teambuilding through Eating in Singapore

Singapore’s teambuilding professionals are as varied as its multi-racial and multi-cultural diversity. Most class room trainers who do teambuilding claim that a teambuilding activity without a detailed debrief and follow up will not yield much positive results. Events planners claim that you will need a good theme, great music and an experienced emcee to make a teambuilding event memorable. Ropes obstacles experts will recommend physically challenging teambuilding exercises that bring out extreme emotions to bond the participants. To us, they are all right and at the same time, perhaps all wrong – it really depend on the participants and what we are trying to achieve.

If our main objective is to have fun and give the participants a chance to interact with one another, a teambuilding car rally (technically speaking, car rallies are banned in Singapore, but it sounds better than car treasure hunt, so we’ll stick to that term in this article) will fit the bill pretty well.

The rich ethnic diversity has made Singapore a food lover’s heaven. What other theme will you plan your car rally around other than a food theme in Singapore? If you have staff or visitors from overseas, they will love this interesting, teambuilding food-race, where participants are grouped into teams of 4 or 12 (depending on whether they are driving or we are chartering mini-vans for them or taking public transport) and they will embark on a journey to hunt for interesting local food around Singapore, while completing teambuilding tasks at some checkpoints.

Here is a sample of the street foods that are great and economical:

1. Mee Goreng (from Singapore Fried Prawn Mee Stall)

Mee Goreng is an Asian dish. “Mee” refers to the thick yellow noodles and “Goreng” means “Fried” in Malay. Interestingly, one of the best Mee Goreng that I like in Singapore is sold by this stall called, “Singapore Fried Prawn Mee” at Whampoa Market. Yes, they are well known for their Fried Prawn Mee and there is usually a long queue at their stall for the latter dish. However, personally, I prefer the dry type of Fried Prawn Mee. Please refer to section 2 below. Mee Goreng sells at $3 or $4 per serving.

2. Fried Prawn Mee (aka Fried Hokkien Prawn Noodles)

Hokkien is a local Chinese dialect group and of course this dish has prawns in it (as the name suggests), as well as squids. From what I understand, this is a local dish, which means, very likely, you will not find very good Fried Prawn Mee anywhere else in the world other than in Singapore. The best fried prawn mee in Singapore is probably the one at Geylang. Their noodles are always fried till it is full of flavor, the ingredients are fresh and most importantly the dish is fried till it is dry, unlike many other fried prawn mee vendors that serve it with gravy. Their Fried Prawn Mee sells at $4 (the small one that usually will not fill my stomach), $6 (a slightly larger portion) and $10 (feeds 2 big eaters). You should stick to these denominations as the more expensive ones do not make economic sense, like chicken rice, if you know what I mean.

3. Rice Wine Chicken Soup (aka “Ang Chow” Soup)

Rice Wine Chicken Soup is a Fu Chow dish (Fu Chow is yet another dialect group in Singapore, which originated from China, of course). The wine that they use to cook the chicken soup is fermented from rice and the shop that sells this dish has a special licensed to ferment their own wine. The soup is cooked with radish, chicken and some Chinese herbs. It is red in color and it tastes like….. thick chicken soup(not the corn soup kind of thick but just thicker than those usual light Chinese soup), some people claim that they can taste the wine in it, while others are oblivious to it. I belong to the latter group, I just enjoy the taste as a whole. To drink authentic Rice Wine Chicken Soup, you will need to travel to the central part of Singapore and they sell the soup at $5 a bowl in their own shop.

4. Chili Crab (Spicy Fried Crab with egg gravy)

If you are in Singapore, you must eat our famous Chili Crab. If you have love spicy food, you will love this local delight. The secret is in the savory thick gravy mixed with spices and egg. If you have low threshold for spicy food, try the black pepper crab instead. It is an art to eat a crab, you have to learn how to crack the shell and yet keep its flesh as intact as possible. It will be good if you have a local show you how to do it. Head down to Boon Keng Road and look for a coffee shop that sells great crabs at affordable prices. A plate of 3 crabs sells at $10 (if the crabs are small) or $12 (if they are medium). They do not sell human corpse-eating huge Crabs.

5. Fruit Juice

If you are an adventurous person, you will have to try the Durian fruit in Singapore. Crowned as the king of fruits, it has a thick texture, tastes sweet and its smell is so strong that the fruit is banned in major shopping centers, public transportation and most hotels. Some people find this smell repelling, to be fair to those people I agree to a certain extent. If you transport this fruit in your car with the air conditioning on, after removing it, its stale smell will linger on for another week and no amount of cleaning will remove it. However, this king of fruits is not to be missed, if you learn to enjoy it, you will come back for more. To have a taste of the Durian, visit the fruit drinks stall at Bukit Merah Food Centre (Beside Ikea along Bukit Merah Road). Their fruit juices are thick with real fruit chunks in it. Another of their specialty is the Mango juice, another tropical fruit. One large (I mean huge) glass of fruit juice sells at $2.50 or $3.

6. Fried Oyster Omelet

Fried Oyster Omelet is another local dish that I love. As the name suggests, it is made from fresh oyster, eggs and some glutton. There are many variations of this dish, some people fry the mixture until it is crispy, while others prefer it to be slightly crispy on the outside, with the contents tender and not overcooked. I prefer the second type and my favorite Fried Oyster Omelet is also found at the same food center as the Fruit Juice stall. Each serving starts at $3. By the way Singapore now has an oyster farm, supplying some restaurants and hotels with really FRESH oysters, which makes it an even better place to eat oysters!

The above is just a sample of what we can do for a food-race or makan-rally in Singapore, other themes that we can do in Singapore include shopping-race, heritage-hunt and car rally theme. Individual stations can also be customized to suit your requirements as long as it meets the legal requirements in Singapore.

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