Come March 2019, Singapore will be nominating, to join one of the 178 countries to adopt the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The vision is that with the successful inscription of Singapore’s Hawker Culture into the UNESCO list, there will be greater appreciation for our hawkers and their fare and this in turn will ensure the sustainability and vibrancy of our Hawker culture but how does one go about ordering Hawker Food – The Singaporean way?

 

In this series of Ordering Local food the Singapore way, I would touch on the topic of ordering our local coffee and tea.

Forget Starbucks, Coffee bean or Spinelli , when in Rome, do what the Romans do. When in Singapore, try the traditional coffee henceforth known as Kopi (kaw-pee) or Tea henceforth know as Teh (tay).

  • Kopi is the malay word for Coffee. 
  • Teh is the hokkien dialect word for Tea. 
How uncle made coffee
Image source: Edwin Koo for The New York Times

What in the cup?

In the truly traditional local kopi in Singapore, the beans are roasted over hot wok with sugar margarine, sometimes pineapple skin and maize to a dark brown then grounded.  The perfect brew is then poured repeatedly into a sock-like cotton strainer into can-sized pots (see above image) that resemble a little bit like the watering cans.

Coffee beans are usually sourced from Indonesia or sometimes as far as Columbia.

By default the kopi comes with condensed milk and sugar at the bottom of the cup.

How to order?

  1. Milk: First of all decide whether you want condensed milk or evaporated milk. Evaporated milk is condensed milk without the added sugar and with the water content cooked off until it has a consistency that is similar to cream.
  2. Sugar Level:  Decide on the amount of sugar level suitable for your taste bud, now this is really subjective in my opinion, depending to the uncle who is preparing your coffee. Each tea spoon of sugar is dependent on how “big” a scoop he picks up.
  3. Concentration: It is actually the thickness of your coffee, in starbucks term it’s like the amount of caffeine shots. So “Po” means less concentrated, “Gao” means more concentration. 
  4. To put into practice, this diagram from FunToast – a popular local coffee joint is really helpful. 
Image taken from FunToast Guide
  • “O” in hokkien dialect means black
  • “Kosong” in malay language means empty
  • “Siew Dai” is apparently a hock chew dialect meaning less sweet.
  • “Ta Bao” is actually a Mandarin term meaning to take away

Welcome to Singapore, a melting pot in a mixture of different culture and languages. One way of ordering coffee is a combination of various dialects and languages. 

Image taken from FunToast Guide

So just try it out…. to order your favourite coffee, in the local terms, here are some examples: 

  • Black Coffee without sugar = Kopi O Kosong;  
  • Iced Coffee with evaporated milk = Kopi C Peng and
  • 2 Iced Coffee to take a way = Kopi Sua Peng Ta bao
  • my favourite; Coffee with evaporated milk and lesser sugar = Kopi C Siew Dai.

Have Fun ordering Local Coffee the Local way!