Tastes of hybrid belonging: Following the laksa trail in Katong, Singapore

This article builds on previous research tracing the introduction of laksa to the ‘Mediterranean’ city of Adelaide, Australia in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Almost thirty years later, with laksa normalized as one of Australia's ‘borrowed’ foodways, the article allows the adopted culture a sentimental return to a mythical point of origin. The search for laksa, together with other nostalgic flavours of Peranakan and Eurasian communities, is now mapped on to the streets of Katong, one of Singapore's ‘ethnic’ villages. Collectively, these ‘little’ spaces resonate, in the discourse of urban planning, culinary tourism, and popular memory, with nuances of uniqueness and difference. Taking a walking tour through Katong's sensuous landscapes, the article charts a meditative excursion through arguments that address ‘authenticity’, touristic reinvention, and cross-cultural encounters through food within the ‘mixed’ spaces and contradictory imperatives of postcolonial cities. In particular, the article revisits debates of ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006) to reflect on the following: how does laksa, returned to its place of origin, become transformed as the ‘homely-exotic’ for touring ‘locals’ and ‘others’ alike?; do its complex flavours and multiple forms acknowledge both its hybrid history and its potential future as the taste of commensality and (differential) belonging?