Tales from the Marble Bar

My main meal of the day is lunch.

This taken at one of the local hawker centres or during the working week, at the student canteen at NUS. The pattern of dining out for lunch is not one that is practised in New Zealand preferring instead to take home sandwiches to work.

The quality and price of bread in Singapore precludes this option. It is difficult to find good whole grain bread at a reasonable price. Locals prefer soft white bread or bread creations from such outlets as Bread Talk .

The only other time in my life when I regularly partook of bought lunches was as a very small child.

I can recall at the age of two, when my mother was giving birth to my sister, that I was in the tender care of my father. He and I used to bike down to a local eating house in the main street of the small NZ provincial town where we lived.

This eatery was rather grandly titled, The Marble Bar. I cannot recall the naming rationale but I suspect it referred to the counter top. The waiting staff were dressed in neat and uniform attire and the food was the standard NZ fare of the 1950's - fish and chips, sausage and vegetables etc.

Food in the NUS student canteen is markedly different. There is an excellent Nasi Padang stall which serves Malay food. Here you can get two choices of meat and two vegetable on rice (with a nice curry sauce) for the princely sum of $3.

Nearby is the Fruit and Juice stand where for $1.20 a large glass of freshly blended Papaya juice is to be had.

Someone has even published a blog site dedicated to NUS Canteen food so they are as equally impressed as I with the quality and selection.