The Singapore Travel: The Imperial Herbal Restaurant – part 1

By Isabella Tree

There can’t be many restaurants in the world where the waitress feels your pulse and looks at your tongue before taking your order. The Imperial Herbal Restaurant in Singapore is definitely not the place to go on a first date. Before you’ve had time to shake out your napkin or sink an aperitif, your body and its various failings are broadcast across the dining room.

“You drink much alcohol lately?” barked our waitress as she peered into my mouth. I thought guiltily of the stack of miniatures I had emptied on the plane.

“Thought so,” she tutted, adjusting her spectacles like an oriental Sybil Fawlty and rapping my wrist with a pair of chopsticks. “Now I can’t make good diagnosis.”

The Imperial Herbal Restaurant had been recommended as one of Singapore’s finest examples of Chinese cuisine and a good place to go to overcome jet-lag. It’s a place frequented by health-conscious Epicureans who have out-yanged their yin [or vice versa] and by the clients of the proprietor, herbalist Li Lian Xing, who prefer to take their medicine in a sweet and sour sauce rather than the usual tonic of bitter tea.

At the back of the restaurant is a grand old-fashioned teak pharmaceutical counter with banks of drawers and shelves full of bottles. Mr Li presides over it like a lean-shaven Confucius, grinding up powders and weighing remedies on a delicate pair of scales before dispatching them to the kitchen.

His specimen bottles are not for the faint-hearted. Macbeth’s witches would have had caterpillars, antler velvet, pickled snakes and seahorses, ox tendons and duck’s webs, and an array of deer penises or ‘pizzles’ that would makes Santa Claus’s eyes water.

Then there are roots, fungi, bulbs and herbs that look as weird and unappetizing as their animal counterparts but are also prescribed for a catalogue of complaints: American ginseng, for example, for ‘spontaneous perspiration and shortness of breath’; polygorum multiflorum for premature aging; fritillary bulbs for smoker’s cough; and birds’ nest for the complexion.

None of these look the stuff from the local take-away and under Sybil Fawlty’s direction there was no chance of avoiding them for a simple spring roll.

“First you will have famous appetizer - quick fried egg white with scallops and ladybell root in fried noodle basket. Good for ‘qi’ - more energy. Also,” she added, with a pointed look at my companion, “good for over-weight.”

She tugged at my hair. “Now need something for this,” she said. “Going grey already. I give you bowl of crispy black ants. Special imported from Northern China. Also good for Hepatitis B and arthritis.”

I tried to look grateful.

(To be continued)