Theophilus Kwek
Issue 4: TOAST, September 2025
Set A breakfast: Kaya toast, two soft-boiled eggs, coffee
The lockdown had a way of making us dream of food. Hawker stalls and coffeeshops long faded into sepia-toned habit resurfaced in our minds with a vengeance, branded now as “essentials”. Invited to write this piece by a commercial outlet, I took the chance to vent those cravings. Needless to say, this probably didn’t sit well alongside their advertising copy. The resulting essay never made it into print.
Four years later, I’m overjoyed that it’s found a new home at Sploosh!, and in an issue that could not have been better themed. With everything that’s taken place in between, the pre-COVID kopi map I shared with Dad has sadly been redrawn, though some old favourites remain. In this economy, writers are often told that we should know which side our bread is buttered on — but all praise to platforms like Sploosh! that remind us to enjoy it, too. Dig in.
Fifteen minutes before seven, the ceiling fan in my room comes to a muggy stop and the slow August heat drags me towards the surface. It’s Saturday and Dad’s already waiting by the shoe-rack, whistling xinyao, having flicked the switch on his way down the corridor as my summons to breakfast. Before I can ask where we’re headed he’s filtering onto Lornie, the waking thrum of Bukit Brown forest easily audible from the car, and cruising seventy an hour westwards for a coffee that will set the universe to rights. I count off the exits as we peel along. Eng Neo. Chatsworth. Beauty World.
Dad carries in his head a map of coffee stalls across the island, carefully annotated. Which have the most full-bodied brew. Which time their soft-boiled eggs just right. Which won’t skimp with butter on the toast, with kaya lathered thick on the sides. Granted, with new variables in play, he’s adjusted his rankings over the years. Proximity to fresh minjiang kueh is now a must, especially if done with crisp edges and peanut overflowing as Mom likes. But the core components of a satisfying meal, elements so central as to be lifted beyond kopitiam staple into a kind of communion – bread, thin-sliced; eggs, gooey; coffee, unadulterated – remain unchanged, the lodestones of my father’s life.
Signposted everywhere merely as ‘Set A’ (if you’re one of those who orders the other sets, seriously, who are you?), only true connoisseurs could know how much personality that false modesty conceals. Our local go-to is the redoubtable Hua Fatt Coffee Stall, bastion of Block 628 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 4, and at one time the market’s sole purveyor of a decent kopi si after the rival Seng Hup Heng’s owner was arrested for a knife attack. Newcomers might be fooled by the identically-named Hua Fatt Coffee and Toast Stall, established just across the convivial central aisle and said to be run by an ingenious relative. No matter. Compared with what one ‘Lum Wan Ling’ on the food forum sg.openrice.com calls “really good kopi gao”, downed with a trembling wad of butter on diagonally-sliced bread, the latter’s French toast and cheese toppings are quite simply no match.
Another weekend might bring us to Lorong Ah Soo market, deep in the blue Hougang heartland and festooned with banners that seem to emanate from Aljunied Community Centre opposite. Even the name of the coffee stall, Da Zhong Cha Shi (literally, ‘canteen for the masses’) matches the neighbourhood’s egalitarian leanings, and a photograph of ‘Set A’ breakfast – the eggs just right, with runny whites and unbroken yolks – gleams invitingly from the banner of its long-outdated Facebook page. Recent visitors will have noticed, behind the counter, a watercolour sketch that Mom made of the stall one morning, inspired by a mouth-watering wait. But that’s hardly the only tribute they’ve received. It was here in 2013 that Dr Leslie Tan of ieatishootipost.sg had mournfully predicted “the end of the traditional Kopi Man”, only for misstamchiak.com to visit a full seven years later and gush about what remains the “best kopi in Singapore”. One of those hyperboles that could just be true.
The coffee that brings us out west, though, is that made by the habitually short-tempered owner of Hup Cheong Coffee Shop in Bukit Timah Food Centre, happily distinguishable from Hainan Coffee on the next row of stalls by its round-bottomed enamel cups, individually marked with hand-written numbers. “Stay focused on the uncle and not on your mobile phone when Q-ing and shout your order once you get eye contact with him, else he will skip you totally”, warns ‘Jasmine Pang’ on foursquare.com with more than a hint of regret. Lulled into false confidence, I was once rebuked by said uncle for asking for two ‘Set A’s. He didn’t do sets, he said, and I’d better take breakfast seriously by listing out my order. I can only imagine what he must have thought – tsk, scurrilous youth! I dutifully counted out change for our six slices of kaya toast, four eggs, one kopi, and one teh si.
My attempts to describe this culinary landmark to friends are met with blank stares. The hawker centre’s official name feels garish to me, having always heard Dad referring to it as “seventh milestone”, a nod to the old markings on Upper Bukit Timah Road. On at least one occasion have my dinner companions, following instructions to the closest MRT station, mistaken it for the food centre in Beauty World, whose name remembers its history as a wartime amusement park. Adding to the confusion, other, more chichi cafés have sprung up in the vicinity, like FlagWhite and Carpenter & Cook on Lorong Kilat. Only one evening last year did an impromptu meal with friends home from abroad, the musicians Jonathan Shin and Rachel Lim, bring us back to Hup Cheong for a post-dinner teh ping.
How does one begin to plot the coordinates of a map like Dad’s? Even now, all I catch are glimpses of the story. How my late Grandma, self-taught, came to run two kopitiams and a medical hall, her second son running between the tables with a tray full of steaming mugs; how they all learned to pull coffee through a sock, the thin cotton hauling the grounds off the bottom of a scalding pot. Fast forward twenty years and two young medical students exchange glances over breakfast in the NUS Science Canteen; months later, she leaves a coffee for him on a desk in the hostel after an afternoon’s studying. As junior doctors, they drop their son off each morning at her parents’ flat, a stone’s throw from the hospital and even closer to his kindergarten. Offered piping black coffee for the first time by my impish Granddad, I cough and snort. The bitter liquid, I learn, is an acquired taste.
Throughout the years at university overseas I keep a kettle and tin flask by my bed, which follow me from the tiny room and shared kitchen of freshers’ year to the spacious postgrad flat on Holywell Street. In winter months I let the eggs steep slightly longer, white albumin occasionally escaping through cracks in the shell, and douse the soft-boiled yolks in soy sauce and pepper, hand-carried all the way from Singapore in scotch-taped bottles and Ziploc bags. With kaya in short supply I swap out the toast for chocolate chip brioche, three for a pound from Tesco, but something’s off. At the supermarket an image comes back to me of a family trip to the UK years before when, miles from home, we’d scoured the aisles at Morrisons for ingredients to make our favourite breakfast. This was the early 2000s, and rows of margarine taunted us from the shelves. I can’t believe it’s not butter.
These days, I’ve found my own haunts. Like Sky Coffee at Tanglin Halt Food Centre, where I stopped for a kopi peng last year while waiting for Mr Amin, the garrulous cobbler, to add finishing touches to my worn work shoes. Or Holland V Coffee and Drink, which offered to replace my table’s orders one lunchtime when I slipped on the wet tiles and sent mugs of tea toppling. The former will close by year’s end, when the last of Tanglin Halt’s residents are relocated – more than three thousand households and two hundred shops – for estate redevelopment. Even as some milestones are dislodged, other routes and shelters take their place. I think of all the undiscovered coffee stalls sprinkled over the wrinkled map of the city, and imagine their shutters rising at four in the morning with a synchronous clack. Like beacons of comfort in a brewing storm. Kopi o, teh si siu dai. Land ahoy.
We found ourselves back at Block 628 last month when the Phase 2 restrictions lifted, our first breakfast outside in a while. Mom made straight for minjiang kueh, while Dad navigated through the Saturday crowd to a table for three. I joined a motley assortment of Ang Mo Kio residents in the queue at Hua Fatt, change in hand, as the morning sun spilled across the seats. “Two set, one kopi, one teh, tio bo?” I looked up, surprised. It wasn’t my turn yet, but the owner was looking unmistakably at me. “You too long never buy already, boy, now use PayLah. Your father come today?” I gestured over the din to the next aisle, where Dad was sitting. “Okay, okay. Later I come say hi. Next?”
Apart from the fact that we were all masked, little, it seemed, had changed. Yet here and there, the odd stall stood empty, some with ‘For Rent’ signs hanging from the displays, others simply cleaned out, aluminium racks standing empty on white counters. The shadow of a hard year lingered on everyone’s faces. Dad sipped silently, taking it all in: tables taped for social distancing, families scanning the rows cautiously, stallholders pensively watching the queues return. “We’ll come back,” he said as we were leaving, which we knew was both more and less than enough.
Theophilus Kwek is a writer, editor and translator based in Singapore. His work has been published in The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, The Straits Times, and elsewhere; and performed at the Royal Opera House. Two of his previous collections of poetry were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, while his pamphlet, The First Five Storms, won the inaugural New Poets’ Prize. In 2023, he was the youngest writer and first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”. He is a member of the Folio Academy, and part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2024. His latest book is Commonwealth (Carcanet Press, 2025).
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