After 10 years of working for a New York City newspaper, I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to the other side of the world. My journey is a meandering route through Southeast Asia, from Bali to Hanoi, though I don’t know when this trip will end, or exactly where it will take me. This piece is adapted from my blog, Packmonkey.

“IF YOU WANT TO EAT IN SINGAPORE,” the man behind the counter at the camera store said, “you must eat chili crab.” That’s how I ended up at Jumbo Seafood, a proper restaurant across from Clarke Quay, one of the main tourist areas of the city. After nine weeks in the Australian Outback and a harrowing two-week trip through Indonesia, I deserved a bit of fine dining.

RESTAURANT ON CLARKE QUAY; ALL PHOTOS BY MATTHEW KLEIN.

A steaming two-pound crab arrived at my table, slathered in red chili sauce. I looked at the crab, the well-dressed crowd, back at the crab, to the crowd again, and muttered to myself, “There’s nothing to it but to do it.” I spent the next 30 minutes cracking, sucking, picking and slurping. Without a hint of the sea, the chili sauce packed the perfect amount of heat, never overpowering the meat or the palate.

I left nothing but splinters of empty shell amid broken legs and shattered claws, my fingers as pruney as if I’d spent the evening in a wet sauna. I assumed there was no other way to eat this dish, until I noticed the couple at the next table, picking diligently through their own crab, their clean hands and orderly table betraying my status as a chili-crab amateur. It didn’t matter; even at three times what I was paying for a night at the hostel, it was the best crab I’d ever eaten.

But I wanted more, I wanted to eat my way through Singapore’s culinary stew, edible counterpart to the city’s intermingling Chinese, Malay and Indian ethnic groups. There is an accepted wisdom that there’s nothing to do in this tiny nation state at the southern tip of the Malaysian Peninsula but shop and eat. I’m not much of a shopper, but eating my way through one of Asia’s foodie capitals sounded like the recipe for a memorable visit.

I decided I needed to take a risk, to face a dish that in most circumstances would elicit a long, drawn-out “eww” at the mere mention of its name: fish-head curry. At the Banana Leaf Apollo in Little India, I faced a massive snapper head drowning in a sea of tangy curry. The dish should rightly be called fish-head-and-neck curry because the majority of the meat comes from what would be the neck and shoulders, if fish had necks and shoulders. The fish started at me with vacant, dead eyes as I cleaned its bones of succulent meat. I even ran my finger along the inside of its lower jaw for one last bite.

FISH HEAD CURRY

I have it on the authority of two trusted sources, Anthony Bourdain and Michael Y. Park, that if you want to eat chicken rice, which is as close as you’ll get to a Singaporean national dish, you must go to Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice, stall No. 10 at the Maxwell Road Food Centre in Chinatown. My first trip there, I found a note tacked to the shutter announcing that they were away, serving chicken rice in New York City at an event called Singapore Day. Sometimes irony is flat-out cruel.

A few days later I resumed my mission. A huge plate of Tian Tian chicken rice was served to me, then disappeared as I scooped mouthful after mouthful into my face. I snapped out of my flavor-fueled trance in time to recognize that I was at the last bite. I paused for dramatic effect, said thanks to the food gods and then closed the book on my Singapore chicken-rice experience.

SINGAPORE’S NATIONAL DISH

But my food tour wasn’t over. I sampled fragrant chicken biryani in Little India and heavy but satisfying char kway teow (fried flat noodles mixed with cockles and Chinese sausage in a spicy black-bean sauce) in Bedok. I waited in a long line for an overflowing plate of curry rice (if there’s a long line at a food stall, it means it’s worth trying). I washed down meals with the fresh juice of lychees, soursops and small tart limes called calamansis. The Malaysian dessert drink chendol delivered a jolt of coconut and caramel—dulce de leche in a cup! On a lark, I tried vadai, fried donut with an unshelled prawn embedded in the center. The greasiness of the treat was offset by the snap of a crisp green chili on the side.

Food experiences are great. Shared food experiences are better, and the folks who worked at my hostel were happy to lead the way. Karen, an ebullient woman who’d spent a few years living in California, led me and three other new friends to a sprawling, outdoor harborside complex for a communal meal of steamboat. Each table had a propane tank, a hotpot and a grill. A large buffet was piled with with raw seafood, marinated meats and raw vegetables.

After 90 minutes of us boiling, grilling and eating, the table was littered with prawn shells, wooden skewers and a jumble of used napkins. We ate processed fish balls and tender strips of cuttlefish. Marinated strips of pork and beef kept the land-based animals in the picture. The food was tasty and plentiful, but it was the communal nature of cooking and eating that made steamboat memorable.

SEAFOOD STEAMBOAT

Before I left Singapore, there was one more dish I wanted to try: grilled stingray. Perhaps it was my way of exacting revenge for the death of Steve Irwin.

With my new friend Marcus leading the way, we headed out of the city center to East Coast Lagoon, a food center in an upscale district on the eastern edge of the island. Marcus had grown up in the neighborhood and knew just what to order.

The stingray was grilled on a banana leaf, then covered in a thick and pungent chili sauce called sambal. What I thought would be a chewy fish, something akin to squid or octopus, turned out to be light and tender, and sweet where the cartilage meets the flesh.

STINGRAY IN SAMBAL SAUCE

I returned to the hostel a happy man. Karen greeted me from behind the counter with a big smile.

“What did you eat today?” she asked.

“What didn’t I eat?” I said. •