I can’t believe it was twenty years ago when I started writing this food blog.

It all started because I had just opened my new clinic. It was in a very quiet building, and it took time to build up a clientele, so I found myself with hours to fill. I decided to spend them searching out the best hawker food in Singapore.

Back then, information about our hawker scene wasn’t as readily available as it is today. Makansutra was one of the resources I leaned on, the guidebook and the Hawker Legends series especially, along with the Makansutra forum. When I joined the forum, I had to pick a moniker. As it was the era of the iPhone, when everything was “i this” and “i that,” I decided to call myself “ieat,” since that’s exactly what I was doing.

Through the forum, I started discovering where the best char kway teow, hokkien mee and chicken rice were, and I went around trying them and posting my reviews on the forum. I was really active back in the day, and after a while some of my makankakis suggested I should just post my reviews onto a blog. So I did. I registered on Blogspot and started a food blog. Since it was a blog about what I ate, what I shot and what I posted, I called it “ieatishootipost”! In retrospect, it wasn’t a wise choice, because to this day, most people I meet on the street still get it wrong. Oh well.

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

Before I start reminiscing about my twenty year journey, I want to acknowledge the people who have helped me along the way.

First of all, I want to thank my family, and especially my wife, Lisa, who has been supporting me all these years and is now helping me full time in managing the blog and social media platforms. Without her, none of this would have been possible. Now she joins me as co-host which means it should actually be renamed, weeatweshootwepost, but its just too complicated to change it.

My kids, James and Megan, thanks for patiently waiting for me while I took my photos. If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would try not to take so much time while the food gets cold! Gratitude to both my mum and my mother in law (God bless her soul) were also a great influence on my culinary development over the years.

And to you, my readers, who have stuck with me all these years, I really appreciate the time you’ve spent reading the stories, watching the videos, and leaving comments, even the negative ones, which were often helped me improve. So thank you, whoever you are, for being part of this blog’s journey.

I am also grateful to friends who have supported me all these years, especially Jimmy, who organises all of my makan sessions, and also Cactuskit, who is constantly discovering new places for me to blog. There are too many others to name, but over the years I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made, even those who could only be part of the journey for a season.

Finally, as a Christian, I have to acknowledge that whatever I’ve achieved over these twenty years could not have been done without my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who has led and guided me every step of the way. There is a very insightful quote from the Bible that says:

“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.” Ecclesiastes 9:11 (ESV)

So I have to keep reminding myself that success is not based solely on ability and hard work. In the end, it is God who determines the time and the place. He is the one who causes doors to open, connects me with the right people, and gives me the health and ability to keep going.

The First Post

The first story, “Hokkien Mee Riddle Solved Finally,” was posted on 2 August 2006. At the time, I could never have imagined how this food blog would so radically change my life. Over the following two decades, it opened up a whole world of experiences that I would never otherwise have had as a family doctor running a suburban solo practice! I am in fact posting this in a homestay in Penghu, Taiwan, precisely because of the blog!

Pioneering Street Food Photography

Back in 2006, digital photography had just arrived, so I decided to trade in my film camera for my first digital camera, the Canon Powershot G1. I soon became a little obsessed with the quality of the photos I posted on the food blog. No point telling people how good a plate of hokkien mee was if it came with a terrible photo. The photo had to capture the same anticipation I felt just before I dug in.

The professionals were shooting food photos in studios, with proper lighting and food stylists fussing over every plate. I was hunched over a table of dishes at a hawker centre, so I had to work out my own technique for taking photos without specialised equipment.

Canon soon took notice and came on board as one of my sponsors, which I’m grateful for to this day. From there, one thing led to another. I started teaching courses on Street Food Photography, and that eventually grew into my very own food photography exhibition at Millenia Walk. To Andrew and the good people at Canon, thank you for your support!

Documenting Singapore’s Hawker Heritage

As I started visiting all the famous hawkers, I began to realise that most of the origin stories behind our hawker dishes still only existed as oral history, passed down by the hawkers themselves. So I took it upon myself to talk to the older generation of hawkers and track down the history of the various dishes we grew up with. That really became the focus of the blog in the early days.

The End of Char Kway Teow!

By 2010, I’d collected enough stories that Epigram approached me to publish a book. It was Edmund Wee, the boss at Epigram, who coined the title, “The End of Char Kway Teow and Other Hawker Mysteries.” I already had a feeling, back then, that Char Kway Teow’s days were numbered.

Sixteen years later, in 2026, I think we’d all agree that a truly good plate of Char KwayTeow is getting harder and harder to find. As the legendary uncles retire one by one, there don’t seem to be any young hawkers stepping up to take their place. Even with UNESCO recognition for our hawker culture, having been a chronicler of our hawker food, I have to say that the quality has been steadily slipping over the years. As ingredient costs keep climbing, hawkers have to compromise on the quality of their produce, because the general public remains reluctant to pay more for hawker food. We’re seeing fewer artisan hawkers nowadays and more franchised hawker stalls, which usually leads to the commoditisation of the dishes.

But all is not lost. Some hawker dishes, like Prawn mee, Chicken rice and lately, Hokkien mee, have managed to buck the trend and break through the perceived price ceiling for hawker food, now commanding eight to even twenty dollars a bowl in some places, proof that people will pay for quality when it’s genuinely there. This seems to be the way forward for our iconic hawker dishes, evolving into their own specialty shops, where better ingredients and surroundings can command better prices.

Food Fights with Our Dear Northern Neighbour

The importance of preserving our food stories was most evident during a period when the Malaysian tourism Minister issued a statement claiming that Chilli Crab, Bak Kut Teh, and Curry Fish Head were actually Malaysian dishes that Singaporeans had simply taken credit for. That got me really curious, so I went digging for the truth. I ended up writing the story of Chilli Crab’s Singapore origins, tracing it back to Madam Cher Yam Tian, who started selling it from a pushcart in the 1950s. I think the Singapore story of Chilli Crab is now largely accepted as canon.

I also traced the origin story of our Curry Fish Head to a man named Gomez, an Indian immigrant from Kerala who started selling it at the foot of Mount Sophia. Years later, while I was in the US giving a talk, I mentioned this story to a room of Singaporean students, and an elderly man in the audience said he actually remembered eating at that exact stall at Mount Sophia. That was one of those significant moments that really cemented my purpose in writing the blog.

Together with many others who also joined the public discourse on preserving hawker culture, I think we’re now far more confident about which dishes are truly unique to our little island.

Then I got interested in Recipes

Aside from history, the blog became a place for recipes, because it wasn’t easy to find a good local recipe back in the day, unlike nowadays when you can learn almost anything online. Having said that, I’ve always been determined to publish recipes that actually work. That simply means each recipe takes me a lot more time to experiment and get right, but I think it pays off in the long run, since they’re recipes that are still referenced years after publication.

One of my most well received recipes is my pandan chiffon cake, which took months to perfect. I’m not a baker, so I had to learn everything from scratch, and none of the existing recipes I could find actually produced the type of cake I envisaged. It took a long time to arrive at a version my own mother would approve of. It’s satisfying to know it’s since helped readers, from a café in Cambodia to home bakers here in Singapore, some of whom have gone on to start their own businesses. The butter cake and banana cake recipes that followed were also very well received.

….And Ingredients

In that same spirit of documenting local food knowledge, I started writing my Fish Files, because I realised I didn’t actually know the difference between an “Ang Goli” and an “Ang Goi.” After I got to know our local fish, I moved on to learning the difference between “Ang Kah” and “Sua Lor” prawns, which became my Prawn Files, still probably the most detailed local prawn reference around, since I went as far as photographing the private parts of male and female prawns, sometimes the only reliable way to tell certain species apart. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s been genuinely useful for the fellow food nerds out there.

Tracking the Food Trends

Aside from local food, my other favourite things to eat are steaks, pizzas, burgers, and most notably Japanese cuisine, and sushi in particular. When I started blogging, I didn’t eat raw fish at all. But I was fascinated by the art of sushi and began researching the various sushi tane, which resulted in my Sushi Files. I also got into durians, back in the days when names like Golden Phoenix and D13 were still quite novel. That journey resulted in the Durian Files, which got published in a special section of my second book, “Only the Best.”

Speaking to Overseas Singaporeans

Publishing a book was never something I dreamed of doing, but Epigram gave me the chance to publish two. Special shout out to Ruth Wan, who did the hard work of turning my blog posts into the text for the books. That recognition led to an invitation from the Overseas Singaporean Unit to travel to the US and UK and speak to Singaporean students there, reminding them of the food waiting for them back home. It was a wonderful excuse to travel, talk about food history, and meet fellow Singaporeans residing overseas. The thing Singaporeans overseas miss most about Singapore, aside from family, is the food!

From Blog to Social Media to Who Knows What?

After blogging came social media, and I found that I needed to pivot to the new platforms. I’m thankful that I got onto Facebook and Instagram early. However, nowadays it isn’t good enough to publish a nice photo, you need videos! And producing a good video today takes far more time and effort.

The whole advertising landscape has also shifted in the last twenty years, and somewhere along the way, my wife and I turned this hobby into a consultancy, doing editorials and helping restaurants with their marketing. Some long-time readers have expressed concern about how this has affected our objectivity.

We try our best to adhere to several core principles. My mission statement of never wasting your calories on yucky food is the Prime Directive. If we don’t like something, we simply don’t write about it.

The other overarching principle is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. This applies principally to the owner of the eatery, and to our readers.

Every restaurant is someone’s life’s work, and we don’t want to tear that down. So even with our potential paid collaborations, we always ask ourselves whether it’s something we would genuinely want to eat and return to. If the answer is no, we will give our honest feedback to help them improve before we accept the project. If they’re not open to it, we will simply turn down the collaboration.

Our responsibility to our readers is to ensure that our reviews are honest and objective. That means we always disclose if a review is part of a paid collaboration, or a media tasting (only the meals are provided, with no obligation to write). Otherwise, whatever we post online is paid for by ourselves.

The other part is objectivity. We try to give reasons why we say something is good by delving into the raw ingredients, the weightage, the quality, and so on, so that viewers have the information to make up their own minds. I also believe that it’s only fair to both the chef and the viewers if I also understand the actual cooking process, which is why I educate myself on culinary knowledge through books and practice, so I can understand what the chef is trying to achieve and relay it to our readers.

Onward to the Next Two Decades… God Willing

I’m in my late fifties now, and long time readers will have noticed I’ve lost some weight this past year. As I approach the end of my fifth decade, I am even more cognisant of the importance of maintaining my health. Around April last year, I pivoted to a low carbohydrate, whole food diet and was amazed at how effective it was for losing weight. Essentially, I cut back on ultra processed food and refined carbohydrates, and focused on eating whole foods like meat, vegetables, tofu, nuts, eggs, and dairy. I found it worked wonders for me, and I’ve also been able to help some of my patients lose weight and manage chronic illnesses, especially diabetes.

As a result, you’ll probably notice that the kind of food I write about nowadays is slightly different. Of course, hawker food is still very much our focus, but I am more selective about what I eat and how often I eat it.

I’ve been cooking a lot more at home this past year and have been developing more recipes which are easy to cook and more vegetable and protein-focused. I have plans to shoot videos of these recipes in the future to share with everyone! We are in a season of change and we are praying about how we are going to approach the future so we can continue to eat, shoot and post things that are relevant to our readers. If you have been following us for a while, it means that you too may also need to focus more on healthier eating! So, do let us know what type of content you would like to see on the blog!

So here’s to everyone! Happy eating and remember:

Never Waste Your Calories on Yucky Food!