Issue Number Three: "The Team Is The Dream"

Extreme Malaise, Biang Biang Noodles, Stained Clothing and Steely Dan.

More Excuses From The Editor!

Welcome to Issue Three, coming in hot a full… year? off the back of Issue Two. Most of you had probably forgotten that you were even subscribed to this. Some of you probably don’t even remember who I am.

I don’t know what happened but I spent most of 2022 feeling devoid of motivation and enthusiasm. Is that normal? Is that a pandemic-hangover symptom? Who knows. I took a brief trip in September which forms the basis for this edition of COMFY. I made some dot points when I got home and they’ve been sitting there for months waiting for me to properly flesh them out. I’ve put on an exhibition and a Comedy Festival show in that time, both of which would have benefitted greatly from me getting my act together, writing about my goddamn trip, and getting a little plug in to you dear subscribers.

Anyway, the past is the past and this year feels way better so far. I’m really only putting all of this out there to say that if you, like me, felt worse about the early days of being out of lockdowns than you did about being in them, then you're not alone.

I hope you find my travel diary from Singapore in 2022 interesting and entertaining. If I’ve spent this long working on it and then everyone hates it then that’s very funny and in a way is sort of the perfect outcome.

Enjoy, and I hope you’re doing well. I’m going to Vietnam in July for two weeks so hopefully I’ll have something new for you all sometime before 2027.

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If you don’t use either of those services then I’m afraid I cannot help you.

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Covered In Slop In Singapore.

My favourite part of a holiday is the first night. The first night in a new city is capable of reaching a euphoric high that is tough to replicate for the rest of the trip.

You’ve travelled all day, you’re already tired, you check in, and you duck out for what you intend to be a quick bite before an early night. “The holiday officially begins when I wake up”, is always my logic. This first mini-night doesn’t count. Anything good that happens is in bonus time. It’s the cold open to the holiday, the teddy bear floating in the pool before the intro to Breaking Bad. 

This was me in September, stepping off the plane in Singapore at 5:30pm on a typically humid evening, and texting my friend Drew to say I’d arrived.

Drew is one of my oldest friends. He’s a chef and had recently nabbed a job working for a pop-up catering company called Nama. They were heading over to Singapore for three weeks, taking over the kitchen of a different bar or restaurant every weekend. Drew had casually said “if you feel like a trip, you’d be welcome to tag along at a bunch of the restaurants that we’re visiting on our nights off”, which I suspect he didn’t expect me to latch onto so rapidly and keenly.

This “invitation” (the more I dig into my memory, the more I’m starting to think that there was no invitation, it was more like me blurting out “I’LL COME ALONG!”) couldn’t have come at a better time for me. After two years of the pandemic and lockdowns, I was starting to grow tired of scrolling through Instagram and seeing more adventurous people than myself venturing over to Europe and taking advantage of our newly regained freedoms. Remember that one month period where people felt blessed to be able to travel and promised never to take it for granted again? Right before they went back to complaining on Twitter about the cost of a sandwich at the airport? It was in that window. I was feeling bored, constrained, sapped and uninspired and so I leapt on the opportunity and booked my ticket.

I’d deliberately not eaten all day on the plane in anticipation of going utterly hog wild when I arrived and so the combination of being stranded at the airport because I was unable to get their local rideshare app to work on my phone, and the overly lengthy check-in process at the hotel means that by the time I meet Drew at Lau Pa Sat, I am quivering, muttering and salivating. I’m so hungry that I’ve turned into a cartoon character stranded on a desert island; when I first see Drew off in the distance, there’s a split second where he appears to be a giant talking chicken drumstick.

As I hug the giant drumstick and try very hard not to start nibbling on his arm, it dawns on me how odd and rare of a trip this is to take, especially in your mid 30’s. A lot of our friends are busy raising toddlers and I’m jetting off on a nine-hour flight to watch my friend do his job for a few days.

Drew’s been here for a week already so he has a game plan for how best to tackle Lau Pa Sat: we’ll hit as many of the different stalls as we can, getting one dish from each. Two of his work buddies are joining, so between us, we’ll end up with a massive smorgasbord that’ll give us a delicious overview of this specific hawker hall. I appreciate this taking of the reigns from someone who’s got the lay of the land but to be honest, I’m operating on a completely different wavelength. After a full day in transit including a long flight and all of the extra baggage that travelling in a pandemic carries with it, Drew’s culinary plan for the evening registers as white noise to me and my response is simply: “where do we get a beer from?”  

After guzzling a beer and doing a round of the food vendors, we park down at a table outside. Smoke billows over our table from the surrounding stalls grilling a plethora of skewered meats.

Our banquet includes noodles, various skewers and, much to my dismay, none of the fried chicken that we’d ordered. The surprise hit for me, however, is the carrot cake. I’d never had carrot cake in Singapore before and when Drew ordered it, I felt like I was hallucinating. Surely to God this man isn’t ordering carrot cake for dinner at a hawker hall surrounded by dumplings, noodles and curries. We’re on a boy’s trip, not at nan’s for afternoon tea. I quickly find out that Singaporean carrot cake doesn’t actually have any carrot cake in it. How foolish of me to assume that It would! What it actually is, is white radish cut into cubes and cooked into a sort of omelette with garlic and soy sauce. It’s completely unique in both texture and taste, it pairs perfectly with some cold beers and it’s easy to pick away at which is why I spend basically the entirety of our meal-time hovered over the plate like a little orphan who’s worried that he’s not going to get his rations.

There are four of us at this table with a spread of so much food in front of us that it looks like we’re catering for a wedding. This, I will learn over the week, is the great thing about dining with chefs: they want to try everything, so they’re not shy about over-ordering. As someone who’s least favourite sentence in the English language is “we’ll all be fine with half a pizza each, won’t we?” this decadent approach to meal-time is Heaven for me.

It’s a Monday night and so the only place we can find that’s open for “one more drink” after dinner is called The Blue Lagoon: an open-fronted, dimly-lit bar with a bright neon sign out front.

Halfway through our first drink, the music stops playing and we hear someone speaking in another language through a microphone that is turned up to a volume that I wasn’t aware any microphone was capable of reaching. We turn around to see a stage on which there are about twenty young women standing in three rows, all wearing sashes with different numbers on them. It’s then that we realise that we’re in some sort of “companion bar”, as the person holding the microphone seems to be spruiking each of these ladies. A man in the crowd will raise his hand, get up and lead the lady off into a private room. I’d like to take a quick moment here to congratulate myself for my bravery in relaying this detail, since I’m aware that a sizeable percentage of people reading this will not buy for one second that we ended up in this bar by accident, no matter how repeatedly and voraciously I stress that it was literally the only place we could find that was open.

We befriend a young businessman who’s sitting by himself nursing one of those giant Heineken towers. He inserts himself into our conversation and then insists we help ourselves to some of his beer. We don’t need to be asked twice. He tells us he does this regularly: plonks down at a bar with some beers and offers them to strangers. I ask him if this is some kind of exercise in meeting new people and hearing their stories. “No,” he replies, “I’m bored and I have too much money.” “Right on”, I say. “In that case, how about getting us another one of these towers? Chop chop.” I’m saying this to try and be funny but he doesn’t chuckle or smile, he simply takes me at face value and appears moments later with a fresh Heineken tower. It’s like I always say: if you’re going to bomb, you may as well bomb in a way that results in you being gifted litres and litres of alcohol.

*

I wake up the next morning comfortable in the knowledge that so far, this trip is absolutely off to the races. I spend the day wandering the streets with Drew, somehow resisting the temptation to go full Labrador-mode at every hawker hall we stroll past and eat until my stomach explodes. I spend a lot of my time on holidays being irrationally stressed about my meals. A bad meal at home is one thing, but a bad meal on a short holiday in a foreign country where you only have limited opportunities to try the local cuisines wounds me deeply in my soul. I’m still, to this day, hung up on a terrible sandwich that I wasted a meal on in a Japanese train station in 2016.

We swing past Park Bench Deli, one of the restaurants that Drew and the Nama boys have cooked in over the last couple of weeks. They do a curry fried chicken burger that looks absolutely off its head and which the Hangover Gremlin perched on my shoulder demands that I order. I scarf it down, along with the rest of the iced coffee that I’ve purchased on the walk over. Bright orange curry sauce slops down my t-shirt, wiping out a quarter of the wardrobe that I’ve brought along with me for the week. I view this kind of filthy behaviour as a badge of honour. If I return to Melbourne with a suitcase full of clothes covered in culinary stains and now requiring either dry cleaning, bleaching, or to be set on fire and buried in the woods, then I’ll know that the trip has been a rousing success.

For dinner, we’re travelling out to a hawker hall near the airport called The East Coast Lagoon. It has an incredibly grand entrance that looks like a cross between a summer camp and a water park, and is filled with food stalls that are almost impossible to order at if you’re the kind of dunce who is only fluent in English. We go through plate after plate of fried oyster omelettes and grilled stingray. I make a joke to the people we’re dining with about how it’s offensive to serve stingray to an Australian, after what one of them did to our beloved Steve Irwin. At least, I intend it to be a joke: our hosts take it at face value and I’m too embarrassed to explain myself so I avoid the stingray and stick to the omelette. How thrilling it is to be travelling again! God, I’ve missed disgracing myself in front of people from other cultures! I didn’t even get a free beer out of this bomb - I’ve never felt so alive. I head back to the hotel after a few wines at an Australian-owned wine bar, mostly proud of myself that after a curry chicken burger, an iced coffee, some afternoon beers and an omelette, I’ve managed not to soil any more of my outfit today.

*

Wednesday is a big day - well, as big of a day as it’s possible to have when you have Peter Pan syndrome and you’re on a frivolous overseas jaunt. Drew and his co-worker Raph have managed to snag a lunch at Metres Above Sea Level, one of the 50 Best Restaurants In The World, so I’m killing time solo in the city until I meet up with them in the afternoon for a beer, before Chef’s Night Out - a tradition that the Nama boys cooked up (har har) wherein they hit a bunch of restaurants and bars on their night off, sample a little food at each, and collect people along the way as their friends and colleagues knock off work.

Tonight’s instalment promises to get loose, as they’re being joined by many of the local bartenders and chefs they’ve worked with in Singapore so far. We’re also going to be joined by our friend Chuck from back home, who got wind of my plans for this trip and decided to jump in for a couple of days on his way to meet his brother in Bangkok. He’s arriving in the evening, probably in time to meet us at our third venue on this restaurant crawl.

Given how hectic this restaurant crawl promises to get, I relish (har har) in the opportunity to have a quiet day by myself. I decide to head for a hawker hall before checking out the National Gallery. I get distracted halfway to the hawker hall by a biang biang noodle joint. I love biang biang noodles and hardly ever come across them back home so I decide to cut my journey short and plonk down. These are perhaps the best biang biangs I’ve ever had: perfectly thick and spongy, the spicy stewed pork clinging to them for dear life, which makes it even more impressive how much of the sauce ends up on my shirt. Another one bites the dust.

*

There’s something about the manner in which hospitality staff speak about their work that fascinates and delights me. If you’ve read Kitchen Confidential, you’ll know what I mean. These self-described buccaneers and misfits are able to pontificate about their professional lives in a way that the rest of us find endearing, yet if anyone else we knew talked like that we’d probably cut them out of our lives. Imagine a substitute teacher telling you that they’d just completed a “rockstar shift”. I work in an industry that shares a lot of traits with the world that chefs inhabit (creatively focused, weird hours, narcissists rise to the top) so perhaps this fascination with how they get away with describing their work in such floral terms is fuelled by a jealousy on my part. In any case, I’m excited to join Chef’s Night Out tonight, and I’m touched that I’ve been included. That being said, I’m nervous. I drink enough that I have to shamefully lie about it any time I’m asked “how much and how often” by medical professionals, but I’m not naive enough to think that I have any hope of keeping up with people who work in the food service industry. Before I head out, I literally give myself a pep talk in the mirror about going at my own pace this evening.

I arrive at our first destination, Vinyl Bar, a slick new cocktail bar themed around records that are stacked along the walls. I slurp down three pints without having had any food since midday. Thank God I had that pep talk with myself about going slow tonight, or else I’d probably be out in the street, sucking petrol through a hose from a motorbike.

As lame as this is, when I leapt at the opportunity to take this trip, a decent chunk of my motivation was that I’d be able to write about it for this very newsletter. You’re welcome! It’s great then, that due to overextending myself at Vinyl Bar, when we make it to our next destination - a wine bar called RVLT - I’m already half cut and as such, my memory of what we actually ate from here on out is incredibly foggy. Put it this way - I’m generally not a huge fan of seafood (My Steve Irwin blunder the night before was a low key saviour) but I’m wolfing down these fish cakes (?) and crab pasta (??) like I’m on death row. Okay, I’ve just Googled the menu at RVLT and they weren’t fish cakes, they were fancy chicken nuggets, which tells you everything you need to know about my diminished powers of observation at this point of the evening. They’re served with a sriracha dipping sauce. There’s also some blurry photos in my phone that this menu informs me would have been the smoked potato ravioli with a potato leek sauce, and a salted cod Portugese egg tart. This place sounds great! I should go sometime.

Just after we’ve eaten, Chuck rolls in, fresh off the plane. He takes one look at this chaotic scene: a table full of empty wine bottles and food scraps. A dozen chefs and bartenders all screeching over the top of one another. And me, his childhood friend, in the grips of a full blown mania, full sentences proving too challenging, dribbling all over myself (now that I’ve had some food I’ve decided I can let loose and start properly drinking) and I see a moment in his eyes where he contemplates the logistics of calling the Embassy and getting me helicoptered out of this country.

From there, it’s on to Mobomoga, an izakaya and sake bar - finally, an opportunity to whet my whistle! I thought I was going to pass out from lack of fluids for a moment there. Drew, Chuck and I crawl around in the street for what feels like three hours, trying to find the front door of the venue (not quite as pathetic as it sounds, it’s very hidden) and post up at the bar.

Before long, we’re drowning in karaage and miso-flavoured cacio e pepe. I break ranks by covertly ordering a second serve of the cacio e pepe and eating it in secret by myself because while it’s been fun to share everything so far, I still wouldn’t consider my stomach to be properly lined and I’m getting the impression that the 'pre-drinks’ portion of the evening might be ending soon (I’m currently non verbal, and both eyes are pointing in different directions).

After downing sake and Japanese malt beers for what could have been eleven minutes or six years, we move to our final venue for the evening. I have no recollection of what it was called and I wouldn’t even know where to begin in looking it up. It’s a dingy, heaving club underneath a bridge. I may well have imagined it. I drink half a beer, check the time and then realise I have to be awake to record a podcast over Zoom in about four hours time. I say my goodbyes and attempt to use one of the rideshare apps to get home. My phone dies a couple of minutes into this quest, so I walk in the rough direction of where I assume my hotel is, eventually flagging down a taxi. I’m in the taxi for what seems like hours, which leads me to believe that I’d been walking in the entirely wrong direction. When I wake up the next morning and I’m getting a coffee downstairs, I notice a landmark across the street from the hotel, where I vaguely remember hopping in the taxi. The taxi driver has obviously heard me mutter an address that’s across the street and decided to take me around the block a few times for some easy cash. Good for him! If I’d seen myself in that state, I think my impulse would have been to dish out a bit of the One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest treatment, so I appreciate his restraint. There’s a wrapper from a convenience store hamburger next to my bed that I have no memory of purchasing or eating. I always thought that the main thing prohibiting me from having any hope of being a chef was my lack of expertise in the kitchen, I now realise that it’s not only that: the lifestyle would probably kill me.

*

Today is the hottest and most humid it’s been so far, which is perfect timing coming off the back of our odyssey the night before. Chuck and I head to Maxwell Food Centre, home of the Tian Tian Hainanese chicken rice stall made famous by the late Anthony Bourdain. We wait in line for ages and then thankfully find a table directly under a ceiling fan. When you Google Tian Tian, or any simple establishment that has been put on the map by someone like Bourdain, you find pages and pages of reviews of people falling over themselves trying to claim that it “doesn’t live up to the hype.” At the end of the day, it’s boiled chicken with a minimal amount of seasoning. It’s a simple meal. Of course it’s easy to get carried away and for the meal to get crushed under the weight of expectation but for Chuck and I, fighting for our lives to recollect our marbles after last night, the simple combination of tender, juicy chicken served alongside some cold Tiger Beers does wonders to soothe our jangled nerves.

Having gone low frills for lunch, we decide to lash out and spend the rest of the afternoon drinking cocktails at the Marina Bay Sands - Singapore’s iconic, luxurious hotel and shopping centre which sticks out on the skyline from pretty much every angle in the city. We make our way up to the main rooftop bar, bags under our eyes, sweat cascading off our foreheads and (in my case) stains all over my clothing, signalling to everyone we walk past that we are not clientele at this ritzy, $1,000-per-night hotel.

We take a seat looking over the city. I order a cocktail called ‘Good Girls Gone Bad’. Hearing that phrase come out of my mouth is the low point of the whole trip. I also order a serve of the laksa spring rolls because I have a weakness for any kind of demented fusion item on a menu. Doesn’t matter how stupid it sounds or if I’m even hungry - if I see a Bolognese dumpling or a green curry croquette, I’m going in. I like to imagine that I’m the first one brave enough, that the chef sees my order on the docket and thinks to themselves “finally, someone gets it”.

That night, Chuck, Drew and I head out for a nice dinner at Butcher Boy followed by some highballs and snacks at No Sleep Club. The dinner of fancy baos at Butcher Boy is very nice, but the three cheese toastie at No Sleep Club really knocks me on my ass. I have to be physically held back from ordering a third which as just as well, as I drift off to sleep back in my hotel watching CNN’s rolling coverage of the Queen passing away, and I’m confident that any more cheese that close to bed time would have propelled me into some intense Monarch themed nightmares

*

Today’s the big day. Nama have their pop-up at Amy’s Wine Bar this evening. Chuck and I decide to spend the afternoon crossing off the basic tourist activity of cruising around the Orchard Road shops. We stumble across a Michelin-starred ramen restaurant that we decide we’d be foolish to miss out on. That’s the beautiful thing about dining in a place like Singapore: not only is there a plethora of internationally lauded, Michelin-starred restaurants, but a great deal of them are just randomly in the basement of a shopping centre, next to a Uniqlo.

We’ve now arrived at a part of this trip that I’ve been dreading having to type out. It’s something that I thought was despicable at the time and something that I’ve spent my life judging other people for doing. It may well cause you to close this window immediately and unsubscribe - and, for the record, I think you’re completely justified in that decision.

So, here we go:

Chuck and I spent our final afternoon in Singapore at an Australian-themed bar watching the AFL.

God, it feels good to get that off my chest.

In our defence, we tried our hardest to find a bar that was showing the game but was still somewhat hip, but even the most die-hard sports bars would inform us when we called up that they weren’t screening the AFL. Many of them sounded like they didn’t even know what the AFL was. And so that is how we ended up at Boomarang, paying $18 each for a pint of Coopers and watching Melbourne comfortably beating Brisbane for the first half. When we put Amy’s Wine Bar into Google Maps we realise that it’s so far away that we’ll have to leave before the game has finished. The drive takes us so long that over the course of the journey, Brisbane narrow Melbourne’s lead and end up beating them in the fourth quarter.

On our way over to Boomarang, we’d received a call from Drew asking us to swing past their apartment and pick up some extra ingredients that the boys had realised they needed. We stroll through the neon lights of Amy’s Wine Bar, past the groups of friends sharing fancy bottles of wines, over to the pass with our bag of corn like the heroes that we are, slightly annoyed that all the commoners dining here aren’t acknowledging the fact that, without us having gone eight minutes out of our way, their dinner would be severely lacking in flavour.

Nama have become known for their bold recipes and it’s not hard to see why. One of their signature dishes features prawns spread over a thick chunk of toast that is lathered in “Namamite”, their take on Vegemite using shio kombu, and topped with salmon roe and chives. When one of the chefs comes past to ask us how we’re enjoying the meal, I jokingly mention that my great-grandfather’s company created Vegemite (this is true) and that I’ll be serving him with a cease and desist on behalf of the family. He looks back at me stone-faced and says “bring it on”. I later find out that this man has spent time in a Japanese prison, so it stands to reason that my threat of slapping him on the wrist for some light copyright infringement hasn’t rattled him in the slightest.

The hit of the evenings set menu for Chuck and myself is the miso corn tostada - a crispy explosion of flavour that manages to seamlessly blend multiple different influences - yuzu-infused mayo, topped with parmigianno reggiano - and we’re still talking about it three courses later. I have a long standing view that every set menu should include a ‘Bonus Round’ where you get to bring out your favourite dish from the roster for an encore, and thanks to knowing the chefs of this particular set menu, Chuck and I get to make this a reality by simply whispering a request into our new friend Raph’s ear as he’s delivering a plate of white asparagus to a nearby table. We demolish our second plate of corn tostadas and before we can contemplate the likelihood of squeezing a third plate out of the kitchen, we’re told that it’s last drinks and are promptly swept up into a crew who are all heading to an apartment nearby for an afterparty where I, for some reason, end up competitively shotgunning beer with a man I’ve never met.

*

I spend my final day in Singapore by myself. Chuck has jetted off early to Bangkok, and Drew and the rest of the Nama boys have departed for Malaysia, the next stop on their tour. I’m leaving in the evening so I’ve got a day by myself to cruise around the city. I head to Satay By The Bay, a food court at the very edge of the Gardens By The Bay. The last few days have gone by at such a breakneck speed that this abrupt opportunity to reflect catches me off guard. I think it’s taken this long for it to sink in that I’m actually in another country - something that went from a God-given right, to seeming like it was out of reach forever, and back again, in the space of eighteen months.

Before we’d parted ways last night, Drew, Chuck and I drank cold Tigers on the steps of the apartment complex, sharing memories from our nearly twenty-year history together. I feel an immense gratitude to have friendships like this in my life. Gratitude is an emotion that I find it hard to focus on at home but for whatever reason I am engulfed in when I’m on holidays. I suppose it’s this warm and mostly unfamiliar feeling that is the reason why I’m checking my phone every fifteen minutes, assuming and praying that my flight home will be cancelled (my flight over here had been cancelled the night before departure, so this seems like a foregone conclusion.)

I start fantasising about what I’ll do if I receive the notification that I’m “stuck” in this country for another night and I plan out quite the indulgent little itinerary for myself. Of course, because I want this to happen, the flight goes ahead. For such a huge airport, I’ve always found Changi to be quite lacking in decent food. Tonight is no exception. I eat lukewarm ramen noodles out of a leaking cardboard container. And even though it’s only now, in the dying minutes of the holiday, that I’ve encountered an average meal, I’m still furious about it.  

Upcoming Shows & Other Stuff.

Well first of all, a plug for something that’s got nothing to do with me: the fellas from the aforementioned Nama are setting up shop at Paradise Alley in Collingwood and they’re having a launch party this Saturday July 1st at 2pm. So if you’re in Melbourne you can go and try those corn tostadas for yourself. I will be there eating all day. If you can’t make it on Saturday they’ll be running the kitchen in there until January.

I’ve updated my online store with some new prints from the exhibition that I did at the end of last year. They came out great. Six new designs for you. I’m also adding some new clothing in the next couple of weeks so keep an eye out for that.

If you weren’t aware, I co-host a video games/ comedy podcast called Filthy Casuals. It comes out every Thursday for free. We have a Patreon and in the month of July we’re doing extra bonus content every week so now is a good time to get on board.

I’m bringing my stand-up show Scam Artist to Perth for one night at Oasis Comedy Club on Friday November 3rd. Tickets are here. Then the next day we have a live episode of The Little Dum Dum Club happening at Lynott’s Lounge. Tickets are here.

I’m going to do Scam Artist in a couple of other places and then film it in Melbourne before the end of the year so keep an eye on my socials if you want to hear about that when it’s announced. Ok bye, thanks for reading and see you next time!