There’s a tasting menu I sat through last month that cost more than my first month’s rent. I remember signing the bill and feeling nothing in particular. Not guilt, not pride. Just a quiet noticing, the way you notice rain starting outside a window.
It wasn’t always like this.
There was a time I planned my week around a four-dollar plate of chicken rice. I knew which stalls gave you more cucumber. I knew which kopitiam uncle didn’t mind if you sat for an hour with one drink. Money shaped everything I ate, and I never had the luxury of forgetting that.
So you’d think access would feel like arrival. That walking into the kind of place I once stood outside of would settle something in me. It hasn’t, not really.
I think about this most when I’m somewhere I couldn’t have afforded back then. A few weeks ago I was at Atlas in Bugis, holding a gin and tonic that cost what I used to spend on groceries for two days. The room was beautiful. The drink was good. And still, some old part of me did the math without being asked. It always does.
That math is the thing I’ve been sitting with.
Because here is what I’ve started to understand. The girl who counted coins for char kway teow didn’t disappear when the bills got bigger. She just got quieter. She’s still there when I order without looking at prices, flinching a little out of habit. Still there when I leave half a plate behind and feel a small wrongness I can’t fully explain.
Money changed what I can buy. It did not change who I am at the table.
And I’m not sure I want it to. The hunger I knew back then taught me something the expensive rooms never could. That a meal you saved for tastes different from a meal you forgot you paid for. That wanting something is part of how you taste it. When you can have anything, you risk feeling nothing.
I notice this even now. The dishes that stay with me are rarely the costly ones. Last Sunday I had toast and kaya at Tong Ah Eating House in Keong Saik, the same kind of breakfast I used to stretch into a whole morning when I had nowhere better to be. It moved me more than the tasting menu did. Not because it was better food. Because it remembered me back.
I used to think being able to afford the nice places was the goal. Now I think the more honest goal is to not lose the person who couldn’t.
She knew how to be grateful for a bowl. She paid attention because she had to. And somewhere along the way, in all this access, I’ve had to learn that paying attention is a choice now, not a circumstance.
So I try. I look at the food. I taste it on purpose. I let myself want it before it arrives.
The bills are bigger these days. But the best part of any meal is still the same as it was when I had nothing. It’s being fully there for it.