Kopitiam Oey

At my last visit to Singapore, I became a fan of Kopitiam across Singapore Management University. At first, I thought Kopitiam is somekind of coffee franchise like Starbucks or Coffee Bean, but today I know what Kopitiam means.

It begins with a coffee conversation between me and my team senior - whom like myself, a coffee lover. We talk about Kopitiam, and she told me that there is a shop at Sabang that called Kopitiam Oey. So today, we decided to have lunch there.

The shop is small, with chinese vintage aura everywhere, from its front door to the interior of the shop. Old pictures and posters from indonesian colonial era pinned along the wall, the table arrange in two rows. Red-lampion-style lamps hanging low at the ceiling. The kitchen placed at the back of the shop, a small kitchen and you can peek at what's going on there. And the ambience become even bolder because they play old-chinese-indonesian music, honestly, it's like a 70-80 year-old chinese coffee shop.

At first, it's a little confusing for me, because I never know if chinese has coffee tradition, I thought tea is more popular in the east asia region, so why there's a chinese coffeeshop? The first page of the menu answer my silent question. It seems that drink coffee tradition chinese comes from Hokkian people who sails across the chinese south sea to Malaysia in the past, and influenced by Portugese culture of having coffee for breakfast. The very word kopitiam comes from portugese coffee -in local malay dialect become kopi- and Hokkian dialect tiam, means shop, so kopitiam means coffee shop.

This kopitiam at Sabang, called Kopitam Oey own by Bondan Winarno, a culinary critic from famous Wisata Kuliner show. The concept is very simple yet thorough, from the venue design, to the menu. Kopitiam Oey offers variety type of coffee and tea, from traditional kopi tubruk to a custom one like siciliana or indochina (vietnamese) coffee and some others that I don't really remember the name. All hot coffee serves with a cup of cold water as compliment, so we can adjust the coffee's temperature. The foods divide in 4 category, breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack. Breakfast consist of variety type of toast, lunch has indonesian traditional menu like gado-gado and nasi rames, they have kroket blanda and others for snack, and I'm sorry, I can't remember the dinner menu :P

I ordered ijs siciliana coffee, ijs tjingtjau, and nasi rames. The coffee is good, it has unique traditional kopi tubruk bitterness but the texture is smoother. Nasi rames is so-so, but their ijs tjingtjau is great. I think they add ginger in the cingcau, it's unconventional I thought, but it's great. It gives warm feeling to the throat, contrast to the ice, I really love it.

We end up stayed there for 2 hours. It's very comfortable place to hang out with friends or spouse, or just being by yourself, order coffee and stay there for a day reading a book. I think I plan on doing that one :)

So just go there. If you don't know where Sabang is, it is behind Thamrin street, right behind the Wisma Mandiri tower. If you still has difficulties finding it, I suggest you to google-maps the street hehehe... you can read this post, that means you can google everything :)