I was photographing carrot cake recently when I started thinking about the dishes we go back for.
Not necessarily the best dish we have ever eaten. Not the one we would confidently put at the top of a list. Just something familiar enough that, every now and then, we find ourselves wanting to make the journey back.
Photography does that to me.
I spend time looking at food before I eat it. I notice how carrot cake breaks apart at the edges, how noodles sit immediately after leaving the wok, how chicken rice is portioned, and how an oyster omelette changes once it reaches the plate.
Then occasionally I stop thinking about the photograph.
I remember another plate somewhere else.
That is when a dish becomes more than a subject. Char kway teow can take me back to a particular aisle. Prawn mee can remind me of arriving before the lunch crowd. Chicken rice can bring back a table I shared with strangers without remembering a single conversation.
The strange thing is that I often remember the journey before the flavour.
Which entrance I used. How far the queue stretched. Whether I found a table first or ordered first. The sound around me while I waited. These details become attached to the food without anyone deliberately putting them there.
Sometimes I photograph a dish I haven’t eaten for a long time, and the camera makes me realise how much I want to revisit it.
Not immediately. There is no urgency.
It is more like remembering a place you used to pass regularly and suddenly wondering how it looks now.
I felt that while looking back through Hawker Photography and our photographs of carrot cake at Lau Pa Sat. The food is the obvious subject, but returning to the images also brings back the counter, the surrounding tables and the particular pace of being there.
Maybe that is how favourite hawker foods work.
They become small coordinates in our lives.
You know where to go when you want that particular plate. You know roughly what time feels right. You may even have a preferred table nearby. Another stall might serve the same dish closer to home, but somehow that is not the one you are thinking about.
I wonder what yours is.
Maybe it is bak chor mee you grew up eating. Satay you associate with late evenings. Laksa you would cross Singapore for. Or something very ordinary that became important simply because you kept returning to it.
I photograph plenty of hawker food, but some plates make me stop thinking like a photographer.
They make me think about where I have eaten before.
And sometimes, before I have even finished taking the photograph, I already know where I want to return.
