The very thought of living on Indian food on a foreign trip is killing. It’s not that the gracious hosts don’t like to spread out their local delights. It’s just that the company an adventurous gastronaut like yours truly keeps on such official trips can turn out to be quite dicey. So my past experiences ? as bitter as an 80 per cent cocoa chocolate ? did a quick flashback when a fellow traveller (from Kanpur) didn’t even flip through the international page of the Singapore Airlines menu card.

Thoughts of having to live on chana-kulcha and dal-chawal in the bustling bylanes of Chinatown and Bugis smelling 24/7 of chilli crabs and oyster omelettes bugged me for the rest of the flight.

It’s simple: if you are the only one interested in local exotica and the others on the trip swear by ghar ka khana, you have to compromise and keep your chopsticks aside.

The hosts usually have to relent and book tables at Indian restaurants to keep the majority happy. Haven’t you leafed through the dal-roti meals the travel agencies promise even on an Egyptian cruise where the only Indian thing the locals have ever heard of is Amitabh Bachchan?

Having already put forward my case to our immensely likeable tour guide Wee Tee, my mind was at some peace. “Donth worry, we will eath the most authentic Sichuan Chinese meal,” she had promised. Now, that was some lure. Having grown up in a city that loves to rustle up its noodles like paratha rolls and spray a medley of artificially coloured sauces for a cover-up job, this was a prized proposition.

Yes, there sure is a Mainland China and even a Chinatown in Tangra but do they come at all close to the true flavours of China?

Tucked away in the south-west corner of Singapore at a place called Rochester Park lay Min Jiang (named after the Min river in Sichuan), the answer to all my gastronomic grumbles.

The swank two-tiered restaurant ? a cosy indoor set-up and an even cosier balcony setting ? passed the preliminary litmus test: there were Chinese faces drowned in their plates and bowls on rotating tables and the chefs moving around were part of the 77 per cent Chinese population of the Lion City.

That’s the first thing to confirm at any Chinese eatery, Nondon Bagchi had pointed out a decade back in one of his food columns in The Telegraph.

Menu matters

My friends meanwhile were doing their job ? “We want only chicken?”, “Please don’t put beef or pork in my dish”, “We can have fish but not from the sea”. The cantankerous cacophony was doused by Scallops in Crispy Golden Cup with Crispy Sesame Eel and Drunken Chicken. Well, that’s just one dish ? oval one at that ? carefully carved into three. On the left, looking almost majestic in the deep-friend cup-shaped wanton skin were the pan-seared scallops. Very white, very tender, the light saut? had kept the fresh-from-the-waters feel. A lot of work had gone into the twisted nuggets lying around. The eel had been smoked, breaded and fried before being soaked in the sesame vinaigrette to abandon the inherent acidity. Drunken Chicken was true to its name as how much beer had been poured on the poultry was anybody’s guess.

A super starter is always a sign of things to come and by now I was getting used to the fact that these Chinese dishes drew inspiration from our Bollywood movies when it came to nomenclature. Sample the soup: Double Boiled Chinese Herbal Shark’s Fin Cartilage with Fish Maw. Phew!

This was one soup that had history, geography, physics, and, of course, chemistry all simmered in one. The Chinese have been using food to treat ailments for a long time. The Shark Fin floating in there somewhere was meant to maintain my youth, while the double-boiled soup in itself was meant as a yin energy tonic to strengthen the body’s immune system and help prevent cancer. To me, however, it was one super shorba that I could gulp a few bowls of and refuse to enter the main course.

But we were having a proper sit-down dinner with continuous helpings of Chinese tea ? meant to clear the taste buds between two back-to-back dishes ? and I had to contend with just one bowl of Double Boiled? you know what. The Braised Lingzhi Mushroom with Tofu had arrived and the soggy fungi assigned a certain dignity to its family that the shiitakes and white mushrooms have never quite been able to achieve at the Calcutta eating addresses.

Finally, the phenomenon we call chowmein arrived. And no, it had nothing remotely to do with the greasy strings we are used to dive into these days. Min Jiang called it Wok Tossed Japanese Udon Noodle with Char Siew and Prawns. The difficult bit in there is just the Chinese name for barbecued pork. Served in a cup(!), what made the noodles strikingly different in preparation was the ratio of the meat and the cereal. For those used to noodles barely garnished with the meat, here was a welcome change of a whole lot of it stitching together the slightly thicker noodles tossed in lovely rich hoisin sauce.

Dessert time meant Cream of Fresh Mango with Sago Pearls and Pomelo, and while the waiters insist that most of the mango in Singapore is imported from India, it somehow tastes infinitely better than what we have here. And to be able to use something as bland as sago so effectively for a sweet ending needs craft and creativity.

though there were other super surprises in the Beef Rice Burger at the local McDonald’s and the Pork Rib Soup in Chinatown, somehow, there was nothing to match the majestic meal at Min Jiang.

My friends, though, had robbed me off one main course dish. Thanks to their tastes and preferences, we were not served Stewed Sichuan Pork Belly with Chinese Pickled Cabbage with Crispy Cigar Burns.

Yes, I have started saving for a weekend trip to Singapore. And it will be a solo one this time ? my experiments with gastronomic truths.