Fabulous Food Court

 
By Wendy Chan

A food court is a casual dining area offering people who may be shopping in a mall or enjoying themselves at a theme park a convenient place to eat and cool their heels without the trouble of leaving the premise. It is often a collection of food vendors with a variety of inexpensive quick service foods, so you can eat in a hurry, and return to doing what you were doing. You order, pay, pick up, you eat, and, you clean up in robotic precision. You don’t think much about the food, as you’re there for another reason. Typically, your only selections are burgers, pizzas, sandwiches, fried chicken perhaps a taco place, a rice bowl type of Asian fast food (if you’re lucky), and of course sweets – cookies, ice creams, pretzels and other snacks. They perhaps accurately reflect what sells in America.
 
For the most part, they are all prepared foods, assembled on the spot by minimum wage workers with little or no culinary skills. Almost all such food court restaurants are managed by major national chains or corporations that stake a claim in as many such food courts as possible to generate revenue for their quarterly profits. So the food is rarely interesting or extraordinary.

How refreshing it is to walk into food courts when visiting foreign countries! They usually have different concepts and selections. One food court named Food Republic in Vivo City, a new satellite shopping and entertainment town in Singapore, still remains to be one of my favorite quick eat places. While it is a food court by definition, to service shoppers of the huge mall, it is itself a food destination. Instead of simply leasing units to different companies, this entire food court is actually one restaurant managed by BreadTalk Group Ltd. a food management corporation in the island state, carefully selecting a medley of food vendors, creating a unifying nostalgic theme under one roof accented by objects of art to reflect the 1960’s era. The individual stations actually compliment one another, just like items on the menu. The first thing I noticed visiting there was a fresh fruits station, offering eye-catching pre-sliced, pre-cut, pre-peeled, pre-skewered, not only pre-washed seasonal fruits. Ready-to-eat fresh fruits on a stick – simply brilliant! A fresh young coconut instead of a 200-calorie bottled soda! Why can’t we have that back home?   

Then you’d notice the food selection is a replica of traditional street hawker comfort foods, with an abundance of tasty varieties actually cooked there – hot noodle soups, traditional butter and toast, Chinatown style roast pork, Hainan chicken rice, steamy dim sum, hot soupy dessert, halal foods, roti prata even Japanese-style tepanyaki! “Chop chop” does not mean hurry up, but really chop and chop the ingredients on a prep table. They even have service staff to clean up after you’re done, so the tables are constantly wiped down. The one thing I noticed acutely absent, though, was paper napkins. I suppose local people carry their own tissue pack and wet wipes. It is either a cultural thing or they are simply very environmental.