Finding an unexpected ingredient in your bowl of curry yong tau foo is never pleasant.
Finding out said ingredient was a cockroach? We would be flipping tables.
Former Mediacorp actor Thomas Ong recently took to Facebook to share what happened when he was having a meal with several Singaporean friends at a Johor Bahru restaurant, which he didn’t name, last week.
One friend was halfway through a bowl of curry yong tau foo when their spoon dredged up something that definitely wasn’t tau pok.
A cockroach.
According to the 56-year-old, the entire table immediately fell silent. But instead of losing his temper or calling for the manager, Thomas had a rather unexpected reaction.
“If this had happened when I was younger, I probably would have lost my temper. But over the years, it seems it’s not just the wrinkles that have increased — my EQ has apparently improved a little too,” he wrote.
So what did this supposedly wiser, calmer Thomas say as everyone stared at the offending roach?
“Wow, your eyesight is really good!” he chimed in.
The restaurant eventually waived the cost of the curry yong tau foo, but to Thomas whether they had to pay for the bowl wasn’t really the point.
While he may have handled the discovery remarkably calmly, it apparently unlocked a brand-new habit.
For the entire week afterwards, whenever Thomas ate soup noodles, the first thing he did wasn’t take a photo, but stir through the entire bowl.
Thomas joked that he’d inspect the bottom for cockroaches, rats or any other form of “protein that shouldn’t be there” before daring to tuck in.
Thomas admits he’s realistic enough to know that not every restaurant kitchen is going to be completely pest-free.
But knowing there might be a cockroach somewhere in a kitchen is one thing is very different.
“Some things you can probably still stomach as long as you don’t see them. But once you have, every bowl of soup after that turns into a treasure hunt,” he wrote.
How zen. Though we would prefer our next treasure hunt to come with considerably fewer legs.
8days.sg has reached out to Thomas for comment but has not received a response at press time.
Thomas ended his post by asking followers what they would have done in the same situation.
“This cockroach has also been stewed until it’s soft. It should be very flavourful,” joked one netizen.
Another commenter said they experienced something similar after finding a large cockroach at the bottom of a packet of prawn noodles, but only after almost finishing the entire meal.
Then another netizen pointed out that the cockroach in Thomas’s friend’s bowl looked like a baby.
“Looks like there could be other family members in the other bowls,” they joked.
Umm… Maybe don’t scroll social media comments while eating.