It has never let me down. That kind of reliability is rare in food, and rarer still in the places that serve it without fuss.
So if you are visiting, skip the queue for the viral dish, at least for one meal. Find a fish soup stall in a hawker centre or a corner coffeeshop. Order it clear. Sit down. Let it be simple. You might understand something about this place that no famous dish could tell you.
If you love the kind of food that stays with you long after the meal, come read more stories like this over at SG Foodie Travels.
