Chicken Bolognaise Fish Fillet Rice

One of my favorite things about Singapore is the wide variety of tasty food that is available. On any given day, I may have kaya toast for breakfast, ebi tempura for lunch and mutton with prata for dinner. It is worth noting however that all the meals previously mentioned are Asian/SE Asian dishes. The reason for that is, "western" food is something of an adventure.

Undoubtedly, the first question that comes to mind is what exactly is "western" food? And the best I can say is that it is some weird amalgam of what Asians imagine American, British and miscellaneous other western cuisines must be. As far as I can tell, the standard rules appear to be (1) fry (preferably deep-fry) the designated meat, then (2) cover it in some sort of suspicious sauce/gravy and finally (3) serve it with plain spaghetti or fries (except not the McDonald's fries but those rippled ones you'd only find in the frozen food aisles at the supermarket). Oh, and of course, give it some bizarre name, like "chicken chop", that will completely baffle any "westerner" to the point that you're pretty much guaranteed that they will choose some other cuisine to eat.

Anyway, this is pretty much what I encountered when I decided to get dinner tonight. I let my curiosity outweigh my better judgment and opted for the Chicken Bolognaise Fish Fillet Rice because the name was just far too fantastic for me to pass it up.

As I figured, there was no such thing as "bolognaise" but perhaps they were referring to bolognese sauce (they were) and to substitute chicken for beef should be fine. Now, in a standard Italian restaurant the dish should end there because this sauce is typically served with spaghetti. Alas, here, in the land of interpretive "western" food it did not.

One guess as to how the dish was "creatively" interpreted.

If you said, rice instead of spaghetti, brownie points for you! And if you said a deep fried fish fillet was thrown in just for the heck of it, bonus points!!

And one guess of what it tasted like...

Let's just say, there's a reason why the Italians use pasta and keep fish out of it.